Tuesday, May 20, is Early Care and Education Day at the Capitol, and among those organizations in Baton Rouge today fighting for the importance of funding for this need is the United Way of Southeast Louisiana, which just released some sobering new data on single mothers in the region. UWSELA President and CEO Michael Williamson joins us again on the podcast to share the latest findings, as well as what his organization is doing to fight for the nearly one-third of working Southeast Louisiana households that can’t afford basic necessities.
about
Williamson has over 30 years of executive level nonprofit management experience, 26 of those years served in the United Way system. In a matter of weeks, he has led United Way’s immediate COVID-19 relief efforts, which have generated more than $7.5 million in local community support through crisis grants, volunteerism, advocacy, and nonprofit partner funding. Williamson is serving on Governor John Bel Edwards’ Resilient Louisiana Economic and Community Development Task Force to help develop solutions to strengthen the state’s economy.
Under Williamson’s leadership as CEO, United Way developed a Blueprint for Prosperity, a plan which informs all of organization’s work with a framework to eradicate poverty in Southeast Louisiana and a bold vision of equitable communities where all individuals are healthy, educated, and economically stable. The Blueprint included an expansion of the traditional United Way granting process with the addition of collaborative grants to drive systems-level change and advance the speed at which the needle is moved on poverty.
Williamson is committed to a focus on community outcomes as the top strategy for increasing accountability and maintaining United Ways’ leadership in philanthropy. He has worked to strengthen United Way’s public-private partnerships at the local, state, and federal level to create scalable community building efforts while creating and leveraging the state’s only United Way advocacy program, which has been responsible for countless legislative advancements since its inception.
Some of United Way’s most significant challenges and successes have come in the wake of disaster – Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Isaac, the BP Oil Spill, the August 2016 Floods, and more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic.
