Before Suzanne McCormick took her new job as president and CEO for United Way Suncoast, she was already impressed with the organization. It didn't hurt, of course, that she was living in Maine during a terrible winter when the opportunity came about. "I asked my family what they thought of Tampa," she recalls. "They said that sounded great."

Now she has arrived to run a United Way that works across four counties—Sarasota, Hillsborough, Pinellas and DeSoto—and is anxious to learn what she can about every community here. For the past two decades she has worked in the philanthropic world either for United Way or one of its partner organizations, most recently during a four-and-a-half year stint as executive director of United Way of Greater Portland. During her time in Maine, she worked with about 37 communities in the United Way jurisdiction there, many governed by independent city councils and school districts, and focused her efforts on the sharing of best practices across regions, whether working on workforce development efforts or on homeless issues.

That last bit is of note in the Sarasota area, where regional efforts on handling homelessness has been friction-filled; disagreements over site selection for a come-as-you-are shelter recently led the City of Sarasota to pull out of an effort with Sarasota County. McCormick said she hasn't closely followed the debate here, but has worked on similar efforts in Maine and had seen success with certain strategies.

"One of the things we did was to fund case management that could go through different towns and help people stay close to what is home for them, as opposed to coming to a service center for a shelter," McCormick said. "Without knowing your shelter system, I wonder if that is something that could benefit this area. It was rural case management so people didn't have to leave their hometown to go and get services." Mobile service units helped with the effort. So did a pooling of Section 8 Housing vouchers from various governments within a jurisdiction so that an agency in Portland could help someone there by finding housing subsidies for a place to stay in one of its surrounding communities.

McCormick stressed part of the mission statement for United Way Suncoast is to break the cycle of generational poverty, and she also wants to look at ways to make sure students of all income levels are getting their educational needs met. She has worked on a number of "cradle-to-career" programs and would like to bring some of the best practices from those efforts to this part of the country. But more than any particular effort, she brings with her into the new position an interest in creating synergies. "We call it collective impact, not only providing to specific programs but helping programs to work together," she said. Efforts in Maine were directed toward coordinating campaigns to boost third-grade reading and with programs to ensure students get what they need to guarantee higher education possibilities.

In her few weeks since coming to Southwest Florida, she has visited areas throughout the United Way Suncoast service area, including a visit last week to Sarasota. "I have attended one of major donor events and gotten to meet some of the families involved with United Way Suncoast," she said. "But an interesting thing, a lot of the former community leaders in Maine come and winter in Sarasota. When I was interviewing, I said a lot of your people are my people and my people are your people depending on what kind of year it is."