Economic Self-Sufficiency during COVID-19: Community Organizers Attitudes about Their Clients Who Receive Public Benefits

Background & Purpose

Literature exploring the impacts of COVID-19 on the social and behavioral determinants of health (SBDHs) effecting low-income families in the U.S. is growing. One critical SBDH deserving more attention is families’ economic self-sufficiency. The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) describes economic self-sufficiency as when a family earns enough income to meet their basic needs without public cash assistance. The Family Independence Program (FIP; administered under Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) is a public benefit program that provides low-income families with minor children temporary cash assistance in one midwestern state. However, many low-income families do not receive FIP assistance, relying on community organizations for support. Informed by inductive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022), the purpose of this study is to describe how community organizations perceive their clients, utilization of public assistance, and client economic self-sufficiency in the context of the pandemic.

Methods

All 777 community service organizations registered as food banks, shelters, or domestic violence services in Michigan were contacted by email and asked to complete an online questionnaire between August and December 2021. With a 27.5% (n=214) response rate, most participants reported their organization provided food assistance (n=108, 50.5%), community outreach (n=66, 30%), and shelter services (n=41, 18.3%) to clients. While most participants identified directly providing services to clients at their organization (n=153, 68.3%), a smaller number identified assisting their clients with accessing benefits (n=44, 19.6%). Two research team members independently reviewed the qualitative data and created codes, met, and collectively produced a codebook (with agreed-upon themes, descriptions, and exemplars), independently coded responses utilizing the codebook, and met to discuss coding discrepancies and evaluate the thematic findings.

Results

Participants’ attitudes about their clients, public benefit utilization, and economic self-sufficiency in the context of the pandemic markedly contrasted. Most participants reported clients had significantly more SBDHs due to the pandemic (particularly affordable childcare and housing) and heavily relied on community organizations to meet their needs. Notably, many participants reported they were unaware of public benefit programs, requesting training and interagency collaboration with DHHS case workers to inform clients of program eligibility and facilitate their accessibility to online applications and benefits. Participants also cited DHHS case workers as being the most critical barrier to receiving public assistance due to poor communication, disrespectful language, and not assisting clients with their applications. Moreover, while most participants were empathetic to their clients’ needs and struggles with systemic racism and intergenerational poverty, several voiced concerns that their clients had poor work ethic, were completely dependent on public benefits, and would never be economically self-sufficient because they receive too many benefits from the government.

Conclusions & Implications

Although low-income families have more SBDH barriers to economic self-sufficiency due to COVID-19, findings indicate some community organization employees were uninformed and utilized stigmatized language to describe clients. Future studies should examine trauma-informed, anti-racist improvements to public policy administration that facilitate economic self-sufficiency. Social workers can advocate for low-income families and support public policy improvements to decrease stigma and increase economic self-sufficiency.