Company Profile
Company Overview
OUR MISSION: To build a stronger Lancaster County by mobilizing the caring power of our community.
OUR BOLD GOALS:
Every Lancaster County child will enter kindergarten ready to learn.
All Lancaster County adults will have the post-secondary credentials they need to get a good job.
We will cut Lancaster County’s poverty rate in half.
Everyone in Lancaster County will have access to a doctor, a dentist, and a mental health professional.
Company History
For more than 125 years, United Way has been evolving to meet the needs of the times.
The worldwide movement traces its roots back to 1887 when a tireless volunteer, a priest, two ministers and a rabbi got together in Denver, Colorado. It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but they didn't walk into a bar: they recognized the need to work together in new ways to make their community a better place.
The organization we know today as United Way of Lancaster County was officially born here in 1925. The Welfare Federation of Lancaster, as it was first known, recognized that a similar, great need existed in Lancaster County to coordinate, maintain, and finance our health and human service agencies.
The year 1947 found the Welfare Federation adopting the name of similar organizations across the country: Community Chest of Lancaster County. With our fundraising campaigns known as Red Feather campaigns, our funded agencies similarly were referred to as Red Feather agencies.
A big step in the evolution of today’s United Way came on January 1, 1973, when the Community Chest merged with the Community Council to form United Way of Lancaster County. Like most United Ways across the country were doing, we blended our health and human service fundraising role as the Community Chest with that of the Community Council. Their role was as an agency planning organization that addressed and sought to resolve community issues.
This unified purpose remains the core of our commitment: to build a stronger Lancaster County by mobilizing the caring power of our community. and to achieve our bold goals