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Organizational Excellence Awards

After a rigorous assessment process, three partner agencies, Capital Senior Center, The Free Medical Clinic and LRADAC received organizational excellence awards and funding as top non-profit organizations that demonstrate achievement of outstanding community results.

What is an Organizational Excellence Award?

• The purpose of the Organizational Excellence Award is to recognize those partner agencies that are providing superior services to people in the Midlands and making the community a better place for everyone to live.
• This award provides recognition and unrestricted funding to organizations that exhibit extraordinary results in the community in one of three areas—program performance, governance and collaboration.
• Seventeen of  80 partner agencies submitted applications for review outlining practices they believe are worthy of recognition.
• Trained volunteers and United Way staff were divided into review teams within each of the three categories and held each applicant to high expectations of achievement. Each partner agency's application was evaluated through a rigorous and thorough process that included an interview with the review team.

Why are these awards important?

"This program is so valuable because it recognizes the top performances in organizational management practices," said Mac Bennett, United Way of the Midlands President & CEO. "This year's truly deserving recipients each submitted uniquely impressive practices to the review team and made strong cases for their respective outstanding work."

• The Capital Senior Center received a $10,000 award in the program performance category for an exceptional evaluation process that utilized benchmarks, even at the planning stages.
• Another $10,000 was awarded to The Free Medical Clinic also in the category of program performance program for their effective use of data to optimize their clinical operations..
• In the governance category, LRADAC received a $20,000 award for instituting practices based on data-driven information as well as a quality control and timeline process to be sure their work was truly achieving the goals that were outlined for the agency's programs.

Each of these award recipients has a requirement to share their expertise and great work with other non-profit organizations and partner agencies, so that all organizations can benefit from the Organizational Excellence Awards program.

"This award program is an excellent process to not only recognize and reward superior Certified Partner Agency performance, but also to share their expertise with other agencies through roundtable or panel discussions," said Jack Canter, Senior Development Director of Information Systems, BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina. "This creates great opportunity for improved performance across all United Way of the Midlands Certified Partner Agencies, and the entire community will benefit from that."