UNITED WAY TO TARGET HOMELESSNESS, DRUG ADDICTION

Walking downtown, you pass another human train wreck derailed in a
doorway and go, "Somebody should do something about that."

Just like you did last year, and the year before that. Somebody should
have done something a long time ago. Nobody has, at least not in a
co-ordinated manner.

Maybe tackling social problems is supposed to be the job of
government, the nanny state, but the nanny quit a few years ago and

hasn't been replaced. Waiting for government to act is like leaving
the porch light on for Jimmy Hoffa.

So, if not government, who?

All of us, replies the United Way, which is in the process of
reinventing itself for that purpose.

After 69 years of being what board chair Sharon Halkett calls a
"well-oiled fund-raiser and fund-distributor," the United Way of
Greater Victoria is looking to assume a proactive role.

Instead of merely collecting donations and distributing the proceeds
to its 39 member agencies, the local organization plans to take on
more of an active, collaborative role, channelling money to projects
that are meant to bring long-term solutions to particular social
problems. Beginning in 2007, it wants to partner with other groups,
pulling all the community players to the table to address the root
causes of the most serious issues.

At the moment, it has identified those issues as homelessness and
housing, mental health and addictions, and family development and
wellness. An online survey at www.unitedwayvictoria.bc.ca is meant to
gauge whether the public agrees with those priorities.

Now this is spongy stuff, all this talk of pooling financial and
intellectual capital, and not without its sensitivities, which is why
the United Way is doing a bit of tip-toeing into the change. The most
obvious question is what effect the expanded mandate will have on
those 39 member agencies, which will no longer be able to count on
dividing the annual campaign proceeds -- $5.1 million last year --
among themselves exclusively, year after year. All manner of
non-profit groups will be eligible to apply for a piece of the pie as
the focus shifts to attacking problems at their roots. "To do that
means we can no longer restrict our fund distribution to 39 agencies,"
says Halkett.

The plan is to guarantee funding to the existing agencies for three
years. But even after that, most appear likely to reposition
themselves as the United Way's new community partners anyway. Still,
forgive the agencies for not doing backflips at the prospect of having
to compete for funding they now take for granted.

To that, Halkett et al can argue that the current model isn't solving
the problems. They talk about silos -- community agencies working
independently, sometimes duplicating services, with no global direction.

"The bottom line is our community has changed a lot since 1937," says
Halkett. Victoria is faced with different problems of varying
priority, and no matter how much money gets funnelled at them through
the United Way, they just won't go away.

"The reality is that social and human conditions in our city aren't
improving," says Kathi Springer, who is working with the United Way.
"We can't pretend that it's going to get better." We don't want to end
up like Vancouver, recently painted by the influential magazine The
Economist as a troubled city where drugs are openly dealt on street
corners and the homeless holler at well-heeled theatregoers.

No one, including those at the United Way, pretends to possess the
magic bullet that will fix all this. But they do believe
community-based solutions are the best bet we have, or at least better
than the status quo.

"Something needs to shift," says Halkett. "Something needs to change."