25 Years of Living United: Jennifer Sampson’s Legacy of Transformation
On September 30, Jennifer Sampson will conclude an extraordinary 25-year journey at United Way of Metropolitan Dallas, ending her tenure as its McDermott-Templeton president and CEO and beginning a new chapter as the inaugural CEO of The Stephens Greth Foundation.
The Courage to Change
Jennifer joined United Way of Metropolitan Dallas in 2001 as chief financial officer, arriving after a decade at Arthur Andersen. She later became executive vice president and chief operating officer before being named CEO in 2011.
Her auditor’s instincts—discipline, accountability, evidence—would shape everything that followed.
By then, the world around United Way was changing dramatically.
For most of its history, the organization’s primary role had been to raise money through workplace campaigns and distribute those resources among a longstanding network of nonprofit partners. It was a model that had served communities across America for decades.
But the way people and companies engaged in philanthropy was changing. Donors increasingly wanted to understand not simply where their dollars went, but what those dollars accomplished. Companies were looking for deeper and more meaningful ways to engage their employees and communities. And the challenges facing North Texas were becoming larger and more complex.
United Way Dallas had a choice: Protect a model that had worked for decades or build something new to carry the work forward.
Jennifer and the board and staff leaders chose to build.
Together, they led a transformational strategic planning process that fundamentally changed how United Way approached its work.
The resulting strategy—United 2020—narrowed the focus around three interconnected areas fundamental to opportunity: education, income and health. It established measurable community-wide goals with more than 200 civic, corporate, nonprofit and community partners. And it began tying philanthropic investment more directly to outcomes.
Under the leadership of chief strategy and impact officer Susan Hoff, United Way also moved from a decades-old, closed allocation system to an open, competitive grantmaking process—expanding the number and diversity of nonprofits that could compete for investment. Today, more than 200 nonprofit partners are driving measurable progress toward those goals.
Change of that scale asks something of everyone. Longtime partners made their case anew, and organizations that had never had a foot in the door could compete for the first time. The field got wider and the bar got higher—for applicants and for United Way alike.
The principle underneath was simple: United Way’s responsibility was not to preserve a particular way of working. It was to find the most effective ways to improve lives.
That principle would guide much of what came next.
Making Innovation Part of the Culture
Transformation wasn’t limited to grantmaking or fundraising.
Jennifer and her leadership team worked intentionally to make innovation part of the culture.
In 2013, Jennifer and Susan Hoff launched United Way’s Social Innovation Accelerator, bringing a model common in the entrepreneurial world into the nonprofit sector. With early support from AT&T and the leadership of staff and volunteers, the Accelerator gave promising social entrepreneurs access to mentorship, resources, funding and connections that could help their ideas grow.
Since then, the program has invested millions of dollars in hundreds of entrepreneurs. United Way has also expanded its social innovation initiatives to include an Incubator for earlier-stage ideas and an alumni program that continues supporting founders as they scale.
The Pitch, United Way’s social innovation competition—Jennifer calls it “Shark Tank with a heart”—puts finalists in front of a live audience with real money on the line. AT&T got it off the ground. Goldman Sachs presents it today—which says something about how far the idea has traveled: a competition invented to get the nonprofit sector comfortable with risk, now backed by a firm that prices risk for a living.
The Table She Set
Long before it was fashionable to say so, Jennifer believed that great organizations are built on great governance—not as a box to check, but as the foundation that lets an organization take smart risks and outlast any one leader.
Over 25 years, she and successive volunteer leaders strengthened the rooms where United Way Dallas makes its most important decisions. Its two boards—one governing the organization, one stewarding the endowment—were recruited deliberately, structured intentionally and engaged seriously, with committee leadership drawn from the region’s most demanding institutions and independent validation to match. United Way holds a perfect 100 score for accountability and finance and the highest overall rating from Charity Navigator.
The results show up in who chose to lead. Over those years, United Way has repeatedly drawn sitting chief executives of major global companies headquartered in North Texas to serve as board and campaign chairs—people whose time is their scarcest asset, choosing to spend it in support of one organization.
These were not honorary appointments. They were working roles, filled by people running some of the largest enterprises in the world, who gave United Way their time because they knew the work was serious.
That belief took its most durable form in the CEO Advisory Council she created—a first-of-its-kind forum bringing North Texas chief executives into direct conversation about the region’s future. Roughly 30 chief executives sit in that room today: leaders of Fortune 500 companies headquartered here, of global manufacturers, technology and financial services firms, and of the region’s major civic and academic institutions. Between them they employ a substantial share of North Texas.
“We wanted to create something lasting,” Jennifer says. “A room where CEOs could learn from each other.”
No partnership shaped that work more than Jennifer’s with Susan Hoff. For 17 years Susan has led much of the work of turning strategy into measurable results—the move to open grantmaking, the architecture of the targeted impact initiatives, the Accelerator, the data infrastructure and the Aspire United goals.
Partnerships that long are rare in any sector. They are also why the work compounds: Two people who trust each other can take bigger risks and pour into the partnership for longer.
For Jennifer, those relationships extended beyond the office. United Way became part of her family’s life, too. Her family shared many of the defining moments along the way—and came to understand why the work, the mission and the people behind it meant so much to her.
That sense of shared commitment is reflected in one of the measures Jennifer values most: United Way recently achieved the highest Gallup employee engagement score in its history, indicating that the team is highly invested in the work they do.
For Jennifer, that matters because the strength of an organization is ultimately determined by the people who will carry its mission forward.
Leadership, at its best, is not about making an organization dependent upon you.
It is about helping build something strong enough to thrive without you.
