How the New CEO of the United Way of Greater Nashville Plans To Build Community
In early 2024, the former CEO of United Way of Greater Nashville (UWGN), Brian Hassett, announced his retirement at the end of the calendar year. Under Hassett’s leadership, UWGN expanded its footprint to a nine-county area and merged with Hands on Nashville, a nonprofit volunteer coordination that connects volunteers with community organizations looking for help.
UWGN’s board formed an executive search team and announced in summer that Erica Mitchell, UWGN’s Executive Vice President and Chief Community Impact Officer, would become the new CEO starting Jan. 1, 2025.
“I came to United Way because I wanted to get closer to the community,” Mitchell said, adding that she previously had held policy positions and wanted to see the impact policy changes have on the ground with community and people.
She joined the education efforts of UWGN 14 years ago after working for Tennessee SCORE, the state collaborative on reforming education. Mitchell said she believes in the cross-sector partnerships that UWGN forges with nonprofits, businesses, and philanthropy when working on solutions to complex social needs.
What is the role of the Community Impact Officer?
I have really loved the community impact role. The role itself has evolved over the years that I have been here. I would say first and foremost, we have to be good listeners so that we can hear from the community what the greatest needs are. And from there, we are always looking for opportunities to connect resources to meet whatever the greatest needs are.
To sum it up, the community impact role is about listening to the community and working with the community to put resources in place to truly help people not just sustain but thrive.
What are your goals and plans for next year? How will you tackle your new role?
A lot of it will be listening.
I have told people, I want us to continue doing things that we do well. We work now across nine counties. We fund nonprofit organizations. We will continue doing that and identifying really strong nonprofit community partners to serve communities well.
The collaboration piece means so much to me. I want us not only to continue that but to expand on what collaboration looks like going into 2025. We will go through a strategic planning process, which is important to do because that allows us to listen to the community, hear directly from them where their pain points are, and then see what United Way’s role is, and [determine] how we are uniquely suited to meet some of those needs.
I am looking forward to going through that process and really being able to hear from the community and various stakeholders.
If you had to describe the United Way of Greater Nashville, what would you say?
I am going to start with the mission statement. Let me break that down. We unite the community and mobilize resources, so that every child, individual, and family thrives.
The first part of that, “we unite the community,” I think that is critically important. It is not only about bringing people together, but it is about who we are bringing together. What appeals to me so much about United Way is the cross-sector functionality of the organization. We are talking to community members, those who we want to see thriving and who have first-hand lived experience. We are also talking with nonprofit organizations that are on the frontline serving. We are talking with government and business that serve in a different capacity, and philanthropy that is providing a financial resource. So, “uniting the community” means that we are listening to, we are attentive to, and we are bringing all of those entities together at some point in time.
And then, the second part is, we “mobilize resources.” That is putting things into action so that they can work in the service of what we are trying to solve for. It could be a financial resource, it could be people resources, it could be tangible hard goods. I love the idea of being able to mobilize or put multiple things into play to solve community challenges.
And then, “everyone is thriving,” that is the ultimate goal. Again, I came here because I wanted to see [the direct impact on people]. When people would ask me what I wanted to do for work, what appealed to me is opening doors for people who have all sorts of odds stacked against them. The statistics say they should not make it. The question that always interested me is, “How do we open doors so that anyone, regardless of where they are growing up or the circumstances they are growing up in, has the opportunity to live out what they are capable of living out. How can they live into what thriving looks like for them?” I think that’s part of what we do at United Way.
I really want us to be an on-ramp for how business and individuals understand what is happening in the community as well as a solution for individuals, families, and businesses to give back and contribute to making the community a thriving place for everyone. I want the United Way to be viewed in that way. That is very much what we do. I just want more people to understand that.
United Way has expanded from Davidson County to merge with other United Ways. What are some of the opportunities/challenges to strengthen this regional approach?
Having a regional approach allows us to connect across county lines. It allows us to leverage resources and connect similar or related nonprofit services in one county to another county.
There is just such an opportunity there for us to create more of a coordinated network. I am excited about that, and we are already seeing that in some of the counties that are more rural.
They do not have as many nonprofit resources. They do not have as many services in their area, but the need is great. So, being able to take services like for example a VITA, a Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program, or a Raise Your Hand tutoring program — things that we are already doing. We have an opportunity to do those in other spaces as well.
The challenges are relationship-building and trust-building. It is important for us to get to know a community well and for them to feel comfortable with who we are. It is not Nashville coming in to take over. We really want to be in a place where we can leverage what we have in terms of resources to make another community better and stronger, whether that is by leveraging resources we have here or whether it is finding resources within that community.
There is just a lot of opportunity, so I am looking forward to digging more deeply into that heading into 2025.
The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee has recently announced a new childcare initiative called the Nashville Early Education Coalition. United Way has been working with the Metro government to improve childcare in our community. What is your role in this new coalition?
United Way has been deeply involved in early education for decades. It goes back to our relationship with community-based childcare centers, which continues to this day. [The focus] of that is around ensuring quality childcare and preparing kids for kindergarten. We continue to have a literacy focus and whole-child readiness for school emphasis at our community-based centers.
We have a systems initiative here called Raising Readers Nashville. Megan Godbey is the director of Raising Readers Nashville. She has done an exceptional job uniting the community through coalition-building [by] bringing multiple partners around the table to tackle a hard challenge. That hard challenge has been grade-level reading. Our approach has been to look at what is happening in the early years before children ever get into school, at school readiness, and how the community can serve and support children who are coming from more trying circumstances.
As a result of that cross-sector approach that brought multiple entities around the table, Raising Readers Nashville actually was the incubator behind the Nashville Early Education Coalition. We were convening people in organizations and trying to determine what the next step would be, and the thought was, we needed an individual to get up every single day thinking about how to improve quality early childhood education.
I am really proud that Raising Readers Nashville [served] as an incubator for the Nashville Early Education Coalition and that’s something that we have done in partnership with the Community Foundation [of Middle Tennessee] along with other philanthropic organizations that have invested in this new entity.
United Way has been a local leader in preventing and ending family homelessness and has created an initiative called The Family Collective. Our city has seen a 26-percent increase in student homelessness in the last school year. How do you see United Way’s role moving forward with The Family Collective?
We are so proud of The Family Collective. It embodies what I think are the strengths of United Way — the uniting of communities, the coalition-building, working across county lines, and truly having a regional approach. It coordinated a network to serve families. [With thousands] of families served by moving them out of and preventing homelessness, it has been an important body of work. And as you have mentioned, the 26-percent uptick [in student homelessness] underscores the significance and necessity of a coordinated effort like a family collective.
That work was previously funded by the state of Tennessee. We are looking for alternative resources to see how we can continue the work. We are extremely grateful for the years that the state funded this body of work. The success of the program and the growing need underscores that there is still work to be done, and that is why we will continue looking for resources to see how we can support families.