FROM THE EDITOR: The Social Safety Net Is Unravelling; A New Approach Is Needed
Federal spending cuts will affect the vulnerable; communities must become their allies.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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Two stories unique to the Advance this past week paint a picture of changes to the social safety net our community is staring down in the weeks and months ahead.
The first was the announcement that after 85 years of service, the Rappahannock United Way would be shutting its doors. “This difficult decision was made,” said a notification on the organization’s website, “following a comprehensive review of operations and the evolving needs of the community.”
The second looked at the growing concerns in Virginia over the future of housing assistance funding. “If you look at all funding Virginia has for housing-related initiatives,” Isable McLain of the Virginia Housing Alliance told the Advance in our story, the “state supports about 10%, and the federal funds account for 90%.”
Both announcements come against the backdrop of rising food prices, a worsening housing crunch, an increasingly visible street-homeless population and a growing number of students categorized as homeless, and soaring demand placed on the Fredericksburg Regional Food Bank.
Further complicating this picture was the release of the president’s proposed budget, which would sharply cut spending on programs that directly affect the aforementioned problems. A proposed reduction of $163 billion.
The president’s budget, which has virtually no prayer of becoming reality, has driven a great deal of local discussion since its announcement on Friday, and it will surely continue to do so in the weeks ahead. Rightly so. These types of significant reductions are not to be taken lightly and should spur vigorous public debate.
However, we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that — regardless how the budget battle in Washington is settled — we are in a new age of social service. How quickly we accept that fact, and how we move to address it, will determine how successful we are as a community in the near term, and years down the road.
Looking Within
For at least the next three years, localities are going to have to face their collective social problems with a clear-eyed understanding that the burden for doing so will fall on local residents.
How much they’re willing to address the problems, and how they choose to approach them, will determine our economic health for a generation to come.
The greatest challenge will confront those organizations that have depended most heavily on federal subsidies to do their work. Locally, that includes organizations like the Continuum of Care, which is a federally mandated program and is funded by federal dollars. It has come to play an increasingly important role locally in addressing the permanently unhoused.
A story in today’s New York Times, notes that “The Trump proposal would abolish two programs that finance long-term housing — the Continuum of Care Program and Housing Opportunities for Persons With AIDS — and move them into the Emergency Solutions Grant Program. That program finances short-term shelters and housing limited to two years.”
In Fredericksburg, the CoC has been a leader in organizing those nonprofits that serve people with a range of housing problems, helping jurisdictions better understand the issues, and leading discussions about affordable housing — an issue intricately linked to the rising homeless problem.
To lose CoC would mean not simply a loss of funds, but the loss of institutional knowledge and the main driver for the positive momentum that had been building to address the homeless issue.
A similar story is true of Fredericksburg Area Health and Support Services (FAHASS), which specializes in HIV care as well as support programs and health care for the LGBTQ community. FAHASS receives the bulk of its revenues from government grants, and the administration is actively targeting HIV services.
A dramatic reduction in their funding would force the localities to not just replace funding, but also figure out a way to deliver the care that FAHASS provides.
Losing one of either CoC or FAHASS would prove challenging; losing both could prove damaging in ways that most people can’t begin to imagine.
Shifting Nonprofit Landscape
It’s not just programs that have been heavily supported by federal dollars that are facing challenges, however.
The United Way’s announced closing likely happened because it has struggled of late to redefine its mission.
United Way proved so valuable for so long because it made it easy for individuals to give — through workplace giving, for example — and then managed the distribution of funds and ensuring that the nonprofit recipients were spending those funds appropriately.
As the Advance noted last week, however, “sophisticated giving channels like donor advised funds [have grown] in popularity, giving donors control over their giving desires in ways that United Way could not. Smaller donors [have] more options, too. Groups like CharityNavigator, GuideStar, and Charity Watch made it possible for individuals to quickly identify, research, and contribute to organizations they wanted to support.”
These changes have hurt United Way’s fundraising
While donors have more options, it is also true that the fall of the local United Way means that the nonprofit world is less centralized — a positive for those groups that do great work but not at a scale that may have attracted the United Way’s eye, a negative for those who must now work to replace what had been a relatively reliable funding stream.
Complicating the change in how individuals give to support nonprofits is the decline of houses of faith. Long the center of social service delivery in the United States, these organizations are weakening annually.
It’s not just that houses of faith are closing rapidly, or that Americans are less engaged with religious bodies at any time in the modern era. It’s that people of faith are consistently more generous in their giving than those who are not part of a faith community. This means fewer dollars to care for our neighbors.
Rethinking the Social Network
There are no easy solutions to these challenges, but there are states that are creating promising models.
A number of states and communities are experimenting with guaranteed incomes. In a 2022 report, “States Lead the Way,” the Economic Security Project examines these programs, their eligibility requirements, and how they are working. Though highly unlikely to become a federal level solution, these innovative models are challenging the ways people think about fundamental issues of poverty in a democratic society.
Rather than taking a top-down, big-government approach to the safety net, some states and localities are looking at using data to deliver more targeted aid to those who need them. A report by Deloitte, “Reimagining Social Care,” explores how this approach might more accurately pinpoint needs and deliver targeted solutions that are fiscally more responsible and socially more effective.
Closer to home, United Way’s closure and our reporting on the extent to which some of our social service programs depend upon federal grants for survival, should serve as a warning that the time has come to get creative about addressing social issues.
Doing so will require more help from Virginia, and creative thinking on the part of localities.
At a time when people understandably are focusing on division in the nation, let’s not lose site of the fact that we can’t allow that national-level dysfunction to detract us from doing what healthy communities have always done:
Place people above politics and take care of our most vulnerable.
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