Five Questions for Angela F. Williams, President and CEO of United Way Worldwide

Pretty much anyone working in the nonprofit sector will be familiar with United Way, with its vast network of local fundraising affiliates spanning the United States and reaching overseas. From the small donors who give through its local workplace programs all the way up to the likes of MacKenzie Scott, United Way (along with peer organizations like Goodwill and the YMCA/YWCA) has long served donors as a well-established conduit for funding to support direct service causes.

Angela F. Williams was appointed as the new president and CEO of United Way Worldwide (UWW) in 2021, becoming the first Black woman to fill the role. Prior to joining UWW, Williams served as president and CEO of disability services nonprofit Easterseals. She also worked as executive vice president, general counsel and chief administration officer at YMCA of the USA.

Born in Anderson, South Carolina, Williams studied American government at the University of Virginia and earned a law degree from the University of Texas Law School and a divinity masters degree from Virginia Union University. She went on to serve in the U.S. Air Force Judge Advocate General’s Corps for more than six years as an assistant U.S. attorney, a prosecutor on the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, a special counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee staff, and as an interfaith liaison for the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund.

We recently spoke with Williams about how she came to lead UWW, the legacy nonprofit’s transformation, and her thoughts on what nonprofits need from philanthropy. Here are excerpts from that conversation, which have been edited for clarity and length.

To start with, can you tell me a little bit about your transition from a career in law to the nonprofit world?

It was a journey that began when I was a child. It's actually part of my DNA. My dad was a pastor of a church in South Carolina where I was born, and he joined the Navy as a chaplain. So I've grown up in a household where there was an ethic of service and being willing to give of one's time, talent and treasure to help others. I have always been a giver and a donor in communities ever since I was a kid. And when I found out that you could actually work for a nonprofit, I was 100% in.

And what brought you to United Way?

Before coming to United Way, I was the CEO of Easterseals, which is a national disability servicing organization, and before that I was with the YMCA — great legacy organizations that have been around for more than a century. And what really caused me to click on the link from the search firm and begin to read about United Way and say, I want to put my hat in the ring, was the breadth and scope and depth of United Way in communities in 37 countries. What I didn't realize, even having given to United Way over the years, was that United Way is this global platform that is hyper-locally focused.

United Way has all these wonderful assets, starting with our people, our staff and our volunteers who live in the communities in which they work. So they have those relationships that are very real, tangible and necessary in order to do good in a community. I looked at the asset of 211, which is the national hotline for health and human services. We know on a daily basis what's happening in local communities because we receive 50,000 calls or emails a day. We have 28,000 nonprofit partners that we support financially. That's powerful.

The last thing I would say that was a draw to me with this organization is that we have 45,000 corporate partners that want their employees to want to engage in community activities and want to raise funds and to see change happen in their communities. So when you take that cumulative effect of all these various assets, I couldn't say no. I had to say, "Wow. What a wonderful opportunity to be able to amass this amount of resources, talent and abilities to have impact in a global way."

You touched on this a little bit already, but can you tell me a little more about how your experiences, both personal and professional, have prepared you for your work at United Way?

By training, I'm a lawyer and I'm also an ordained minister. I have been bi-vocational for more than 20 years. One of the things that is key to being a lawyer is being an advocate. Being in ministry, I'm an advocate. And then at United Way Worldwide, I'm an advocate constantly lifting up issues and concerns and being that voice for community advocating for people who may not have a seat at the table.

Because of who United Way is, we can create our own table and invite the people that are struggling, that are having to deal with the effects of not being able to find affordable housing, living in food deserts, or dealing with crises related to meeting basic needs or mental health crises or going through a disaster. We can create a table to say, "United Way is here alongside all of our partners, our resources, our insights and relationships to help people and make their lives better." So I think being that lawyer advocate, being that minister advocate, it's all combined into the best job ever for me.

How do you hope that United Way continues to grow and transform under your leadership?

We are undergoing a transformational process now. We are 137 years old, and as with any legacy organization, we have to continue to anticipate the future, look at the signals of what's happening in communities and continue to evolve to meet community needs.

I started during COVID, and I truly believe that the pandemic was a line of demarcation in world history. It affected everyone. No one was exempted. It affected how we thought about the world, how we interacted with loved ones, how we interacted with our neighbors, how we saw resources distributed, how we saw systems not function. We saw all of these fractures. And so it caused us to cross over into this new era of being, of looking at the world, of thinking about connectivity, thinking about relationships, about how we engage with each other. How do we help each other? How do we support each other?

And so when I look at being in this new era with a legacy organization, I wanted to say, what is going to keep us impactful, relevant and sustainable in the future? So we came up with the vision, which is that we want to be here to help so that every person in every community can thrive. And if we mean that, then what do we have to do as an organization to transform how we show up?

We're doing that in a couple of ways. We are shifting the culture of the organization to meet this vision statement. We're looking at how we engage locally and how we engage as a network across four areas of focus — youth opportunity, healthy communities, financial security, and community resilience, which includes disaster response and more recently, looking and leaning into clean energy. So we, as part of the Power Forward Communities, just received $2 billion from the EPA to do this work.

So we're doing new things that are relevant for the times and for the future and where we're seeing communities head. The transformation work is really about how do we make communities more resilient and really going deep in terms of our role as a trusted partner, community convener, and advocate so that we can help move the needle on critical issues that are impacting communities but doing it at scale.

Shifting gears just a little bit, what, if anything, keeps you up at night, philanthropy-wise?

I would say what keeps me up at night is that philanthropy is still operating under the older notion of, "We want to give to you and then we expect you to count the number of widgets used, the impact, and make sure you don't spend a lot on infrastructure."

What about trust-based philanthropy? I think that's important. I think that the way MacKenzie Scott has really opened that aperture up is powerful. I think that [we need to recognize] that systems like United Way that are vast — we cover 95%-plus of communities in the United States — need investment in our infrastructure. And so having philanthropies say, if we value these legacy organizations that are more than a century old, that have been doing the work on the ground, have proven track records and continue to be present and proximate to communities and their issues, then asking the question: What do we need to do to strengthen them, to continue to be impactful, relevant and sustainable, are the right questions to be asking.

And I don't have as many of those types of conversations as I believe that I should be having. Instead, organizations like ours continue to do the critical work that government can't do and the critical work that even companies can't do to allow communities to thrive and to meet needs. And so we have to get to a place where there's a recognition of the serious work that nonprofits are doing, whether they are really small mom-and-pop nonprofits, grassroots nonprofits, all the way up to the big systems like United Way. There has to be investment in the infrastructure. There has to be trust in the leaders of these organizations to know how to best deploy the funds to leverage philanthropic funds in order to get the work done.

My next question was going to be if you could change one thing about philanthropy, what would it be, but I think you've answered that question perfectly already.

That's what I'm advocating right now!

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