In marketing, we talk about reach and impact. Reach describes the extent to which people hear about or are touched by a marketing message, while impact is the way that message causes some change in behavior or well-being.
WIN’s 2019-2020 grants offer impressive potential for reach and impact in Nebraska.
- WIN’s $84,000 nonprofit grant will advance Legal Aid of Nebraska’s expansion of the Help, Education, and Law Project into the Veteran’s Administration Health Care Center in Omaha. This program, which is already at work in hospitals across much of the state, offers veterans legal assistance to take care of external situations impacting their health. For example, a veteran may need assistance having a legal guardian created while they are ill or obtaining assistance to keep their home while they are hospitalized. Due to regulations around the funding for veterans services, Legal Aid has not been able to serve VA patients until now.
- WIN’s $84,000 University of Nebraska grant will help fund the NU Information Technology Services’ Inclusive Access and Open Educational Resources program, which has a goal of saving students $10 million by 2023. Collaboration among the NU ITS team, libraries, professors and others helps to rework course materials to avoid requiring expensive textbooks while connecting students with high-quality online materials. One of their goals is to reduce the resource expenditure for many classes to $40 or less at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, University of Nebraska at Kearney and University of Nebraska at Omaha. The University of Nebraska is matching WIN’s $84,000 commitment to the program.
The University of Nebraska’s project offers a unique parallel to your annual WIN gift. University officials say most undergraduate students spend about $1,200 a year on textbooks or similar materials. If you used your WIN gift to buy books for a student, you would help one student for one year. But by pooling our gifts of $500, $1,200 and $2,400, WIN members will help provide many students access to quality learning materials and invest in a program to do the same for future students.
Those are tremendous projects. Each year, when WIN celebrates grants, I wonder if the projects WIN members vote on next year could possibly be as good. But each year, we find people offering creative, collaborative and innovative solutions for Nebraska.
Be sure to look at the videos and other grant materials on the updated and redesigned WIN website, as well as videos from our first-ever virtual Grant Awards Celebration Oct. 20. It was inspiring, fun and educational. It was a joy to see so many WIN members and guests from across the state and across the country in the random mixer and breakout sessions!
Thank you for participating in the grants celebration, for being a member of WIN and for helping us continually expand our reach and impact.
Candy