On The Record With ... Jennifer Yonan

Jennifer Yonan has a simple way to explain what United Way of Lake County is all about.

“If we can build [a child’s] foundation around education, then hopefully what we can do is provide people with the skills and the strengths that they need so they won’t repeat that cycle of poverty for the next generation.”

Yonan is vice president of marketing for United Way of Lake County, an agency that prepares children to succeed by focusing on education and building safe and stable families.

She can tell you about the educational programs her organization has established to help children stay on the right path toward finishing high school. She can tell you how parents are learning how to support their children at home.

But she’ll also tell you that United Way doesn’t do it alone.

“It takes a village to raise a child and to help them succeed, so that’s really what we’re all about,” she said.

Yonan went on the record with Lake County Journal reporter Stephanie N. Lehman to talk about how United Way of Lake County is helping the community.

Lehman: For those who don't know, what does United Way of Lake County do?
Yonan: United Way helps children be successful ... by investing in programs that get them on the right path before they start kindergarten, helps them make sure they are reading at grade level by third grade and will graduate from high school on time. We also make sure that families have programs in the community that they can access so that we can make sure their families can stay safe and stable.

Lehman: Why is that important for the community to know that's what you do?
Yonan: It's important because it's different than the work that we used to be known for. As a United Way, traditionally, we would go into companies in the fourth quarter of the year, raise money through employee giving campaigns, turn around and distribute those funds back out to agency programs throughout the community – just a wide variety of health and human service needs throughout Lake County. As the world has changed, as companies have changed, as the competition among nonprofits has become more prevalent, we saw the need to make sure there was a relevance for United Way and that we were looking at issues at the core, at the root cause of why do people need that help in the first place from these agencies.

Lehman: What did you find?
Yonan: We really took a look at what were the needs in the community, what were the obstacles for the people trying to succeed. And we came up with a list of probably eight that were anything from lack of access to health care, lack of public transportation, lack of living-wage jobs available in the community … and we said, what do all these things have in common, and how can we approach this? And we said education – if we can build the foundation around education, then hopefully what we can do is provide people with the skills and the strengths that they need so they won't repeat that cycle of poverty for the next generation.

Lehman: What are some common facts about children in Lake County that people may not be aware of?
Yonan: When we launched our Success by Six program – which was really the first of our education programs – about five years ago, we looked at a pilot community of Waukegan, and we went in and assessed the incoming kindergartners with the skill levels that they had at that time. We found out that 73 percent of kids coming into kindergarten did not know the alphabet; 41 percent of them don't have core skills like counting, being able to tell you the primary colors, basic shapes. And then, about 76 percent of the kids had no knowledge of books. In other words, [they] had never engaged with books, didn't know that a book is oriented a certain way, that you turn the page, it tells a story, the pictures help tell the story – they just had no idea about books because they were not exposed. So, we said, OK, there's a lot of opportunity here for intervention. We need to look at the programs that exist in the community that are addressing kindergarten readiness and parenting skills so that parents can help be the child's first teacher. And then, what other programs can we create? What initiatives can we put into the community that can help fill the gaps that are not being served?

Lehman: Why did you join United Way?
Yonan: Well, having been a Waukegan [High School] graduate – and being born and raised in Waukegan – Waukegan is still very close to my heart, and I'd like to see something really great happen there ... . Most of my career has been spent here in Lake County. I've worked in marketing and economic development jobs for most of my 20-plus-year career, and I can really see where economic development and the work that United Way is doing really kind of have a good fit. How do you attract companies, how do you bring jobs to a community if there isn't a skilled labor force here? How do we bring jobs to a community if the community is not a safe place to be? If there aren't supports in the community with programming for the families that live here?
So, I can definitely see the investment in education really kind of being the key to turning things around and saying, we don't want to be looking at the same set of issues 10, 15 years down the road – let's really get to the root cause and turn things around. That kind of challenge I really, really enjoy.

Lehman: Do you have any projects coming up that people can help out with?
Yonan: We're going to be launching on June 21 ... Lake County's biggest book drive. We're calling it Page It Forward. And anyone can get involved by donating new or gently used children's books … . We're going to be collecting books from all over the county  – there will be multiple collection points – and then we will partner with one of our distribution partners here in Lake County, sort the books, and then get them back out into the community.

