Rene Moquin has been a revolutionary leader for the United Way after dedicating his life to public service, starting back in the '60s when he was a volunteer in the Peace Corps, serving in Vietnam
Our Opinions: A job well done
Rene Moquin has been a revolutionary leader for the United Way
January 16, 2004
His name may not trip off the tongue of most Wichitans, but Rene Moquin has had a larger impact than they realize on this community and its future.
Moquin has announced that he will retire at the end of February as head of the North Texas Area United Way.
He came to the job in June 2000.
It's fair to say that at that time the United Way was in a state of transition, though the direction the changes would take were not universally known or understood.
Clearly, the board of directors felt that Moquin's vision meshed with their own, and the marriage has been a happy one for four years.
When Moquin came on board, he immediately began to implement a broad set of goals, the first of which was to make the United Way something more than an organization that raised money in a once-a-year campaign and then distributed it to more than 30 agencies, most of which had always been supported by the organization without question.
With that overarching goal in mind, Moquin then led the directors in launching the first comprehensive assessment ever done here of the needs of the community.
After all, if you don't know what the real needs are, how can you address them? How can you be sure that the funds that are given are actually used for those whose requests are the most urgent?
After that, it was a matter of listing the agencies that provide services and the actual need for those services. Some had a greater impact on the community than others.
This was something of a revolutionary concept in Wichita Falls.
Equally revolutionary was the idea that each agency receiving money would have to show how the money was spent and whether the expenditures actually made a difference in the lives of people.
The process of instituting accountability has not been fully perfected yet, and critics have asserted that the system leans too heavily on numbers rather than actual human beings. Be that as it may, while the process is not perfect it is at least in progress.
Meanwhile, Moquin and his boards executed four fund-raising campaigns that were successful. At one time that was almost the sole measure of United Way's success.
And finally Moquin also urged the board to build a Venture Grant program that would allow United Way to take a risk on new social-service agencies, helping them get some breathing room while organizing and starting up. Among the beneficiaries has been the Zavala Hispanic Cultural Initiative, a group formed to find ways to get Latinos here more involved in the life of the community at large.
Moquin has dedicated his life to public service, starting back in the '60s when he was a volunteer in the Peace Corps, serving in Vietnam.
This all reads like an obituary.
But, it's hardly likely that Moquin will pass on into a retirement that does not include volunteer work and community service.
Disclaimer: Publisher Darrell Coleman is chairman of the United Way board. However, he had nothing to do with the writing, editing or placement of this editorial.
