United Neighborhood Centers of Dane County, Inc. had its beginnings in post-World War II Madison under the name Madison Neighborhood Centers, Inc. In 1948, Madison Vocational and Adult School withdrew financial support from the naturalization program at Neighborhood House, a social settlement house on Madison's near west side that had served a large Italian immigrant population since 1916. The loss of funding prompted Neighborhood House to request that Madison Community Welfare Council conduct a study to determine the House's future role in the community. The study, completed in 1949 by the Executive Secretary of the National Federation of Settlements, John McDowell, indicated a need for Neighborhood House as well as the establishment of a new neighborhood center in south Madison. The study went on to suggest that Neighborhood House and the East Side Youth Activities Council join forces to form Madison Neighborhood Centers, Inc. (MNC). The newly created MNC provided services for neighborhood and individual improvement and worked to strengthen family relations.
As MNC outlined and strengthened its governance structure, it worked with community members in south Madison to establish the South Madison Neighborhood Center in January 1950. A third center, Atwood Community House (later Atwood Community Center), serving the east side of Madison was established in 1954. The governance structure of MNC included a board of directors with twenty members. Five members came from each of the three centers and they, in turn, elected four at-large members with Madison's Director of the Recreation Division of the Board of Education as the fifth member-at-large. The twenty members elected officers of the board including president, vice-president, secretary, and treasurer. An executive director, Chester Zmudzinski, was hired in 1949 and continued in the position until 1972.
Through the 1950s and 1960s, the member centers worked to provide community programs such as day camps and after-school activities for children, women's groups and support groups especially for low-income and minority groups. One special program was created between MNC and Madison Rotary Club. In 1964, Madison Rotary Club purchased a hundred-acre farm near Dalton, Wisconsin as a campsite for MNC. Until the early 1970s it was used by MNC and its member centers as a residential camp in the summer and for weekend camping the rest of the year. In 1969, Wil-Mar Community Center was established in the Williamson-Marquette Neighborhood and the East Madison Community Center was developed to serve the Truax-Hawthorne area of Madison. During the next two years, MNC underwent an organizational structure study and change.
Each center had its own board of directors and the restructuring helped to define the roles each board played. MNC saw its role as coordinating and mediating conflicts between the centers as well as functioning as a central administration and representing the interests of the centers as a whole. In 1973, Madison Neighborhood Centers, Inc. changed its name to United Neighborhood Centers of Dane, County, Inc. (UNC) to reflect the organization's growth and wider community influence. This wider growth can be seen with the 1973 establishment of UNC-North, or the Northside Teen Center, and the 1977 establishment of the Deerfield Community Center in Deerfield, Wisconsin. UNC-North only operated for a few years before closing.
The UNC continued to expand its services in the 1970s and 1980s with a Latino Outreach Center and Teen Rap Alternative Counseling (TRAC) for teenage alcohol and drug intervention. The member centers developed more programs such as adult and senior education programs, employment counseling, and work with food pantries and emergency food collection for families. Funding for the UNC was not always enough to cover the programs or the cost of operating the centers and central organization. A variety of sources have provided money to the UNC and the centers since their inception, including the United Way of Dane County, the Community Welfare Council's Community Chest, the Rennebohm Foundation, the Community Development Block Grant, and other grants and private donations. However, a pervasive lack of money plagued the UNC during this time period and continued into the 1990s.
The Broadway/Simpson/Waunona Neighborhood Center was developed by UNC around 1990 near Monona in southern Madison. The Vera Court Neighborhood Center opened in 1992 on the northeast side of Madison and the Wexford Ridge Neighborhood Association joined UNC in 1994 and established the Wexford Ridge Neighborhood Center and Advisory Board. However, even before the establishment of the Broadway/Simpson/Waunona Neighborhood Center, the UNC was struggling with finances and having relationship difficulties with some of the centers, such as the South Madison Neighborhood Center, which moved to disaffiliate itself from UNC in 1988.
In 1997 the UNC dissolved due to escalating administrative difficulties between the UNC and its member community centers, leaving the centers to operate on their own. During the dissolution process, the Broadway/Simpson/Waunona Neighborhood Center was forced to close due to time and resource restrictions. The South Madison Neighborhood Center became the Boys and Girls Club of Dane County but the other centers remained unchanged in name and focus.
