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This paper presents results of a qualitative study of how staff at nonprofit social service organizations (NSSOs) are navigating the gradual winding down of pandemic-related aid. Natural disasters, pandemics, and other mass crisis events often entail increases in both social need and resources to meet that need (Mathias 2022). While responding to such events is not a primary mission of most US NSSOs, pandemics and other crises can push these organizations into response and recovery work (DeVita, 2006; Flatt and Stys, 2013; Simo and Bies, 2007). As such, they must navigate transitions between disaster/pandemic aid and normal social service provision. This study focuses on the post-COVID 19 transition, asking how NSSOs downshift from the moral urgency of pandemic aid back to their roles in addressing everyday conditions of inequality in the US. By looking more closely at how NSSO staff wrestle with this transition, the study aims to offer a fresh perspective on what holds US inequality in place, both as an economic relation and as a set of cultural values and assumptions about “normal” social conditions.
Methods
The paper presents results from a longitudinal qualitative study of NSSO staff in North Florida. Researchers conducted semi-structured interviews with client-facing staff in nonprofit social service organizations (N=15) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Initial interviews focused on anticipated challenges with the inevitable end of pandemic aid. Follow up interviews were conducted a year later with the same individuals, who were in the midst of the “winding down” process. Data analysis began during data collection and oscillated between phases of induction and deduction in order to uncover and test patterns in the data, using Nvivo QDA software to code and track emergent interpretations (Reichertz, 2014; Hennink et al., 2020).
Results
Staff at NSSOs described their efforts to expand their services during the period of expanded resource flows associated with the pandemic. Staff sought to leverage aid to make durable improvements in their services and, thereby, to challenge chronic inequality in the US. While they experienced the termination of disaster aid as largely beyond their control, dictated by funders and the media, they sought to carry over the urgency of pandemic aid into their everyday work. However, as resource flows diminished, they often found it difficult to realize this vision. Thus, at times, they were faced with the difficult task of rendering the return to pre-pandemic resource scarcity meaningful for both themselves and their clients.
Conclusions and Implications
By showing how NSSOs sought to use a period of crises to challenge chronic inequality in the US, this study offers a different angle on what have some have called the “phoenix effect,” in which response to crisis improves upon pre-crisis conditions. However, the study also offers insights into the limits of such transformative possibility in the US and clarifies one aspect of how chronic inequality is being “put back into place” after the pandemic.