Leslie Ann Howard: Uniting a Community As the president of United Way of Dane County, Leslie Ann Howard addresses social issues at their roots

As the president of United Way of Dane County, Leslie Ann Howard addresses social issues at their roots

By Ellen Williams-Masson

I t was an obvious place for an epiphany a bit clichéd, even but Leslie Ann Howard wasn’t expecting a mountaintop experience when she laced up her climbing shoes one morning, many years ago.

Dangling from a bluff at Devil’s Lake State Park, the United Way executive was struggling to master rock climbing while keeping a weather eye on her fellow climbers. “We were scrambling up the climbs, and I was always looking at who’s next to me, how fast are they going, is it taking me longer, am I doing as hard a climb as they’re doing,” she says. “The instructor kept saying to me, ’Leslie, I want to see you smiling on the rocks.’”

Three days into the weeklong course, Howard hardly felt like smiling. Growling? Possibly. Grimacing? Definitely. Grousing? Maybe a little under her breath. But grinning? You’ve got to be kidding.

As she grappled with the unyielding rock, however, the meaning of his words began to sink in. “I realized that it’s like a chess game,” Howard says. “If you’re moving and thinking about where you’re going next and enjoying yourself, that’s the whole point of it. I slowed down, and I started thinking more about what I was doing and not what everybody else was doing. Before you know it, I was climbing, and I was getting to the top, and I was smiling.”

Howard came home with a new understanding of scaling heights that transcended the craggy slopes at Devil’s Lake.

“I realized I was living all of my life that way as soon as I achieved a goal, I was asking, what’s the next goal? And the next goal?” she says. “What a great thing to have gone through, to realize that how you get there is as important as getting there [itself].” That moment of insight in the fall of 1988 was a watershed moment that shaped Howard’s career and taught her an invaluable lesson that she has used time and again in her interaction with others as president of United Way of Dane County. Shortly after returning from the rock-climbing course, Howard then vice president of planning, fund distribution and agency services at United Way tossed her hat into the ring as a contender for the agency’s top spot. In April 1989, she became the first woman at the helm in the organization’s 86-year history.

Under Howard’s leadership, United Way of Dane County has grown from an annual campaign of $5.5 million to over $16 million. More importantly, she and her staff have galvanized a coalition of hope that has become a national model for identifying, and preempting, common quandaries of the human condition including homelessness, poverty, violence and despair.

Rising from her past Growing up in Easton, Pa., Howard was “everybody’s best friend,” as inscribed in her yearbook, gravitating toward situations where she could help others by battling injustice. Her compassion stemmed from a childhood shaped by her father’s alcoholism. Although he eventually sought treatment and was sober for the last 35 years of his life, Howard says those early years with an alcoholic parent made an indelible impression.

“During my growing up time, I lived inside a family with that dysfunction, and I think that’s really one of the things that spurred me into wanting to help other people, because I wanted to help myself,” Howard says.

A fierce proponent of equality who insisted on hitting from the men’s tees in golf, Howard was the first woman in the country to manage a varsity men’s football team in college. She describes participating in collegiate sports powderpuff football, softball and swimming and several intramural and city league sports in Madison as an important part of her coming of age as a woman.

After graduating from Lafayette College with a psychology degree in 1976, Howard the first in her family to leave Pennsylvania since the American Revolution defied generations of tradition by moving to Madison to earn a master’s degree in social work from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Following an equally hallowed Madison tradition, she fell in love with the city and stayed after graduation. Howard soon found a job as director of volunteer services at United Way and began working her way up through the echelons of the organization.

For a young social worker fresh from the East Coast, Madison’s fairly homogeneous population at the time was a bit of culture shock. “I wondered, where are the rest of the people?” Howard jokes.

Of course, times have changed, and people of color now make up more than 12 percent of the Dane County population and 43 percent of children in Madison schools. In addition to a growing diversity, Howard has also witnessed more than a tenfold increase in the number of food pantries and a shift in the homeless population from single adult men to more families with children.

By the mid-1990s, the spiraling crush of human need began outstripping conventional means of alleviating suffering and donors challenged United Way to address underlying causes of social issues, not just symptoms.

“My first reaction was, ’Gee, that’s kind of naïve; don’t they know how hard it is to change the human condition,’” Howard says. “When you’re talking about reversing engines on issues that have been evolving and developing like this for decades, we [as a society] have convinced ourselves that human issues like this are only going to get worse. But we did learn that we could move the needle at scale and change the course of history.”