Holes In the Safety Net: The Spatial Mismatch of Nonprofit Human Services and County-Level Poverty

• In Event: 4265 - Social Policy

Abstract

Although there is a significant literature on social service spending to reduce poverty in urban areas, less is known about the rural social safety net. There are reasons to suspect that services to address poverty are disproportionately concentrated in cities (Allard 2017), but little research has explored variation in social service provision across rural areas, despite persistently high rates of poverty. To some degree, this is due to limitations in data: difficulty tracking funds disbursed through block grants; the localized nature of the post-TANF safety net; and a lack of rural-urban identifiers in relevant social service data sources (US Department of Health and Human Services, Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation 2005). This paper uses unique data on social service funding to assess differences in total county expenditures on nonprofit human services per person living in poverty by degree of rurality. Data for this project is drawn from the National Center for Charitable Statistics, which includes the total annual expenditures of all nonprofit human services organizations that file an IRS-990 form. Preliminary findings suggest that whether a county is rural and how rural a county is matters for human services spending, even after controlling for region and state politics. In particular, rural counties with urban areas of <20,000 people have lower levels of spending than large metropolitan counties, and this relationship gets stronger as those counties get more rural. For rural counties with urban areas of >20,000 people, this association was less clear.

Author

• Shoshana Shapiro, University of Michigan