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Cradle to Career

We love where we live, and we want our kids to succeed. Our strategy will focus on children and youth from the time they’re born until they find a career (Cradle to Career/C2C).

What does Cradle to Career mean? It means that we’re going to help kids and their families from the time that they’re born until they find a career. It means that we’ll work together with the community to figure out why children are struggling in school, why they aren’t graduating high school or going on to post-secondary, and why there are so many children who simply able to live up to their full potential. And we’re going to work together with community partners and residents to fix the problems in key neighbourhoods in Windsor-Essex County. Neighbourhoods that can benefit the most from this support. Neighbourhoods that are facing significantly more barriers than others – whether it be poverty levels, educational outcomes or safety factors, to name a few.

We need to evolve to meet the needs of our community. So we’re going to be:

  1. Implementing a new approach to drive community impact by leveraging the combined investment of a broader cross section of community partners than ever before, through a collective called ProsperUs.
  2. Taking on the vital role of backbone organization for ProsperUs to guide the work of convening, facilitating, and supporting this new community partnership and driving results.
  3. Developing a new C2C investment strategy with our partners and the community starting in 2021.
  4. Targeting future investments in priority neighbourhoods where the data is telling us more help is needed support children and families, including West Windsor, Downtown Windsor and Leamington.
  5. Focusing our efforts on improving outcomes for youth in Windsor-Essex.

United Way is extremely proud of the work that has been done over the years, and we’re grateful to the donors, volunteers and partners who have made our work possible, but to change community-wide conditions, we need to drastically change the way we work. That means going ‘all-in’, focusing investments on innovative new approaches to improving outcomes for youth — the way we have with our On Track to Success program. Every child deserves the opportunity to thrive, and we’re uniquely positioned to help tackle this problem along with local residents and our partners. We’re excited to focus our efforts to achieve significant, long-lasting change in our community.