The Simple Lesson: Becky Benton and Helping Others

Cover Stories — 01 January 2012

Becky Benton and Helping Others

Every Monday afternoon, Becky Benton’s mother went visiting. They called it visiting shut-ins in those days, and her mother took it on as her duty in the town of Opp, Alabama, about fifty miles due west of Dothan.

Sometimes Becky accompanied her mother on her visiting day. It wasn’t a big deal. Her mother didn’t put on a show. But it made an impression. It is how Becky learned that not everyone had it as good as she did, and that left her with a debt. “It was small things,” Becky says. “She didn’t beat this into my head, but I got that sense as a small child that it was very important to visit, to be with people, to make their lives better.”

Becky’s father was the chief of air traffic control at Fort Rucker, the U.S. Army post. Her mother stayed home and cared for her and her two siblings. And her mother visited shut-ins.

Not by plan nor by strategy, but perhaps by the route of an apple that keeps close to the tree, Becky has created a life that’s about that simple lesson her mother taught: We help others. For the last 15 years she has carried out that lesson as executive director of the United Way of Lee County.

“She doesn’t work like you imagine an executive would,” says Michelle Keese, a United Way employee. “She’s very empathetic. She cares deeply about the clients and always puts herself in their shoes.”

Lately, those shoes have pinched a little more, as more Lee County people are in need. While Lee County unemployment had fallen to an enviable 6.8 percent in November, need remains substantial and hard to alleviate.

“When the economy is tough, it hurts the least of these the most,” she says.

This time, it also cut into United Way’s ability to help. The turning point was BFGoodrich’s 2009 decision to shut its one-and-a-half-million-square-foot Opelika plant, an institution in town since 1963. The closing left a thousand people jobless; it also cut total corporate giving to the United Way by twenty percent. In response to the lost jobs and the disappearance of a major corporate donor, the United Way dropped its annual campaign goal from $1 million to $900,000 n 2009. Still, the agency fell short of the goal by some $30,000. The following year, Lee County donors managed to meet the $900,000 goal, but not until nine months after the campaign’s ceremonial end. And in the campaign that wrapped up as 2011 drew to a close, United Way remained 20 percent short of its most recent $900,000 goal.

Becky and staff members Kristen Meadows, campaign manager and Michelle Keese, community resource development specialist
But that doesn’t mean it’s over.

“We say we wrap up at year’s end, because we allocate the funds in January, but we still hope to raise that 20 percent,” Becky says.

The loss in funding, combined with reductions in federal and state funding to United Way member agencies, added to the hardships for community members. United Way was able to delay the impact of its funding loss on member agencies by making use of an emergency fund created for disasters such as tornadoes or flooding. But the emergency fund eventually ran out, and United Way was forced to reduce its contributions to member agencies.

“Last year was the first year we actually had to make cuts,” Becky says. The agency tried not to cut funds to groups involved in such survival services as food and shelter. Other services were harder hit. The across-the-board average cut was twelve percent, although some member agencies saw no reduction in funding, and a few saw reductions as large as twenty-eight percent. Because the disaster relief fund was depleted by the recession, if Lee County is hit by a major disaster, United Way would have to dig into its six-month operating reserve.

After reviewing the financial realities, Becky catches herself.

“I don’t want this to sound like gloom and doom We certainly live in a very, very caring community,” she says. “We’re so blessed here in Lee County.”

But she acknowledges that at times those blessings keep people from realizing the depth of need that remains. Until her tenure at United Way, and the Domestic Violence Intervention Center before that, she wasn’t aware either, she says.

“I really didn’t realize some of the problems we did have,” Becky says. “If you’re not a victim of domestic violence or you don’t have someone in your family who’s effected, you may not realize that’s really a problem. If you’re not around situations where children are abused, you wouldn’t know. It happens much more frequently than people realize.”

“I think sometimes, the further you are removed from the need, the harder it is to understand there is a need,” she said. That makes education an important component of the United Way’s mission. Part of that education has to focus on helping individuals understand that they are an essential part of the solution.

“It’s like watching a telethon on television, and you think, someone else will make that donation. It’s not that you don’t care. You just think somebody else will do it. But a lot of times, if we don’t step up to do it, it won’t happen.”

Becky Benton did not set out to run charitable agencies. As a girl in Opp, a place best known for its annual rattlesnake rodeo, she dreamed of teaching. She attended the University of South Alabama in Mobile as an education major. Then, for ten years, she taught special needs children, first in Abilene, Texas, then in Waco.

Teaching was a big surprise. She had imagined filling the role her own teachers filled: Standing in front of the class, helping children through lessons, grading papers. The reality was far different. The children she taught needed her in a much more elemental way. They ranged from toddlers with incomplete toilet training to ten year olds.

