Nonprofit Human Services in Counties at Risk of Human Services Desert Status

• In Event: Place and Opportunity: Human Services and Public Policy

Abstract

This project works to, for the first time, confirm the existence of human services deserts using a combination of national secondary administrative data and interview data. We combine analysis of administrative data from the IRS-990 dataset with in-depth interviews covering 47 counties to investigate the extent of human services deserts in two states, Georgia and Kansas. We first analyzed IRS-990 data to identify around 300 counties nationally that appear to have no nonprofit human services. This is an indicator of the counties potentially being human services deserts. Close to two million Americans live in these counties. We identified Georgia and Kansas as cases because they are high within-region outliers for presence of possible human services desert counties and they represent the two regions of the country that have the most human services desert counties. We then interviewed local officials (n=33 interview participants) in these counties (n=47 counties) in Georgia and Kansas to better understand the service landscape. 

Previous research had theorized the existence of human services deserts using social worker shortage data (Belanger 2013; 2018). This project will answer the following questions: Are there counties in the United States that are human services deserts? What types of human services are available in these counties? This project contributes the first primary data collection in human services deserts and the first work to confirm the existence of human services deserts. In this paper, we present novel data analysis on human services availability in human services deserts, as well as a new taxonomy of human services deserts. Our preliminary findings suggest that around 70 percent of the counties identified as possible human services deserts from the IRS-990 data in Georgia and Kansas are human services deserts. The remaining 30 percent are either extremely low human services density counties or low human services density counties. The most commonly raised theme in the open-ended questions section of the interview was distance to services and transportation barriers. 

Authors

• Shoshana Shapiro, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Presenting Author

• Aayu Jain, University of Michigan Ann Arbor
  Non-Presenting Co-Author