Talk about a turnaround. Kathleen Cannon was skeptical about becoming the leader of United Way of Broward County when people suggested she apply.
“I said no because I didn’t see United Way running collective impact initiatives in the community and leading some of the critical issues our community was facing. I came to realize after it was not their model. Their model was funding only. “I was talking to my son, who was probably 13 at the time, and he goes, ‘Mom, that’s exactly why you should go for the job.’ … I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ From the mouth of babes. So, I went for the job.”
She went through plenty of interviews for the president and CEO job in 2012. Cannon says hiring her was a risk for United Way, because she had a background in programming and service rather than fundraising. However, she brought a captivating sense of humor, a warm demeanor and a very business-like approach and she says fundraising is one of her favorite parts of the job.
Turns out the risk was worth it for both Cannon and United Way.
The budget has gone from a little above $11 million to $32 million. The staffing was about 40, but should hit 100 by the end of the year.
“You have to run this business with strategy and you have to have outcomes,” Cannon says. “We measure everything we do, and we measure what we fund too. … I really go with grit. I lead with compassion, but I want outcomes. So, my team knows what drives me. I’m most happy when we’re tackling the biggest, most critical issues.
United Way funds 130 organizations doing vital work in the community. It has taken important leadership positions in addressing homelessness, helping veterans and the issues facing the working poor.
Early life
Cannon grew up in Bergen County, New Jersey. After the Army, her father was a stagehand on Broadway for 50 years. “So, as a little girl, I didn’t even know how special it was that I could go in and hang around backstage,” she says.
A significant event occurred when her brother was born two years after she was. He was physically deformed and had no cognitive abilities.
“He could breathe on his own, but that’s all. He could not feed himself. He could not see us. He could not really hear us. He did not even know us. He was not tactile. My mother took care of him,” Cannon says. He died when he was 13.
“I think that totally shaped me as far as doing all you can do to make something better,” Cannon says. “You can feel like you can give up or you can feel like there’s always new solutions or there’s always new innovative ways to look at a problem, look at an issue. Sometimes it’s little things that make a big difference. And if you put a lot of those little things into place, it makes a bigger difference.”
Cannon was the first in her family to go to college and went to Moravian College, now a university, in Bethlehem, Pa., and earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology with a minor in special education.
“I always knew I wanted to be in some kind of a helping profession,” she says.
Moving to Fort Lauderdale
She wanted to go to graduate school and among the three choices was Nova Southeastern University. Looking through a brochure and seeing students sitting on the beach studying under palm trees cinched her decision.
She drove her car south with a mattress tied to the roof and sweated after her AC broke down in Georgia. She skidded into the parking lot at NSU at 4 p.m. on a Friday as a self-described “hot mess” and rushed to register and hoping to get a room in a dorm (hence the mattress in case she couldn’t secure student housing.
She had left the windows in her car down since it was a hot sunny afternoon, but came back to find out an afternoon deluge had soaked everything. Her attitude was she was on a life adventure and she wouldn’t let it get her down. The mattress went in a dumpster.
School was more expensive than she anticipated. She started working at a hot dog stand near what is now called Henderson Behavioral Health Center. She got a job at the center after she told customers from Henderson that she was looking for social work.
She went to NSU for a year and a half, working fulltime as a social worker and then in whatever job she could get a night, including being a waitress and bartender. After dropping out of NSU she went back years later and obtained a master’s degree in social work at Florida International University.
At Henderson, she was a case manager for the severely mentally ill and chronically indigent clients who were lacking family support and residing in adult congregate living facilities.
Some clients suffered as the AIDS crisis emerged.
“Others didn’t want them on their caseload, but I’m like, ‘I’ll take them, I’ll take them,” Cannon says. “So, then people started to refer to me as the AIDS case manager because I was willing to take folks, figure out what they needed, how to help.”
She left Henderson for the Comprehensive AIDS Program in Palm Beach County.
“I worked there for 10 years, It was the height of the AIDS epidemic where people literally died every day. I had babies die in my arms. I was a case manager and then a hospice case manager during the AIDS epidemic. Sometimes, it was just helping people die with dignity.”
Many clients were gay or from disenfranchised communities who were cast out of their families.
“So sometimes they were dying alone. I just tried to help them through that period of their time as best that they could,” she says. “I was with many, many people when they died and helping them calmly, trying to say, ‘It’s going to be fine, it’s going to be OK.’” Some worried that they would die in sin and I got clergy involved.
However, she also met the man who would become her husband. He had two girls, a two-year-old and a five-year-old, whom Cannon calls amazing. They are 38 and 41 now and she had a son who is turning 27 in November. She is crazy about her blended family and blessed to get two step-daughters who she calls daughters. Her parents moved here in 1997 when her son was born. Her father died a couple of years ago, but her mother lives in Fort Lauderdale.
Cannon worked her way up in many non-for-profit organizations, including Covenant House and Broward House, where she was the Chief Operating Officer. Along the way, she realized she had business acumen.
“I’d say to my boss at the time, if we ran this program this way, we should measure what we’re doing. Is it working? I think I can get donors and grants. I think we could do it more effectively if we did it this way,” Cannon says. “So, I literally just started to make my way into nonprofit management.”
By the time United Way hired her, she knew how to measure the impact of programming and services and how to engage others in big social crises.
Joining United Way
Her immediate goal at United Way was to make it a leader in improving the community.
“Every staff member, I tell them, ‘You’re the CEO of your own programs here, your own projects. You need to have pride and ownership.’ I strive to build a productive and nurturing culture,” she says. Everybody works hard with a strategy and purpose.”
United Way has a director of public policy, a researcher and an epidemiologist to help influence and inform.
