Take Action in your Community
See how United Ways near you and around the world will celebrate this year's Day of Action
United Way Day of Action 2017
On and around June 21, thousands of people in hundreds of communities across the world will volunteer with United Way to fight for the health, education and financial stability of every person in every community.
THIS YEAR UNITED WAY IS FOCUSING ON SUMMER LEARNING AND NUTRITION. SUMMER IS A CRITICAL TIME FOR CHILDREN’S ACADEMIC AND PHYSICAL WELL-BEING. BUT IN TOO MANY COMMUNITIES, KIDS ARE FALLING BEHIND IN SCHOOL AND GOING HUNGRY DURING THE SUMMER MONTHS.
Kids who don’t get academic enrichment during the summer forget what they learned during the school year, experiencing what’s known as the “summer slide.” Children from low-wage families slide a lot further. They start school with a two-month lag in math and a 3-month delay in reading. By middle school, they’ve lost two full years of learning. Middle-income kids don’t suffer the slide as much, because their families can afford summer camps and academic enrichments, and their homes are usually filled with books. In fact, sometimes their reading skills even increases over the summer. It all adds up, making it very hard for low-income youth to catch up. Experts say more than half of the achievement gap between lower- and higher-income youth can be explained by unequal access to summer learning opportunities.
BOOSTING SUMMER LEARNING – AND WORKING WITH SCHOOLS, SUMMER PROGRAMS, EMPLOYERS AND OTHER NONPROFITS – IS PART OF UNITED WAY’S STRATEGY TO HELP KIDS SUCCEED IN SCHOOL, WORK AND LIFE.
United Way’s Summer Learning Collaborative in Boston is turning summer time into learning time for over 3,000 elementary schoolers every year. Almost 90% of those kids are starting school without any summer learning loss; 82% think reading is more fun.
In their 7th year of Day of Action activities, United Way of Northwest Michigan is also making summer learning fun by providing kids with exciting, literacy-based learning activities, free books and backpacks, and help signing up for a library card (a series made possible through the support of UPS).
UNITED WAY’S WORK IN SUMMER NUTRITION IS PART OF OUR LARGER COMMUNITY IMPACT STRATEGY TO HELP BUILD STRONGER, HEALTHIER COMMUNITIES WHERE EVERYONE CAN THRIVE.
For example, United Way of Greater Mercer County is hosting a food packing event to provide 200,000 meals to food banks across New Jersey. And Heart of West Michigan United Way is partnering with Feeding America West Michigan to mobilize over 1,000 volunteers to assemble more than 200,000 meals for the community.