Forsyth County Struggles to Help Its Most Vulnerable Amid COVID-19

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have been especially severe in Forsyth County, North Carolina, yet help has been slow to arrive. A year after the pandemic’s start, many of Forsyth County’s most vulnerable citizens have yet to receive substantive financial relief.

Recently released data indicate that Forsyth County lost 22,000 jobs between the first and second quarters of 2020, adding up to one of the most severe losses in the state. Unemployment in the Piedmont Triad region has doubled since the onset of the pandemic, with Forsyth County’s food services and accommodation sectors experiencing especially acute losses.

Despite dramatic cutbacks in employment, as well as a severe eviction crisis and historic levels of concentrated poverty, the county’s distribution of COVID-19 relief funding, particularly to low-income residents, has proven largely ineffective.

Much of the economic hardship resulting from widespread job loss might have been avoided had federal, state, and local governments coordinated an effective funding mechanism for the distribution of pandemic aid. However, a largely disorganized rollout of relief funding hindered distribution efforts as the pandemic worsened.

CARES Act funding was deployed erratically nationwide, with direct aid dispensed based on a county population threshold rather than on critical socioeconomic indicators such as average household income, poverty rate, or percentage of households receiving public assistance. Whereas neighboring Guilford County received $93.7 million in direct CARES Act funding, Forsyth County received only $6.4 million. The $87 million difference between Guilford’s and Forsyth’s allocations is especially puzzling given that the counties’ populations only differ by 150,000. As a result of this discrepancy in distribution, Guilford received approximately $175 per resident in CARES funding while Forsyth received only $18 per resident.

Guilford County received $175 per resident in CARES Act funding, while Forsyth County received only $18 per resident.

The size of Forsyth County’s CARES grant hamstrung its pandemic response, forcing Winston-Salem, the county seat and fifth-most populous city in the state, to reallocate unspent economic development money and raise funds from businesses, individuals, nonprofits, and local governments in order to make relief distribution viable.

Despite its considerable fundraising efforts, the county’s reliance on local nonprofits to facilitate aid distribution made the deployment of relief funding unnecessarily complicated. Local nonprofits were, and remain, severely overburdened given the unprecedented demand for financial relief and social services. Most of these organizations possess neither the staff nor the infrastructure to handle such an influx, contributing to significant delays in application handling and aid distribution.

Furthermore, local nonprofits such as Crisis Control Ministry and United Way require extensive “means-testing” (a process by which an individual proves they are eligible to receive a grant) as well as an array of paperwork as components of their grant applications. In most cases, residents applying for pandemic relief are asked to provide documentation of their employment history, granular records of their spending habits, and personal finance documents that may be inaccessible or difficult to acquire.

Means-testing is common among American social programs and succeeds both in exacerbating existing class stratifications and stigmatizing claimants. By narrowing social spending and requiring that claimants rigorously prove how deserving they are of aid, means-testing frequently makes access to relief funding tenuous for low-income earners.

As a Forsyth County resident who sought pandemic relief funding relayed: “The agencies are out there, but I don’t have the criteria that they’re going to ask for... if you make five dollars and can only prove what you did with $4.99... they will not help you.”

For those who persist despite these grant application roadblocks, elaborate administrative requirements significantly lengthen the application process and delay nonprofits’ response times. Many nonprofits require in-person appointments at their local offices in order to receive aid. Beyond the obvious public health implications of such a requirement, in-person appointments frequently prevent those with jobs or who require childcare, as well as those without access to transportation, from acquiring funding.

A considerable lack of transparency exercised by the nonprofits responsible for distributing aid has also left many wondering how much funding remains at the county’s disposal. Housing advocates in Winston-Salem note that very few low-income residents are actually receiving relief grants, and that ostensibly well-qualified applicants are being inexplicably denied funding.

This problem is not unique to Forsyth County. Many city and county governments across the country were unable to deploy the entirety of their CARES funds prior to the end-of-year spending deadline due to similar distribution roadblocks, forcing Congress to extend the deadline through the end of 2021. These widespread delays in aid distribution highlight both the unconventional method by which the federal government distributed CARES funding and the detrimental impact of means-testing on access to relief grants.

Forsyth County’s failure to protect those most vulnerable to the pandemic recession will disrupt the lives of countless individuals and reverberate for decades to come. That low-income and minority communities should be most drastically impacted by the economic downturn and public health crisis—to the extent that over half of low-income families reported experiencing job loss as a result of the pandemic—is entirely expected given existing disparities in access to social services, healthcare, and employment opportunities. As such, the government should have prioritized relief to counties with significant populations of low-income earners. The now Depression-era burdens facing low-income Americans as a result of COVID-19 belie the 2019 Health Security Index’s first-place ranking of the United States’ pandemic response capabilities.

Early efforts to mobilize large sums of relief funding in response to the coronavirus pandemic were certainly unprecedented. A year later it is important to fine-tune relief distribution mechanisms to reflect the lessons we’ve learned. As Congress prepares to distribute additional aid, a revised distribution metric—one which incorporates a suite of nuanced socioeconomic indicators—should be administered so as not to dangerously underfund small and mid-sized counties. Moreover, city and county governments should take active roles in distributing relief funding locally to avoid overburdening nonprofits. Means-testing and other cumbersome application requirements should be eliminated or significantly reduced in order that funding becomes readily accessible to those who most need it, and virtual grant applications must be made available by all aid distributors.

Relief distribution efforts largely failed those most vulnerable to the economic fallout of COVID-19—as the country enters the second year of its pandemic response, it is critical that we learn from our mistakes.