Thank you, Karen.

Let me echo Karen’s recognition for our departing board members Christine, Cece and Kevin.  It has been a privilege to serve alongside each of you at UWCC.  Each of you – thoughtful and strategic – has helped to shape and guide our national team and our Movement.  Thank you.

Thank you everyone for being here. It is a pleasure to join you at this year’s Annual General Meeting and to take a moment to reflect back on our progress and the forces that continue to shape the work ahead.

Over the past year, our new 2025–2030 strategic plan has become our north star. It is helping to guide our work with clarity and purpose through five key imperatives: Growth, Powerful Voice, Thriving Network, Connected Community, and Strong National Team.

This first year of the plan has also pushed us to sharpen our focus as a national office. We made important changes to our organizational structure to align our team and resources to these five imperatives.  Karen has touched on how these imperatives came to life at our national conference in April.  A few additional highlights of note:

• Thriving Network: We have worked hard with UWC’s and our MAPC to put new systems and supports in place to advance our new membership standards on governance, cybersecurity, data and privacy. Critical standards to strengthen our Movement and mitigate risks.  We also continue to advance our Business Transformation Solutions like sCRM in partnership with UWCs.

• Growth: We launched our multi-year planned giving strategy to drive long-term growth, as well as a growth leadership table guided by our major market CEO’s

• Powerful Voice: In Fall of 2025 we launched our first national research poll on Financial Anxiety and just last week we scaled the Financial Anxiety Index as a new national research and public awareness program, allowing UWCs to raise the profile of this important issue and how we respond locally and nationally.

• Connected Community: As Karen mentioned we planned and implemented our National Conference in Halifax and hosted our first CEO forum as part of the conference.

Looking back, it is also important to highlight the global and national challenges affecting Canada and our work.  We entered 2025 with the Country facing significant threats to our economy and sovereignty that continue today, creating economic uncertainty and reshaping government priorities around economic and industrial strategies.  Global conflicts continue, now creating an energy shock driving up daily costs for families, business and community services.  At UWCC we know that economic challenges lead to social impacts.

We see this across Canada with more Canadians experiencing financial anxiety, high rates of food insecurity, challenges with housing and energy costs for lower income households, and growing instances of first-time users of community services, putting even more pressure on our essential front line services.

In moments like this, our work is not peripheral. It is essential.  These issues remain central to our public policy advocacy as we represent the experience of UWCs nationally with the Federal Government and through on community services labour force strategy.

We know that the social infrastructure built by United Way Centraide and our partners is important, trusted, and necessary. And we know that if we invest in our collective resilience, our ability to adapt, collaborate, and lead, we can meet this moment with purpose.

As we look forward, I am deeply grateful for the leadership and partnership of all UWCs and your commitment to working together to advance our vision for a country where everyone in every community has the opportunity to thrive.

Thank you.