Every July, all of our grantees submit a year-end report on the results of each grant they receive from United Way of King County. They submitted over 300 reports last summer and the FY2015 Qualitative Report summarizes the wisdom shared by our human services providers.

The greatest challenges when serving clients were:

• High needs, high barriers. Agencies are seeing an increase in the number of clients with high barriers, such as mental health issues, episodes of homelessness and transportation challenges.
• Cultural competence. Providers often struggle to provide culturally competent services to increasingly diverse clients; language is a primary barrier in outreach.
• Access to transportation. Accessibility and reliability of transportation is cited as a challenge, in large part due to increasing costs.

Despite these challenges, funding from United Way of King County helped grantees leverage other sources of funding – and they were able use United Way dollars as flexible funding allowing them to fill gaps between more restrictive sources. They have:

• Served more people,
• Hired more qualified staff and provided more training,
• Expanded and improved program evaluation, and
• Strengthened and created new partnerships with other nonprofit agencies to improve overall services.

We use the information provided by grantees in planning our future grant making to improve our impact on community issues and achieve our goals. This is one of the ways we partner with agencies for effective services.  Thank you to all those who contribute to this knowledge base with their thoughtful attention to our year-end report.