Our Work in Education

 United Way of the Midlands is focused on education through funding, community volunteer work and policy advocacy. We raise awareness for early learning, provide support for families and push for programs, budgets and laws to improve young children's lives. United Way also funds continuing education and adult literacy programs to provide a broad range of educational programs. We all win when a child succeeds in school, when a teenager graduates from high school and when an adult learns to read. 

The Work We're Doing

Local volunteers on Community Councils use their knowledge of community problems to distribute funds through multi-year, competitive grants where the needs are greatest. 

To make the best use of contributor dollars, United Way holds agencies accountable for the programs they run, only funding programs with good results. Grants are typically awarded for a period of three years, with continued funding dependent on satisfactory outcome reports. 

This chart shows how funds were distributed last year to United Way education programs throughout the community.


How Does My Gift Help?

Issue: More than 24% of today's kindergartners are not ready for first grade.
Solution: United Way of the Midlands funds nationally-accredited early childhood education programs at Arthurtown, Tender Years and Children's Garden that serve 119 each year. 
Issue: Almost half of South Carolina's children are not reading proficiently by third grade. Children who don't read by the third grade are much mess likely to graduate high school. 
Solution: United Way funds tutoring programs like the Midlands Reading Consortium that placed more than 200 students with reading tutors, and after school programs that helped 3,223 students from elementary up through high school maintain or improve their grades.
Issue: On average, South Carolina's more than 340,000 working-age dropouts each year earn $8,000 less than high school graduates each year and reduce state employment by more than 37,000 jobs. 
Solution: United Way helped support mentoring and drop-out prevention programs that provided engagement with a positive adult role model for more than 4,500 students last year.