United we stand/ There's still time to organize a campaign to aid

With many corporate campaigns still in progress, a situation that will continue at least until early in the new year, Pikes Peak United Way officials are not in a position today to hazard a guess on how well their 2000 community-wide fund-raising initiative will fare.

The stakes remain high, though, with this year's goal of $4.525 million - to underwrite more than 60 programs of 40 United Way affiliated agencies - being a stretch. It is those in need, in crisis, whose lives and futures stand in the balance.

Last week, United Way President Ann Lang said it is most important at this point that both businesses and individuals realize "there is still time to participate, to run a campaign, to give a gift."

There is an urgency to this appeal that hopefully will resonate with many who have yet to make a commitment to the campaign.

Pikes Peak United Way, like similar organizations in cities across the country, is in the throes of an effort to reinvent itself. This in part at least is a response to increasing questions about the need for an organization that serves as an intermediary between givers and the agencies delivering critical health and human services.

But the fact remains that through its community campaign, conducted largely in workplaces, United Way remains the best and most effective means available today for tapping our community's capacity to give at the grass-roots level.

And this is likely to be so even after the process of reinvention is completed.

For each member agency to have to undertake raising the dollars provided by United Way would be an enormous drain of time, talent and resources, probably with less effect.

Also, many who participate through workplace campaigns appear on no agency's prospective donor list. How else can they be reached effectively and economically with an appeal to consider contributing to the extent of their ability to help address critical community needs?

And whether the gifts that come in response are small or large in strictly monetary terms, they say much about the health of our community, much about the sense of responsibility each of us feels - not only for how we and our families live our lives, but also for the needs of our larger community.

One of the principal challenges facing United Way here and elsewhere is that many donors, corporations and individuals alike, today prefer more autonomy in deciding where their contributions go than this campaign may afford them. Clearly, this is a concern United Way must address as it goes forward.

But it is also true that many who care deeply about the future of our community will continue to want and need an organization such as United Way to help them to understand where the most urgent needs lie and how they can most effectively be addressed.

Who is better suited to this task in Colorado Springs today or likely to be in the future than United Way?

The $4.525 million Pikes Peak United Way seeks to raise in 2000 is urgently needed. That is not a matter of debate, even as the organization's future is.

To the extent this campaign succeeds, many lives will be changed for the better.

New era in statehouse

And a bad omen for some good measures

We wish the best to Democratic state senators who, for the first time in 40 years, took control of their chamber on Nov. 7. But we don't have high hopes.

The election handed their party a majority - by one seat - in the Senate, thanks in part to the retirement of longtime Denver Republican lawmaker Dottie Wham. Wham was known for voting more like a Democrat, in synch with her heavily Democratic district. So when voters there picked Democrat and former House Minority Leader Ken Gordon to replace Wham, it was no surprise.

And, we'd guess Gordon won't vote a lot differently on key legislation. Like Wham, Gordon, a lawyer, can be counted upon to oppose liberalization of concealed-weapons laws statewide as well as to oppose attempts to streamline the death penalty.

Particularly that latter endeavor - scrapping the cumbersome, unwarranted three-judge panel that now handles sentencing in capital cases, in favor of letting the trial judge hand out death sentences - had a fighting chance up until Election Day. After all, Wham, who had chaired the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, long had blocked legislation bolstering the death penalty as well as the right to arms. A different Republican in her place could have shaken things up.

But with Democrats now in charge, guess who's chairing the same committee: Gordon. Expect a real logjam between the Senate and the Republican House, at least on some of these flash-point issues.

Copyright 2000
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.