Look, I want to walk you through something CalMatters Housing covered that really matters for how we think about the communities we work in. During the pandemic, community organizations in California did things that surprised everyone. According to the California Association of Food Banks, member organizations nearly tripled their direct food distribution between 2019 and 2020, literally shifting to new models overnight just to keep people fed. It wasn't fancy or planned out. It just happened because people showed up for their neighbors.
What struck me reading this is how these same groups were solving problems that official systems couldn't touch. When government health campaigns weren't reaching immigrant and Indigenous communities because of language barriers and lack of trust, local organizers filled that gap. In places like Ventura County, Radio Indígena translated COVID safety information for farmworkers. In South Los Angeles, the Black Barbershop Health Outreach Program went from running chronic disease screening to distributing masks and sanitizer to seniors within days of shutdown. These organizations had already spent years building trust in their neighborhoods.
Here's where the real concern comes in. According to a National Council of Nonprofits survey in California, four out of five community organizations are reporting job vacancies, and budget constraints are their biggest obstacle. Nationally, most nonprofit leaders are worried about staff burnout, and a quarter lost more employees than usual recently. The problem is that government and philanthropy have treated community work as a temporary fix rather than real infrastructure. Grants are short-term, project-based, and rarely cover what things actually cost to do well.
We're seeing the consequences of that approach right now. When the Eaton Fire hit Altadena in January, evacuation warnings for West Altadena, a historically Black community, went out hours later than warnings for other areas. The California Department of Justice is investigating whether discrimination played a role. At the same time, federal funding cuts and pullbacks on diversity and equity initiatives are straining the very organizations that serve communities already dealing with decades of underinvestment.
What I'm seeing locally in the Bay Area and the broader East Bay is that we need to think differently about how our community operates during both good times and crisis. These organizations doing the real work deserve year-round support, not just emergency grants when disaster strikes. When we keep treating community care as temporary and vendors providing services instead of permanent infrastructure, we're essentially betting that problems will solve themselves or that nonprofits can keep doing more with less. That's not sustainable, and frankly, it's not fair to the people who show up every single day to help their neighbors.