“We’re like a hybrid United Way. We’re a fundraiser, funding others to do great work, but we also, where there is a need, we’ll do services ourselves,” she says. One example is Mission United, which filled the need for a comprehensive system of care for veterans — financial assistance, housing, employment, education and law.
There’s a Mission United building next to United Way’s headquarters on South Andrews Avenue and a Veterans Resource Center nearby. United Way has helped about 21,000 veterans and has a 90 percent success rate in getting housing for homeless veterans. United Way has a 16-unit building for veterans in Pompano Beach and is about to close on another the same size in Hollywood.
“So, they’re small, but it’s affordable housing, which is really needed. We did a $10 million investment in affordable housing the last three years” she says. Often, it helps fill gaps in funding projects.
United Way is heavily involved in addressing the homeless situation in Broward County.
There’s urgency because a new state law on Oct. 1 prohibited cities and counties from allowing people to sleep in places such as public buildings and right of ways. On Jan. 1 the public will have legal standing to file lawsuits against government that fail to enforce that.
Numerous news accounts depict leaders in Broward and elsewhere as desperately trying to figure where to house the homeless — just about any solution seems to have detractors.
United Way is working with the county on shelters made out of pallets that can be erected quickly, Cannon says.
United Way and the Greater Fort Lauderdale Alliance previously formed the Broward Business Council on Homelessness, which was originally run by veteran banker Lynne Wines. It helped clear the tent city near the Main Broward County Library. COVID disrupted the program, but Cannon says it’s being resurrected under newly hired United Way VP of Housing Rebecca S. McGuire, who had a key role in the county addressing homelessness.
United Way was also working with the Alliance on an Oct. 29 event on the benefits cliff The cliff refers to how people can lose subsidies if they make too much money — sometimes just 50 cents more an hour. It’s such an all-or-nothing proposition that some people actually turn down salary increases because they will lose subsidies, Cannon says. It especially impacts single mothers who can lose childcare subsidies. And their raise nowhere near covers the cost of what they will lose in assistance. Cannon envisions local pilot programs that keep people from falling off the cliff, which could be a model for a federal approach.
Cannon is chairwoman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta at the Miami Branch and she says the Fed is concerned that the fiscal cliff conundrum keeps people from advancing in their careers, which hurts economic development.
Another issue for United Way is the working poor, covered in its ALICE Report, an acronym for Asset Limited, Income Constrained and Employed.
“This is not about the homeless. This is about people that are doing all the right things but cannot get ahead no matter what they do,” Cannon says. “Our wages here and our cost of housing? We have the widest gap in the country. … We can’t have people that are working full-time and a part-time job and still can’t afford childcare, transportation, housing and food.”
United Way has a lot of initiatives around ALICE trying to help families and people get to the next steps, whether its skills building, helping with some subsidies, finding different work or housing that’s more affordable.
Then, there’s the Commission on Behavioral Health and Drug Prevention. It has a coalition of about 100 members, including law enforcement and hospital districts, that focuses on the prevention side of substance abuse.
The commission includes task forces that address opioid overdoses, suicides, vaping and underage drinking.
There’s the Opioid Overdose Task Force, the Zero Suicide Task Force, the Anti-Vaping Task Force and an Underage Drinking Task Force. There’s “Be Healthy Broward” a broad mental health initiative, which was launched with Circuit Court Judge Ginger Lerner-Wren, who started mental health court.
It’s a lot for one agency. Pausing a second, she says, “We’re so complex.”
Finding Downtime
So what does this busy leader do in her downtime? She loves sports and is a Notre Dame fan. The interviewer asked Cannon if she knew Kip Hunter of Kip Hunter Marketing, another prominent female leader, who is heavy into sports.
Turns out Hunter and the United Way staff surprised Cannon at the end of a Women United Fashion Show by bringing out Alec Ingold, who was the Miami Dolphins nominee for the Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year Award.
“He came out, gave me a helmet, a football, and walked in the fashion show with me, so Alec Ingold was my surprise for my 60th birthday,” Cannon says.
Cannon also loves to travel and was anticipating a trip to Maine to babysit her 1-year-old granddaughter so the parents could take their first vacation since her birth.
She and her life partner, Steve Cooney, like to take at least one big trip a year. They have been together 10 years. He is a Private Wealth Advisor-Managing Director at Wells Fargo Private Bank. Cannon says she loves her alone time and her whimsical little house, so they don’t live together — yet.
She tells an entertaining story about how she met him.
She was attending the YMCA of South Florida’s Martin Luther King Jr. breakfast and Cooney was chairman of the group. She was impressed when he got on stage and simply thanked people for coming rather than giving a windy talk. She introduced herself and didn’t think much of it. The following year, his appearance was brief once again.
“I remember saying to myself, ‘This guy seems like a really nice guy,’” Cannon says.
In her direct fashion, she asked Sheryl A. Woods, president and CEO of the YMCA of South Florida, about him.
“I’m like, Sheryl, Steve Cooney, the chair of your board. What’s the scoop? Married? Gay? Weird? She goes, ‘No, he’s the nicest guy. He’s so smart. He’s so nice.’ So, I said, ‘I think I’m going to ask him out.’’
Before that happened, though, Woods tells Cooney that Cannon has asked about him. He knew who she was from the society pages.
“So, he wound up calling me, but I literally initiated that. And we’ve been together 10 years,”
Cannon says. “He’s a wonderful guy. I can’t have somebody high maintenance. Because I’m at all these events — I am out and about — I can’t take care of him. I need to be focused on my job and what I’m doing and he’s a hundred percent fine. … I always call him quietly commanding. He’s super confident, but he’s not arrogant at all. He can take care of himself. … If he’s in a big space and I’m off doing my thing, he lets me be me. I’m quirky. I’m ambitious. I work all the time.”
For that, the community can be grateful.
