August 10, 2026
Episode 253 opens with Mark back from five days at his parents' place in Endicott. The boys swam all day in the rain and slept harder than they ever have. Jaime Saunders walks in about to become an empty nester with her second kid, and she says the thing every parent eventually learns: the days are long and the years are short, and when they grow up into people you actually want to spend time with, it is extraordinary.
This is Jaime's second appearance on the show. The first time covered her journey and the basics of United Way. This time Mark and Corey want to go somewhere different. The world has changed. The needs have changed. And the organization Jaime runs has had to change with it.
United Way is 108 years old. Its history is grounded in the workplace campaign: your employer would inspire employees to give a little bit out of every paycheck, and it became a movement. That is still the core. But Jaime says the organization has expanded significantly into individual giving, events, sponsorships, and a large and growing area of public grants. The how has been evolving. The why has not.
She uses the phrase civic infrastructure, and she means it precisely. Over a century of serving the region, United Way has had to keep asking the same question in different eras: what does a society need to make sure people can thrive? In 1918, the year United Way was founded, the answer involved a flu pandemic and orphanages. Those are not the answers now. But the underlying human needs, connection, housing, food, health care, transportation, have not changed. The delivery has.
Jaime is proud of how Rochester came together during the pandemic. She remembers the empty streets, the deer in front of the theater, the way neighbors checked on each other. She calls it trauma, a real diagnosis, and she says the community did amazingly hard things together. She is still proud of that.
But she is also honest about what came after. The disconnection did not end when the pandemic did. Fewer people are coming out. Fewer people are connecting in person. Mental health is off the charts. Substance abuse continues. Child abuse and domestic violence are up. The human condition is struggling, and the safety net that was supposed to catch people is being cut at the federal level in ways that are hitting Rochester families right now.
She is nonpartisan about how she says it, but she is not vague. United Way awarded 1.7 million dollars in emergency grants to organizations impacted by federal cuts. They received over 9 million in requests. She read the applications. She saw organizations running on fumes, workforces exhausted, leaders enduring trauma while the budget cuts kept coming and the people kept showing up at the door.
The US Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic. Jaime references Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone, published in 2000, which tracked the collapse of organized social life over decades: fewer people in churches, fewer bowling leagues, fewer Rotary clubs. The garage door goes up, you pull in, the garage door goes down, and you never talk to your neighbor. That trend has only accelerated.
She is careful to say this is not just about time. It is about cognitive load. Being a really good friend takes effort and attention, and people are spread thin. United Way serves six counties, 150 municipalities, 6,000 square miles. She went on a road tour after the regional merger and found the same thing everywhere: people want to take care of each other, they want to give back, they want to feel part of something. The vitriol on social media is not the real picture. It is just the loudest one.
She talks about Threads, the platform she uses instead of X, and why she finds it more human. Someone posts that they lost 100 pounds and tens of thousands of people cheer them on. A parent asks strangers to say hello to their physically disabled daughter at Disney World and the response is overwhelming. That is also the internet. That is also people. She wants more of that.
The biggest pressure on families right now, according to Jaime, is mental health access for kids. If a child is behind by third grade, the likelihood of graduating on time drops significantly. The services exist, but finding them is exhausting. She uses her own recent health scare as a reference point: she has a job that lets her leave in the middle of the day, a husband who could join her, a support network, and insurance. She asks what happens when any one of those is missing. For a lot of families in Rochester, several are missing at once.
One in three families in the region struggles to make ends meet. The average cost of childcare in Monroe County is $18,000 a year. Add transportation, after-school care, and a job that does not match your hours, and the logistics of being a healthy family become a full-time job before the actual job starts. Sitting down for a family dinner or walking around the block together becomes a luxury. She says this plainly and without drama. It is just the math.
She talks about the food stamp work requirements that went into effect, requiring recipients to work to earn benefits. Her response is direct: if there was a job that matched their skills, they would already be working. The rules were designed without accounting for unhoused veterans, people without transportation, or households with a 14-year-old where a parent is now required to work. She calls it false logic when the stated goal is supporting families.
Jaime describes the nonprofit sector as being set up like the Hunger Games. Organizations that care deeply about their missions are forced to fight each other for scraps of funding. She wants to change that framing. Her love letter to nonprofits is this: they are innovative, scrappy, committed, and talented. They are the chief everything officer. And the sector has made it unnecessarily hard for them to survive.
She singles out the overhead question. Nobody asks Apple what its overhead is. But nonprofits are constantly asked to justify investing in their own people, technology, and facilities. She says that is backwards. A strong nonprofit needs to invest in itself the same way a strong company does. The sector is also the only one that defines itself by what it is not. Not for profit. Not nonprofit. She wants to reframe it: we provide the social care fabric so communities can thrive.
She is also cautiously optimistic about AI as an equalizer for the sector. Nonprofits are late adopters, but the potential to help under-resourced organizations deliver services better, faster, and more measurably is real. She is watching it with eyes open.
Jaime says this moment calls for a high degree of empathy. She has gotten feedback that her pace is too fast. She understands it. The urgency she feels is real: people need services, people need United Way to show up. But the workforce is exhausted. A survey of nonprofits found that 96% reported burnout and trauma. Recruiting into those jobs is painful. The leader this moment needs is someone who can hold people accountable while also understanding what it took for them to get up and come in that day.
She is a perpetual learner. She has an executive coach, CEO peer groups, online courses, and a habit of asking questions of every business leader she meets. She just turned 50 and received the book 10% Happier as a birthday gift. She is a driven person who has never been good at meditation, and someone who loves her gave her a book about slowing down. She is working on it.
Jaime's vision for Rochester in five years is a destination. A place people choose to move to, start a career in, and stay for their career. She sees big things happening in economic development that will attract people if the housing is there to receive them. She sees a workforce that is so connected to the community it volunteers, gives, and shows up. She sees nonprofits that are strong and vibrant, with best-in-class workforces, where people go to school specifically to work in the sector.
She has a vision for where United Way will be in 2035. She is not ready to talk about it publicly yet. But she can see it, and she knows that when she starts bringing others into it, they will make it better and bolder than she imagined. She is starting with the small wins first.
Favorite place in Rochester that brings peace and calm: walking on Cobb's Hill Reservoir. She loves that you do not have to think about finding your way back. She can see over the horizon of the city. Hidden gem restaurant: Shorkey, the Persian restaurant behind Village Gate. She also loves the Cove at Hotel Canandaigua.
One Rochester institution she would resurrect: Changing Seasons, the rotating restaurant on top of the Radisson. Her father took her there when she was very young. She thought it was the most amazing thing in the world that a restaurant could revolve and you could look out at the whole city. She wishes it still existed.
Favorite season: fall. Cozy, comfortable, family, fires, color. But she also loves the moment in February or March when the flowers are trying and you can feel renewal coming. That moment, she says, is like another opportunity to do things differently.
Coffee meeting with any Rochester leader, past or present: Frederick Douglass. She knows it is the popular answer. She helped celebrate Susan B. Anthony's 198th birthday and studied her deeply. But she wants to know Douglass's perspective on today. She wants to know what he would tell us to think about for the next generation. She says it plainly: given the stakes he was operating under, and the pragmatism he still managed to bring to his work, he is the one she wants to sit across from.
Stay Connected
Subscribe to our email list and receive new episode updates and more.
