No one foresaw the story you’ll read here in the United Way of Anchorage 2020 Annual Report.
It’s an encouraging story of how our community responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. From the outset of the pandemic’s lightning strikes to both our health and the economy, United Way of Anchorage and our partners responded without pause to help our neighbors in need.
Alaska 2-1-1, United Way’s statewide helpline, took on the greatest challenge since its founding in 2007 and became the primary portal to help and provide information for both the Municipality of Anchorage and the State of Alaska, to support public health and make referrals for financial assistance. Working seven days a week, and extended shifts, 2-1-1 created a comprehensive crisis line on the fly. The team fielded four times the normal call volume, helping streamline appointments for rent, utility, and food assistance, as well as fielding COVID related calls.
The first surge of rent assistance came from United Way’s Anchorage CARES campaign. Stood up long before the first federal stimulus payments, Anchorage CARES raised more than $300,000 from generous donors throughout the community to help people already living paycheck-to-paycheck – and now living without paychecks. Initiative, imagination, and the power of longstanding partnerships and professional expertise helped thousands of our neighbors stay in their homes and keep hope afloat.
We didn’t stop there. With our partners, we maintained a steady flow of rent and mortgage help through several iterations, expanding our reach statewide and adjusting to the demands of different sources of income as Anchorage CARES morphed into AK Can Do.
We joined with other leaders to help child-care providers keep their doors open so that Anchorage parents fortunate enough to keep or regain jobs could go to work.
Adapting to the restrictions of the pandemic, we took our Healthcare Navigation help online to support and guide Alaskans to Affordable Care Act health insurance, including Denali KidCare, for individuals and families.
In November, with the municipality and Alaska Hospitality Retailers, we launched the Restaurant and Hunger Relief program, an economic lifeline to the city’s hard-hit restaurants, their workers, and dozens of nonprofits struggling to provide meals to children, families, seniors, disabled. As you’ll see, from well-appointed commercial kitchens to the humblest kitchen table, this program has overachieved and, in the process, knit our community closer.
Now well into 2021, we continue to forge ahead with this encouraging, fruitful work as we navigate what we all hope are the last months of the pandemic.
Another encouraging element of this 2020 story is that the pandemic underscored the great value of partnerships we have in our long-range work for a better community. That steady strength gave us the means to respond immediately to short-term, urgent needs; good, strong partners meant that if we didn’t have a solution to a problem, we had friends who did.
Nevertheless, there is another story that was made even clearer through our pandemic work. While COVID-19 is an equal opportunity scourge from a viral point of view, the impact of the virus has borne a disproportionate share of its consequences, both medical and economic on our most underserved, overburdened communities. That’s a discouraging story – a sobering one and a challenge presented to each of us to renew our efforts to fight for the education, health, and financial stability of everyone in our community. To ensure that your zip code, or identities like race, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, or creed are no longer predictors of a person’s chance of success in our city.
That goal is implicit in the work we’ve led for years, in our drives for increased high school graduation rates, financial literacy, housing stability and health care for all. Your contributions in time, expertise, sweat, and money allowed us to accomplish what we did in 2020; it will help carry us all to a “new normal” of LIVE UNITED in 2021.
With our profound thanks to each of you,
Natasha Pope, Chair
Board of Directors
Clark Halvorson
President & CEO
