Westchester County Business Journal Leading the Way
Leading the Way
Adler to head local United Way
Naomi L. Adler, who takes over next month as president and CEO of United Way of Westchester and Putnam, had her baptism by fire at the nonprofit community agency in the hours, days and weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center.
A 41-year-old attorney and former upstate prosecutor with proven skills as a fundraiser, Adler at the time had been only four months on the job as CEO of United Way of Rockland County. With the county’s Red Cross staff dispatched to Manhattan, United Way took the lead in assisting families of World Trade Center victims and displaced downtown workers in Rockland County.
“I learned a great deal very quickly,” she said of that harrowing time and the disaster relief efforts she organized. “We were on the ground running within the day.”
On Feb. 25, Adler will bring that dynamic leadership, along with a reputation for community alliance-forging as an award-winning advocate for underserved residents, across the Hudson River to United Way headquarters in White Plains. The fourth executive to head United Way of Westchester and Putnam in its 45-year history, she succeeds Ralph Gregory.
Gregory, 68, is retiring after 26 years at the helm of the agency. The Katonah area resident said he plans to stay active as a consultant, teacher and volunteer in the Westchester community.
Regarding notable achievements during his tenure, Gregory said, “The community should be encouraged that, number one, we’ve been able to move our organization to focus much more significantly on the major issues in the community, including affordable housing and accessible and affordable child care and health care.” The agency works with approximately 80 partners in its 15 member communities.
‘Real change’
Gregory has also overseen the agency’s effort to realign its payments to human services agencies to coincide with its receivables cycle for donor pledges. “We were not as prompt as we should have been with those payments. It’s a matter of cash flow. We were lagging behind for two or three years,” he said. The agency last July implemented a three-year transition plan to bring payments for services in line with the service period. “It’s really working very well at the moment,” he said. “We have no reason to believe that we will not be back on course within a year.”
Following a 2004 agency survey that found the chief barrier “to people getting the help they need is they didn’t know where to turn for help,” Gregory said, six United Way agencies – in Sullivan, Westchester and Putnam, Orange, Ulster, Rockland and Dutchess counties – teamed to start a 2-1-1 helpline that informs and refers callers to the nearest health and human services in the Hudson Valley region. Launched in 2005, the free, confidential and bilingual service recently received its 50,000th call, Gregory said.
The departing CEO called his successor, Adler, “a tireless crusader” for the regional helpline. “Her strength has been her unflagging commitment to helping people and her ability to rally partners around a problem in order to produce real change,” he said.
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