“It was not what I thought it was going to be. The children had so many different kinds of needs, that no two days were the same. And your goals are different. Your goal is to help each child be the best they can be, and that may be only counting to ten, or helping a child figure out what different coins they need to go to the Coke machine and put them in.”

“The work was very rewarding,” she says. “The smiles you would get from the children when they would accomplish a task were just so amazing. There is nothing like working with children.”

Despite the pleasure she took from her job, she found herself ready for a change. For one thing, she couldn’t help worrying. She was single, and teacher pay wasn’t great. Deciding to focus on improving her earnings, she moved back to Alabama to earn a master’s in business administration from Auburn University, with thoughts of becoming a businesswoman. But by the time she finished her degree in 1992, she knew she wasn’t cut out for the corporate world.

“I guess I could not get it, whatever it is,” that made someone a corporate type. “With a personality that makes you want to be a teacher, and enjoy being with people, and being a part of people’s life, I realized that probably working in the corporate sector probably would not make me happy.”

Now she was at sea. “I was just trying to find out what’s next. I just wasn’t sure. I felt like getting the business degree was the right thing, but now how am I going to use that.”

Then, to her good fortune – in a way — someone embezzled money from what was then the East Alabama Task Force for Battered Women. It turned out, with her new MBA and her need to help others, she was uniquely suited not only to sort out the mess, but to put new systems in place to prevent it from happening again.

“I felt like God opened that door for me,” she said.

In 1995, she married to Chip Johnson, whose job kept him on the road a lot. When they decided it was time to have a baby (Their son Trace is a seventh grader WHERE), she knew it was time to job hunt. She couldn’t tote a baby along when she responded to middle-of-the-night distress calls from women escaping intolerable lives. So after four years as executive director of the task force, she moved to the United Way in 1997, replacing long-time director Judith Peterson.

“I definitely lucked into the United Way job,” Becky says. “It wasn’t something I was just actually looking for.”

But it was a little intimidating; Jude Peterson had run the agency for twenty-six years. “I felt like I was trying to replace Bear Bryant or Shug Jordan. But the board was wonderful. They said, ‘We don’t expect you to be Jude. We expect you to be Becky.’”

There was a lot to learn, not the least of which was how to make the best of the volunteers that made United Way work.

“That has been a major blessing,” she says. “When you have paid employees, there’s a contractual obligation there. Volunteers are working from their hearts. They already have paid jobs. They’re giving up something to be able to help you.” The challenge becomes finding ways to make the volunteer work a positive thing for them.

“You want to make sure you’re a meeting the need of that individual. It could be students who need a credit for a class, or just that mom who also needs to show her child you need to give something back.”

She has regular contact with forty to fifty of the two hundred volunteers or so who help United Way. “What I try to do, as much as I can with my immediate volunteers, is stay in contact with them. And we do that in broader ways, like the newsletter, so they know what’s going on in the organization, they’re getting feedback that the time they’re giving – whether raising money or sitting on the board – that that time is making a difference, families are being helped, children are being fed – that their efforts are making a difference.”

Finding just what Lee County needs “is a more difficult than you would think.” The United Way works with Auburn University MBA students regularly to formulate a survey and target an audience. “We try to do these surveys every five or so years to see if things are changing, if needs are met, where we lack services, where their seems to be a need. It’s always an ongoing process,” Becky says. Man-on-the-street interviews, phone interviews, written surveys administered at member agencies to employees and people receiving services, all help the United Way decide where money is best spent.

In the most recent survey, United Way workers noted an increasing number of children in single-parent homes, which sparked a review of what services were available for those families. “Are their mentoring programs out there to assist these moms – they are predominantly female-headed households – and are there services available to help their children?” Things like the Boys & Girls Club and the one-on-one mentoring program, Project Uplift, are helping meet the needs of this growing population.

The other area of need United Way identified is the growth in the numbers of senior citizens in Lee County. This led them to examine what was available for low-income seniors, such as adult daycare at East Alabama Services for the Elderly.

One area that Becky expects to see growth is in financial education.

“We’re looking at what we can do to assist families in, not just putting a Band-Aid on a situation, but seeing if there are better ways to work with families and help them manage and grow resources.” United Way of Central Alabama is already working on this area. “We’re not in a position right now to be able to do that, but we realize that there is a need.”

The amazing thing is, Becky says, the people of Lee County help meet all of these diverse needs. And it’s only a matter of time before more people catch on to the fact that they can also make a difference.

“We are so blessed, she says. “We’re blessed by the number of nonprofits. Our three school systems are some of the best in the state. We have a lot to be proud of, and we can be proud of how we take care of each other. I can’t imagine wanting to live anywhere else than Lee County. It’s just a little diamond. It really is.”

Story by Jenni Laidman Photos by Beth Snipes

United Way of Lee County
P.O. Box 3075
Auburn, AL 36831
334.745.5540

www.unitedwayofleecounty.com