Cars waiting in a line in Los Angeles last month for free groceries.Credit...Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The New York Times • Jan. 24, 2021 • By Kristin Lin
As the Biden administration proposes additional pandemic relief, nonprofit workers see a country facing a growing crisis.
Kerri Lopez-Howell has spent the past year pivoting. Before the pandemic, her nonprofit, the Sunnyside Foundation, distributed education grants for the Sunnyside Unified School District in Tucson, Ariz. In March, it refocused its efforts to distribute relief funds to over 2,000 low-income families in the area, a coronavirus hot spot in the state. And in the weeks since the $900 billion stimulus package was signed into law, she’s turned her attention to the families that will still struggle to get federal relief.
Ms. Lopez-Howell is part of America’s other pandemic front line — of direct service providers who have extended critical relief to communities during the eight months that a Republican-led Senate failed to pass an additional stimulus bill, and now as President Biden proposes a $1.9 trillion emergency relief package.
The difficult choices they’ve witnessed individuals and families make — between medicine and food, internet and electricity — are a microcosm of the pandemic’s continued and overlapping burdens on people across the country. We surveyed social workers, food pantry employees, legal services providers and other nonprofit staff members about how the pandemic has affected the communities they serve.
Their responses, edited for clarity and length, reflect a mounting crisis for the millions of Americans who face long-term unemployment, hunger, cascading bills and threats of eviction — as well as how federal support would affect those struggling to survive right now.
‘Families are at deeper risk of becoming unstable and losing their housing.’
In the San Francisco Bay Area, unemployment and lost wages are causing family homelessness at rates we have never seen before. Families are at deeper risk of becoming unstable and losing their housing. We’ve had to extend rental assistance to prevent them from falling into homelessness again.
In 2019, we served 895 families, with 315 of those families exiting homelessness, but in 2020, only 102 families have been able to do so. Reduced capacity at our shelter program and an uptick in domestic violence among families sheltering in place have resulted in more families facing the grim reality of homelessness without any support. — Kyriell M. Noon, chief executive, Hamilton Families, San Francisco