Frequently Asked Questions:

Is Erie Together a social service agency?

No, Erie Together is a countywide, collective impact movement involving people from many different walks of life. Our real strength comes from citizens with different backgrounds and experience bringing their time, talent and expertise to the table to tackle big community issues. Erie Together is not an “agency” of any kind.

Erie Together is a “collective impact” movement. What does that mean, exactly?

“Collective impact” is when you bring people together in a structured way to identify goals and affect change. In Erie Together’s case, we work with organizations and citizens from across Erie County to identify our region’s top priorities, and then we align local efforts, expertise and resources to address them.

How is Erie Together funded?

Erie Together pursues grant funding to support operations and projects from national, state and local sources. We also seek corporate and private donations to move our work forward. Finally, we solicit project-related contributions from entities that benefit from Erie Together’s convening, facilitation and strategic planning leadership to help keep things going.

What are some things that Erie Together’s done that I might recognize?

Early on, we focused our efforts on helping more kids be prepared for kindergarten so they could be ready to learn when they got there. We created a whole series of kindergarten readiness resources – a checklist, progress chart, toolkit, registration flyer and Block-by-Block neighborhood campaign – to help families, and distributed these resources across the county.

Because middle school years are pivotal in kids’ development, we knew that access to caring adults is key. So, we created the More Caps and Gowns Mentoring Project that was implemented in several local districts.

To help students prepare for life after high school, we launched Career Street linking schools and businesses to provide real-world career exploration experiences for kids in grades K-12. We’re now drastically expanding on Career Street efforts through our Erie County Career Pathways Alliance. We also created, with Gannon University and U.S. Senator Pat Toomey’s Office, our annual Youth Civic Engagement Symposium showing kids how they can become involved and improve their communities and world around them.

Finally, turning to adults, you may have heard of the Erie County Re-entry Services and Support Alliance (ECRSSA), an entity we worked with local stakeholders for three years to create. The ECRSSA helps people coming back to Erie County from federal, state and local correctional facilities get back on their feet and become productive members of our community. The ECRSSA is now a program of GECAC.

How can I get involved?

There are several ways you can get engaged. Click here to get the ball rolling!