A (Rural) View of the Recession
On Thursday, I spoke at the 11th Annual Social Justice Conference at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, IA. The conference provided a great opportunity for me to share my work about poverty and the safety net in rural areas, but also to learn from more than 150 social workers in the Quad City region.
During the talk, there was time for the audience discuss the challenges facing safety net organizations in rural Iowa. Several keen observations were made:
Even slight increases in earnings can make working poor individuals ineligible for work supports and income supports, or reduce their benefits, making families worse off for their modest labor market gains.
The discussion that followed reminded me of work by Jennifer Romich at the University of Washington, which has explored the effective marginal tax rates on low-income workers. Indeed, working poor households and the agencies that help them face a dizzying array of different eligibility determinations for cash assistance, housing subsidies, and medical care. Modest increases in work earnings can upend one’s access to supports that help families become healthier, stronger, and more self-sufficient, even though those families are negligibly better off.
Nonprofits in Iowa, as in most states and communities, are struggling with how to serve rising numbers of individuals seeking help amidst significant budget cuts.
This will be a tough challenge moving forward for many public and nonprofit agencies, and one that is likely to endure for the next few years as unemployment and poverty rates remain high - even if there is economic recovery soon. Agencies will be forced to make tough trade-offs between cutting staff, triaging clients and providing help only to the neediest, offering more modest services, and expanding waiting lists. A bad set of choices. Interestingly, one audience member said she used an anonymous web survey to collect ideas from staff about how to cut costs with as little impact on clients as possible. Her board was reviewing the many recommendations and deciding how to move forward.
Because most nonprofit service organizations draw on many different revenue sources, they face the administrative challenge of complying with various reporting requirements from these different revenue sources. At a time when there are greater demands on all staff, these tasks can take time away from case management and providing services.
Another tough challenge. On the one hand, program evaluation and reporting are critical to ensuring program quality and to improving program models. On the other hand, time spent on compliance documents takes time away from clients and from addressing the fallout of the current economic environment.
My visit provided sobering insight into the tough tasks facing the social workers that staff the street-level organizations upon which our safety net rests.