What Motivates You?

What inspires you to get up each day and go out into the world?  For me it’s the hope that by doing so I am making a difference by helping people and standing up for what is right.  Sometimes this means making sacrifices, but always it means leaving whatever you’ve touched, better than you found it.  Throughout the past several months, our Community Summit Action teams have been working to do just that.  If you recall, we came out of our first summit with some very ambitious recommendations to strengthen our community.  From this summit we created three Action Teams, each focusing on one of the three recommendations around Affordable Housing, Racial Division, and Teen Mental Health and Racial Perception. 

As you can imagine, these are very large lifts and will take time to rectify, so our Action Teams (made up of community members like you) are focusing on what can we do now to start to make smaller impacts that will lead to larger impacts in the future.  The Affordable Housing Action team is focusing on how to change the misperceptions around who affordable housing is for.  The Racial Division Action team is going to create a safe space for our BIPOC community to come together and share their perspective on what will help close the divide in Owatonna.  The Teen Mental Health and Racial Perception Action Team is starting focus groups with our youth to listen to what they believe will improve their mental health and that of their peers.  If you are passionate about one or more of these focus areas, I encourage you to reach out to our office and let us know which Action Team you want to be a part of.  All are welcome. 

In addition to our Community Summit work, we are bringing people together to strengthen our communities through our United for Childcare work, Women United work (Early Childhood Literacy), Volunteers United work (nonprofit capacity building) and our Youth Coalition work with two active coalitions, the Blooming Positive Actions Coalition out of Blooming Prairie and the Steele County Coalition for Healthy Youth, formally named the Steele County Safe and Drug Free Coalition.  We are so fortunate to be surrounding by individuals in each of our communities that are willing and able to step up to serve on these teams.  We have a lot of moving parts at United Way, and they keep moving because of YOUR dedication.  So, whatever your motivation, thank you for getting up each day and working with us for a better tomorrow.  Engaging Communities, Connecting People, We’re Your United Way.   LIVE UNITED.     

Annette Duncan is President of United Way of Steele County.  She can be reached at 507-455-1180 or via email by president@unitedwaysteelecounty.org. Our website is www.unitedwaysteelecounty.org