Deepening Our Understanding

Powerful, experiential opportunities designed to deepen our understanding of complex issues that exist in our local community.

What is an Immersive Learning Experience?

By participating in an immersive learning experience, community participants shift their way of looking at poverty to the lens of a fellow citizen struggling to improve their quality of life.

Our programs focus on educating groups about the realities of poverty in our community, facing those issues through a simulated experience and then debriefing as a group to share our perspectives with others.

Individual Benefits

  • Gain new perspective about our community, its most urgent areas of need, and the effective ways the nonprofit sector, including United Way, is helping

  • Develop deeper understanding and help initiate discussion of daily struggles for those living in challenging circumstances

  • Explore your own behavior to better create change through advocacy, giving, volunteering and generating conversations that can transform systems and lives

Corporate Benefits

  • Corporate Social Responsibility activity that can accommodate large and small groups for an experiential and meaningful connection to our community

  • Unique team-building experience, helping to develop empathy and understanding among participants

  • Incorporate as a part of your team’s diversity, equity and inclusion training

  • Unique community engagement opportunity

  • 45 minutes

    Unlimited number of participants

    Brief, simple experience to simulate budgeting with limited resources; quickly helps develop an understanding of issues surrounding poverty

    Fee for simulation: $250 per session

  • 60 – 90 minutes

    Unlimited number of participants

    Deeper dive into real-life Central Indiana family scenarios and how United Way of Central Indiana can help; budgeting activity with tough choices to be made each month

    Fee for simulation: $750 per session

  • 2.5 – 3 hours

    55-80 participants

    Simulate a low-income family struggling to make ends meet in a community; highly immersive and impactful

    Fee for simulation: $1,500 per session

Want to Learn More?

Connect with Julie Plake to learn more about our Immersive Learning Programs.