“At One Point We Had No Funding for Paper”: How Grants and the Covid Crises Have Shaped Service Provision in Child Advocacy Centers

ABSTRACT

The confluence of the two major challenges has combined to create special challenges for rural nonprofits serving victims of crime: the fluctuation of federal funding, and the Covid-19 pandemic. We discuss the challenges faced by Child Advocacy Centers in northwestern South Carolina in the context of these shifting challenges. From qualitative interviews conducted at 14 centers in this primarily rural region, we explain the challenges they face and the potential effects on the communities they serve interpreted through the lens of Resource Dependence Theory, which predicts that organizations reduce uncertainty of funding through increasing their partnership bonds with cooperative entities.

KEYWORDS:

• Victims of crime act
• family violence
• Child Advocacy Centers
• community services
• funding
• Resource Dependence Theory

Practice points

• (1) CACs are better adapted to handle domestic violence than other agencies and sectors alone because they operate in a multidisciplinary fashion that pulls various necessary resources together.

• (2) While organizations that rely on multidisciplinary team models are more effective in times of adequate resources, they are subject to acute vulnerability in times of diminished resources.

Organizational stability in CACs is strongly linked to sources of funding that are highly restrictive in how they may be sent. For these nonprofits to be more stable, they should seek out sources of funding – or funding partnerships – that help them develop more unrestricted portions of their budget. Likewise, policymakers, granting agencies, and donors should consider in future funding offers how earmarking their funds hinders the mission of CACs.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Data for Figure 1 were obtained from https://ovc.ojp.gov/funding/formula-grant-allocations-archive

² The effects of the Pandemic on the nonprofit world and on organizations receiving VOCA allocations are not fully clear at the time of this writing. However, we hope that future research such as that in response to this proposal (https://nnedv.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Virtual-Advocacy-Days-2021-FY22-Appropriations-Factsheet-final.pdf) will illuminate just how much services decreased due to public health restrictions, and what the long term effects of that are.

³ For a press release by one of the bill’s Congressional sponsors containing further information on what the act entails, see https://nadler.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=394573

⁴ Per the United States Census, rural areas are defined as counties with an urban core of less than 50,000 people and not within a metropolitan statistical area, while urban areas are those located within a metropolitan statistical area.

⁵ The State of South Carolina is often colloquially or officially divided into these three regions. Starting from the coastal area of the state and ending at the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, the Lowcountry, Midlands, and Upstate each represent approximately one-third of the state’s geography.

⁶ For more on what the Office or Victims of Crime has determined are allowable expenses for VOCA grant funding, see: https://ovc.ojp.gov/program/victims-crime-act-voca-administrators/vocapedia#AllowableExpenses