“We Keep Each Other Safe”: San Francisco Bay Area Community-Based Organizations Respond to Enduring Crises in the COVID-19 Era

Abstract

tions (CBOs) in the San Francisco Bay Area (Bay Area). CBOs quickly moved beyond bare survival in important ways. Indeed, in marshaling resources to address pandemic-related needsoften in the absence of full governmental support-Bay Area CBOs that focus on a broad array of concerns, from housing and homelessness "We Keep Each Other Safe": San Francisco Bay Area Community-Based Organizations Respond to Enduring Crises in the COVID-19 Era alison K. cohen , r achel br ahinsK Y , K athleen m. coll , a nd mir a nda p. dotsonThe COVID-19 pandemic revealed ways in which communities take care of themselves in deeply unequal times. Tracing a pandemic-year evolution of community-based organizations (CBOs) in the San Francisco Bay Area through twenty-seven semi-structured interviews with CBO staff, we argue that, through diverse approaches that we characterize as a politics of care, Bay Area CBOs are reshaping their work in ways that could address social and structural determinants of health inequities in the long term. Their approaches call for rethinking the crisis framework around public health challenges such as pandemics. Our research confirms that, rather than an exceptional, short-term challenge, the pandemic crisis is a product of a longer trajectory of structurally produced inequities endemic to racial capitalism.

Social Determinants of Learning: Implications for Research, Policy, and Practice

“…Examples include studies of the impacts of the earned income tax credit on child health and well-being (Hamad & Rehkopf, 2016), arguments for education programs and policies to be considered as public health interventions (Cohen & Syme, 2013), health interventions in the form of providing housing (Taylor et al, 2016), and criminal legal system reform (Duarte et al, 2020). During the COVID-19 pandemic, community-based organizations that were focused beyond the health sector, such as affordable housing and immigrant rights organizations, increasingly conceptualized their work as addressing SDOH (Cohen et al, 2022). For example, eviction moratoria have been used as a strategy to promote public health by ensuring that more people—particularly, people from lower socioeconomic positions who were otherwise at risk for eviction due to job loss during the pandemic or other economic constraints—were able to protect their health (Sandoval-Olascoaga et al, 2021).…”

It’s a Matter of Trust: How Thirty Years of History Prepared a Community-Based Organization to Respond to the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…The COVID-19 pandemic provided ample evidence on how pre-existing structural inequities manifest starkly in human terms in times of crisis. It also offered powerful examples of strengths and limitations of grassroot organizations working to address immediate needs and root causes of disparities in their communities (Cohen et al 2022). The full extent of the COVID-19 pandemic's repercussions on the over 62 million Latino/a/x/e people in the U.S. 1 remain to be observed.…”

“…Despite facing their own financial and workforce struggles due to the pandemic, community-based organizations serving and staffed by Latina/o/x/e people played critical roles in addressing community needs through their role as trusted sources of information, advocacy, and material support for community members, including being mediating partners for government relief and public health institutions (Bibbins-Domingo et al 2021;Cohen et al 2022). The remarkable impact of intersectional feminist and women's rights organizations paired with direct services and mutual aid provision during the pandemic has been documented among small-and medium-sized local organizations around the world (Tabbush and Friedman 2020;UN Women 2021).…”