Heather Brunner has served on the UWATX Board of Directors for seven years, and as a volunteer for seventeen years. As she wraps up her final year on our board, she reflects on her time with United Way. “During my school years and at college, I was always a very active community volunteer. After college as a young professional, I was a road warrior, working long hours and was relentlessly focused on building my career–but something was missing. I wasn’t giving back to the welcoming Austin community that gave me such incredible career opportunity. In the summer of 1999, I saw an ad in the Austin American-Statesman with a call for volunteers from the United Way. I was familiar with United Way from employee giving campaigns at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) and from Donna Van Fleet, a United Way board member and Business Unit Executive at IBM that I admired. So I decided to answer the call. Today, seventeen years later as I end my final Board of Directors term, I can say that serving United Way for Greater Austin has been one of the highest privileges and proudest accomplishments of my life. In those seventeen years, I’ve seen the organization change dramatically from a mostly fundraising “pass through” mechanism to local nonprofits, to a strategic catalyst and thought leader driving positive change for the working poor and their families. Twenty-five percent of our Greater Austin community is living on the edge of poverty and in need of a helping hand […]
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