United Way focuses on making poverty ‘unignorable’

Too many children and families in the Edmonton area live in poverty, officials with the United Way of the Alberta Capital Region said Thursday as they launched a new campaign to make the issue “unignorable.”

The charity’s 2018 campaign kicked off at the Shaw Conference Centre with an aim to build off of last year’s record-breaking $26.6 million in fundraising.

The campaign’s focus is on the more than 135,000 people living in poverty in the Edmonton area and the agencies that help address their problems.

The number of children in need would fill enough school buses to stretch down seven kilometres of roadway if placed end to end, a United Way spokeswoman said.

Hundreds of Edmonton workplaces and thousands of people are involved in the annual campaign, which distributes funds to more than 100 programs across the region.

“They connected me with resources and, because of it all, I got a chance to choose my path in life — instead of only having one path toward poverty,” Emily Crockett, the event’s keynote speaker, said in a news release as she described how resources funded by the United Way helped her stay in school and graduate.

In addition to Edmonton, the United Way of the Alberta Capital Region serves Fort Saskatchewan, Sherwood Park, Strathcona County, St. Albert, Leduc and Leduc County, Spruce Grove, Stony Plain and Parkland County.