Lehman: Why don't you explain briefly about the Success by Six program?
Yonan: Success by Six is one of the four programs that we have. So, it's really dealing with getting the kids core skills that they need to have – it's helping them be successful by the age of six. Getting them the skills that they need to have to be successful in school to ensure a healthy start. So, a lot of that starts at home with parents being able to be their child's first teachers. A lot of the kids that are coming to school that didn't have the skills, their parents weren't working with them on those skills and really didn't even know that that was their role at home, to help them learn the alphabet, engage with dialogue, read books to them, work with them on basic schools.

So, we put some initiatives together to help parents really learn how to be their child's first teacher in a really simple, cost-effective way. They can use simple tools, they can do things in their day-to-day lives. Counting socks as they come out of the dryer, going to the grocery store and pointing out things that are red, finding things that are a circle – just simple things they can do … to help their children learn those skills.

Lehman: You said free programs. What sort of fundraising do you do?
Yonan: Most of our fundraising comes from the traditional United Way fundraising model, which is through the workplace employee giving campaigns, with a number of different corporations around Lake County. About 90 percent of our funding comes in through the employee giving campaigns. We do have a grant writer on staff now, so we do have some grant writing that we're doing. We are always looking for different sponsorships – we get very creative in the ways that we do things – and really, in the last five years, online giving has been another opportunity that we're taking advantage of, as well.

Lehman: What other programs does United Way have?
Yonan: When we started with Success By Six, people were like, OK, that's great, get these kids ready for kindergarten because you really want everyone at the starting line at the same point – you don't want that gap to exist from kindergarten on. So, then we said, well, what happens when they turn seven? What's the next thing?

We know there are really three critical times in a child's education when they can really be left behind. One is the kindergarten readiness skills. And then the second one is really third grade reading. If a child is not reading at grade-level by the end of third grade, chances are that child will not graduate from high school. There's a very strong correlation to that. One of our resources … did a study, and they actually used third-grade reading scores in the community to predict the prison population. So, it's extremely important. When you look at the prison population, and you find out 65 percent of the prison inmates are illiterate, you really start to realize that reading is really a core skill. You learn to read up to third grade, and you read to learn from fourth grade on. If you can't read your textbook, if you can't read the homework, chances are your parents at home aren't going to be much help to you either, because a lot of times the mother's education level also predicts the success of the child. So, it's really all about getting those core skills in and getting those reading skills and that literacy level up by the third grade. So, we have a very strong program with Reading Success around that. A lot of that program is based on making sure kids enjoy reading, because a lot of them don't. And remember a lot of them don't have books at home; some of them will probably be told, don't be wasting your time with that. So, we really want them to enjoy reading and look at it as a pleasure – something fun to do.

So, what we've done is we've developed a classroom reading volunteer program where we have volunteers from companies and throughout the community  go in and read to the kids in the classroom. It's always more fun to have somebody come into the classroom than listen to the teacher. And then we have tutors that are also trained to work one-on-one with the kids that are identified as already being at least a grade level behind, and they work to get those skills up. And then we retest them at the end of the year and look at how their scores went. And we saw about 73 percent of the kids in our programs have improved their skills in our first year of programming. So, we're excited.

Lehman: What are the last programs United Way has?
Yonan: The last program is something we just added last fall, and it's called Stay in School, and it's really around that third critical place where kids kind of fall out in the school cycle. And that is, that transition from middle school to high school. It's difficult enough from a peer pressure and a social standpoint, but think about academically – if you're already two grade levels behind in reading, how are you going to keep up with the academic pressures of high school? So, we see, for example, in Waukegan, if ... 50 percent of the kids aren't graduating from high school after four years, 30 percent of those kids that aren't graduating are dropping out between ninth and 10th grade because they've just given up – they're not even close.

Lehman: What's one thing people can do to help children's education in Lake County?
Yonan: Reinforce the positive with young children. Give them the ability to believe that anything is possible, because once they believe that they can be anything and do anything and take that first step to saying, you know what? I think I can read, because some day I want to become a doctor, a lawayer, a teacher,  a nurse – once they believe in themselves, they can do anything. And I think the saddest thing I've seen is kids who don't see the possibilities or that don't have hope. So, reinforcing the hope and believing in kids and encouraging them to read, encourage them to be good students, stay in school, go to school and graduate on time.

Yonan lowdown

Who she is: Vice president of marketing for United Way of Lake County
Family: Husband, Greg; and two children, Emma, 13; and Gregory Jr., 10
Village of residence: Libertyville
Hobbies: Shopping and food; plus gardening, traveling, riding her bike and spending time outdoors
Website: www.uwlakeco.org