To: All Wabash Valley Community Stakeholders with Direct Knowledge of COVID-19 Economic Impact to our Community
Good Afternoon!
Our United Way and the Wabash Valley Community Foundation have announced this afternoon the launch of the Wabash Valley COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund. Please see the press release attached for details. For such a fund to be engaged properly throughout the 6-county region in the most effective manner, we understand the need to listen to what our community is telling us and respond to areas of greatest need on a data-based analysis of the events around us. This is why we must build an effective way to communicate together and react to changing needs.
To that end, we are reaching out to those organizations or individuals in the community who are seeing and feeling the real-time impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. We are asking you to take the very short survey at the link provided below and begin to give us the data we need to effectively drive community funding supports. From the data and the e-mail contacts provided, we will convene next week (and weekly as warranted) a virtual meeting of stakeholders for “listening sessions” to drive funding priorities for the Wabash Valley COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund. We hope that many of you will join us in this collaborative effort aimed at breaking down our funding siloes and joining hands (virtually!) to get the best funding opportunities to the greatest needs.
To be clear, in the survey response we are not looking for speculative needs, or third-hand stories. Like you, we are also tracking local and national media, but not depending on that information as fact for our community. Instead, with this survey, we are looking for those actual requests and/or problems that have already risen in priority and for which you may have direct knowledge. Essentially, real-time data without speculation or hearsay. Here is the link for the brief survey. We will share the results with our stakeholder group at our first virtual “listening session” next week. Even if you don’t feel you have data for the survey, but would like to be included in the listening session, please just let me know.
Please forward and share this survey link to other stakeholders in our community.
Thanks you for your service and dedication to the Wabash Valley.
Richard Payonk
Executive Director
United Way of the Wabash Valley
