By Kaci Patterson

Kaci Patterson is founder and chief architect of Social Good Solutions and of the Black Equity Collective.

When the pandemic upended daily life across California, it wasn’t state agencies or five-year strategic plans that kept many neighborhoods afloat. It was community organizations — often underfunded and overextended — that mobilized within days to fill gaps that official systems couldn’t.

The numbers tell part of the story. Food distribution through members of the California Association of Food Banks jumped 74% between 2019 and 2020, and direct distribution more than doubled as pantries scrambled to convert their operations into drive-thru and walk-up services almost overnight.

But the real measure of that response shows up in the details. In Ventura County, the Mixteco Indígena Community Organizing Project turned to Radio Indígena, a station already trusted by local farmworkers, to share COVID safety guidance in Indigenous languages that official channels had overlooked. In Fresno, groups such as Centro Binacional took complicated clinical vaccine information and translated it into terms everyday residents could actually use.

In South Los Angeles, the Black Barbershop Health Outreach Program — which had already spent more than ten years building trust with Black-owned barbershops to screen men for chronic illness — shifted almost immediately after the shutdown began to start distributing masks and hand sanitizer to seniors.

No funder drafted a strategic plan for any of that. It happened because people who knew their communities best stepped up, the way they typically do when crisis hits.

Yet that pattern points to a deeper problem. For decades, government agencies and philanthropic funders have poured money into short-term services rather than into the organizations that deliver them. Grants tend to be restrictive, project-specific and rarely cover what it actually costs an organization to operate.

The consequences of that underinvestment are now impossible to ignore. Nationally, 95% of nonprofit leaders say staff burnout is a serious concern, and nearly a quarter report losing more employees than usual over the past year, according to the Center for Effective Philanthropy. In California, a survey by the National Council of Nonprofits found that four out of five organizations are struggling with job vacancies, with tight budgets cited as the biggest obstacle to filling them.

This is what happens when community-based work is treated as an emergency measure instead of essential infrastructure — something to call on only when disaster strikes, rather than something worth building up beforehand. Lasting change requires steady funding and real decision-making power for the communities doing the work, not another temporary relief fund or a grant that expires after 12 months.

The very same organizations that ran vaccine clinics and emergency food distribution during the pandemic are the ones running after-school programs and caring for seniors year-round. Yet they continue to be viewed as short-term partners rather than a permanent part of the region’s safety net.

While the pandemic may feel like a distant memory to some, new strains are emerging, and the inequities are becoming harder to overlook — including much closer to home. When the Eaton Fire swept through Altadena in January 2025, evacuation notices for the historically Black community of West Altadena reportedly went out hours later than warnings issued elsewhere in the area. The California Department of Justice is now investigating whether race, age or disability played a role in that delayed response.

Adding to these challenges are federal funding cuts and a broader retreat from giving tied to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives — cuts that are hitting organizations serving Black, Indigenous, immigrant and other historically under-resourced communities especially hard.

As California heads toward its next gubernatorial election, this issue is largely absent from the political conversation. Candidates are focused on affordability and public safety, but few are asking whether the state is prepared to fund community organizations as genuine infrastructure, rather than treating them as outside vendors delivering services on the state’s behalf.

Government and philanthropic institutions should be providing sustained, flexible funding that allows these organizations to build capacity before the next crisis arrives — with the communities they serve given a real voice in how those resources are spent.

The next governor will have to decide whether California is finally ready to treat community care as a cornerstone of public health, or whether the state will keep relying on overstretched service providers to hold things together — and mistake that survival for resilience.

Original source: CalMatters

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