United Way of Central Missouri needed to be agile and pivot in order to address the gaps experienced by health and human service agencies and be as responsive to these unprecedented, changing needs. We understood the COVID-19 crisis was causing a surge in demand for services, and that it was critical that agencies have the resources needed to continue to operate at the highest capacity and to offer additional services when appropriate.
United Way phased our grant award distribution to ensure support of these challenges immediately as well as for the long term.
Phase I: Announced in mid-March, this immediate grant opportunity in the amount of $50,000 was available to our 28 United Way of Central Missouri partner agencies. Partner agencies were eligible to apply for the Emergency COVID-19 Grants to be used to serve the most vulnerable in our community for immediate, critical basic needs such as food, clothing, shelter, childcare, utility assistance, etc. View our Phase I grant recipients here.
Phase II: The United Way Community Support Grant opportunity was announced in mid-February, pre-COVID. But when COVID-19 became a stark reality, the scope of the Community Support Grant opportunity was expanded to include COVID-19 related requests in addition to the areas of behavioral health, education, food insecurity, financial stability, health, housing, or transportation. $24,000 of the $225,000 total were COVID related requests. View our Phase II grant recipients here.
Phase III: The United Way of Central Missouri COVID-19 Response and Recovery Fund was established to support intermediate and long-term COVID-19 response and recovery for health and human service agencies in the nine counties served by the United Way of Central Missouri. On behalf of the United Way of Central Missouri Board of Directors, we are proud to have awarded $170,894 through 24 COVID-19 Response & Recovery grants. These one-time grants address new or existing programs, capacity or operational challenges due to this pandemic. The funding of these grants was made possible through the generosity of caring, compassionate individuals, organizations and foundations who donated to the United Way of Central Missouri COVID Response & Recovery Fund. A special thanks to Missouri Foundation for Health who identified the United Way of Central Missouri as being well positioned to identify and assist agencies in the central Missouri community during the pandemic, and provided $100,000 of the $170,000! View our Phase III grant recipients here.
