How COVID-19 is Altering the 757 Nonprofit Landscape

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Mary will be taking your questions on Friday, April 17th from 1 PM - 2 PM. Leave a question for Mary now.

Mary Miller - Data and Policy Manager - United Way of South Hampton Roads

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United Way of South Hampton Roads (UWSHR) serves as a convener in our community — we take our mission to heart, working “to bring people and resources together to solve problems too big for any of us to solve alone.” As UWSHR’s Data and Policy Manager, my role functions to support collaboration and data-driven decision making within our region through the curation of a community dashboard on GHRconnects. Prior to COVID-19, I assisted initiatives or organizations in their efforts to prioritize data, compare outcomes, and take action to move the needle on population heath.

A New Era

In recent weeks, my work has both drastically changed and ultimately remained very much the same, still striving towards collaboration, shared measurement, and a foundational focus on data. If anything, COVID-19 has been the ultimate test of our workflows and strategies, accelerating innovation and uncovering stress points. Our communities are also facing similar challenges as the crisis exposes gaps and magnifies or compounds existing needs. Families experiencing food insecurity are navigating new stresses of resource availability, and many are juggling competing needs for childcare and employment stability. While our sector has pivoted to fulfill some resource gaps, our survey of nonprofit partners and our engagement with community members reveal an overall need for coordination and continued engagement.

What Our Data Tells Us

Our partners in the nonprofit sector are being forced to adapt in unprecedented ways. From the 55 nonprofit partners completing our survey, 54% reported they have significantly adapted their services, such as using telehealth to maintain operations. Some of these adaptations are a reflection our sector’s ability to be innovative and flexible, yet many of our partners expressed uncertainty. 18% of partners have reduced or cut back services, and 14% have suspended services entirely. Every nonprofit partner who responded indicated that they expected a disruption in funding.

What We’re Doing

For services that are currently available, our partners and the team at UWSHR have consolidated and updated resource pages on GHRconnects. Our purpose has been to share reliable information with our community, both to help individuals find support and to assist organizations as they connect to one another, leveraging their strengths and responding to the emerging needs in topics such as housing, food access, employment, and childcare.  

As we work together, we must recognize the upstream components and interrelated nature of our many sectors. Health, education, and financial stability are intimately intertwined. We are all focused on “flattening the curve” for our healthcare system, but we must simultaneously consider how we will flatten the curve for our community’s socioeconomic needs. While temporary measures, such as suspensions of utility payments, assist to alleviate immediate stress points, we must recognize that 46.5% of families in Hampton Roads experienced financial insecurity before COVID-19 (Source) , and that new challenges related to unemployment and food insecurity will exacerbate pre-existing social and economic needs within our community.

To be most effective, we need to look to population-level data across multiple sectors, such as identifying communities in which households lack access to transportation (http://www.ghrconnects.org/VehicleAccess), where residents experience high levels of food insecurity (http://www.ghrconnects.org/FoodInsecurity), and which localities or communities have high populations of aging adults who live alone (http://www.ghrconnects.org/LivingAlone).

What You Can Do

We often ask our partners to do three steps with data:

1.    Explore

2.   Compare

3.    Take action

As we determine how to best meet the needs of our region, we cannot run the risk of working in silos. We must share information with one another, communicate across sectors, and leverage our individual expertise towards a coordinated response. The immediate and lasting effects of COVID-19 are problems too big for any of us to solve alone, and one actionable way to support recovery efforts is through data-driven collaboration.

Mary Miller is the Data and Policy Manager at United Way of South Hampton Roads. Prior to her current role, she earned her PhD in Teaching and Learning at Ohio State University, where she taught pre-service teachers and literacy specialists. She then worked as the Director of Academic Success for Boys & Girls Clubs of Columbus in Ohio, where she grew a $35,000 investment for an afterschool literacy program into a $2M portfolio of academic programs and wraparound supports serving thousands of children in Columbus. Mary leveraged her academic background to build organizational workflows and collaborative partnerships, resulting in innovative data-sharing between out-of-school programs, local public schools, and healthcare partners.

At United Way of South Hampton Roads, Mary brings people, resources, and data together to solve problems. She manages the Greater Hampton Roads Community Indicators Dashboard (GHRconnects), providing support to community initiatives and organizational partners as they build capacity around data and align cross-sector projects towards shared goals.


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Mary will be taking your questions on Friday, April 17th from 1 PM - 2 PM. Leave a question for Mary now.


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