Black Chicagoans were dramatically hardest hit, and those residents were dying at six times the rate of any other demographic. That news was like a gut punch, and I knew that we needed to act quickly and that as a government, we needed to work together with health systems and community-based organizations (CBOs) in new ways.
As a city, we would not have gotten through the pandemic as well as we did without these invaluable partners.
Federal COVID-19 recovery funding ends soon, and many CBOs are at a crossroads. COVID-19 exposed deep-seated challenges in the nonprofit sector, including a burnt-out and underpaid workforce, systemic underinvestment in CBOs led by people of color and an almost-exclusive focus on minimizing overhead costs at the expense of crucial back-office functions.
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