From Precarity to Participation
A Position Paper on the State of Community Capacity and the Infrastructure Required to Rebuild It
Prepared for West Avenue Compassion
August 2026
Executive Summary
The pattern emerging at West Avenue Compassion’s Community Resource Center is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Requests for rent assistance, utility assistance, and food have become the dominant needs presented by families. Healthcare, once among the most urgent concerns, has moved into a somewhat distant second place. This does not mean that healthcare needs have diminished. It means that housing, electricity, water, and food have become so uncertain that they are consuming nearly all of the attention available to families experiencing economic hardship.
This shift represents more than an increase in poverty. It signals a deterioration of community capacity: the practical ability of people, organizations, relationships, and local institutions to identify problems, mobilize resources, make decisions, and act together.
Community capacity depends on participation, leadership, knowledge, relationships, communication, resources, problem-solving ability, and some shared belief that collective action can make a difference. Research on community capacity consistently identifies these elements as essential to a community’s ability to respond to social and public-health challenges.
As economic precarity grows, those capacities begin to weaken. Families facing eviction, hunger, utility disconnection, lost benefits, unstable employment, and transportation problems have little time or energy available for long-term planning. Financial scarcity itself can consume cognitive bandwidth and reduce the mental capacity available for reasoning, decision-making, and problem-solving. This creates a central contradiction:
The people who most need a bottom-up social safety net are often the people with the least remaining capacity to build one.
As communities increasingly need ways to share resources, recognize participation, build trust, and mobilize local knowledge; systems like KommunityKoin offer real-world solutions. Yet such systems cannot initially depend upon people in acute crisis to organize themselves. Thus, the first stage in addressing this growing problem must be the deliberate lending of capacity to those in need.
This paper argues that community organizations should develop a Stability-to-Agency model that connects emergency assistance, capacity scaffolding, community participation, and long-term social infrastructure. The model would:
Protect households from immediate and irreversible harm.
Lend practical capacity while families are overwhelmed.
Restore enough margin for people to plan and participate.
Create voluntary pathways into community contribution.
Build a bottom-up social safety net over time.
This approach moves beyond conventional case management while preserving the dignity and agency of the people being served.
Position Statement
The rapid growth of requests for food, rent, and utility assistance reflects a broader crisis of household stability and community capacity.
Traditional case-management and referral systems remain necessary, but they are no longer sufficient by themselves. These systems often assume that a person in crisis possesses the time, transportation, documentation, communication skills, emotional energy, and executive functioning required to navigate multiple agencies. Many people no longer possess that degree of margin.
Community-led responses are therefore essential, but they must be scaffolded. Stable institutions, volunteers, churches, businesses, universities, funders, and community organizations must supply the initial organizational energy. The position of this paper is that:
Communities experiencing rising precarity need an intermediate layer between emergency assistance and community self-organization.
That layer should stabilize households, lend practical capacity, organize local resources, collect real-time information, and gradually create opportunities for people to move from receiving assistance into meaningful participation.
I. The Emerging Condition
A shift from health concerns to survival concerns
At the Community Resource Center, healthcare has not disappeared as a need. It has been displaced by more immediate threats. A family may postpone medical care when rent is due. A person may ignore worsening symptoms when the electricity is about to be disconnected. A parent may skip medications to buy food. Someone may decline a medical appointment because missing work could mean losing the income needed to remain housed.
Healthcare becomes less visible during periods of severe precarity because families are forced to establish their own hierarchy of survival. Housing comes first. Utilities come next. Food comes next. Healthcare waits.
The health consequences eventually return, often after conditions have worsened. The apparent decline in healthcare requests should therefore be understood as a warning rather than an improvement.
Local evidence of increasing food insecurity
The experience of West Avenue Compassion is consistent with broader regional evidence. Feeding America’s 2026 Map the Meal Gap report, based on 2024 data, found that food insecurity remains present in every community in the United States. Approximately 48 million people experienced food insecurity in 2024, and nearly half had incomes above the limits for federal nutrition assistance. Feeding America also estimated a national food-budget shortfall of approximately $33.7 billion. Within the San Antonio Food Bank’s 29-county service region, approximately 629,590 people were estimated to be food insecure. The regional rate increased from approximately 17 percent to 21 percent, with roughly one in four children affected.
These numbers describe conditions in 2024. San Antonio Food Bank leadership has reported that lines continued growing through 2025 and 2026.
Food insecurity is rarely an isolated problem. It is commonly connected to housing costs, transportation expenses, reduced work hours, benefit losses, medical expenses, childcare barriers, debt, and utility arrears. The request for food is frequently the first visible symptom of a much larger collapse in household stability.
Housing assistance is becoming crisis assistance
The available housing safety net is increasingly narrow and reactive. As of August 2026, the City of San Antonio’s rental assistance portal opens from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. on the second Wednesday of each month. Assistance is limited and not guaranteed. Applicants must generally provide an active Notice to Vacate or court-ordered eviction citation, and unsuccessful applications do not carry over into the next month. Households must apply again.
This structure means that assistance frequently becomes available only after instability has advanced into an eviction crisis. The system waits for evidence that the household is already in danger. This is expensive, inefficient, and damaging. A relatively small rent shortage can become an eviction filing, legal expenses, moving costs, lost possessions, school disruption, employment instability, damaged rental history, and eventual homelessness. The community then spends considerably more trying to repair the consequences than it would have spent preventing them.
II. The State of Community Capacity
What community capacity means
Community capacity is sometimes discussed as though it were simply a willingness to volunteer. It is much broader. Community capacity includes:
Available knowledge and skills
Trusted relationships
Leadership
Communication
Participation
Access to resources
Shared problem-solving
Organizational infrastructure
The ability to mobilize people
The belief that collective action can produce results
Research on community-capacity building identifies participation, leadership, resources, collaboration, knowledge, critical awareness, community power, social connection, and organizational structure as central domains. A community may contain many talented and compassionate people while possessing very little usable capacity. The skills may be present but disconnected. The relationships may exist but remain informal. The resources may be available but invisible. People may want to help but have no reliable mechanism through which to help. Organizations may serve the same population while operating separately.
Capacity emerges when people, knowledge, resources, relationships, and structures become organized around a shared purpose.
Precarity consumes capacity
Precarity is the condition of living without dependable access to the resources required for stability. It includes more than low income. It may involve:
Unstable housing
Unpredictable employment
Food insecurity
Transportation problems
Utility arrears
Benefit interruptions
Lack of childcare
Medical debt
Immigration concerns
Limited documentation
Weak social support
Persistent uncertainty
Each problem consumes time and attention. Several problems occurring simultaneously can overwhelm a household’s ability to respond. A person must call one agency, sit on hold, visit another office, upload documents, obtain a landlord statement, arrange transportation, miss work, find childcare, replace identification, and repeat the entire process when funding is unavailable. The family may be described as “failing to follow through.” In reality, the system may be demanding more capacity than the family currently possesses.
Research on scarcity helps explain this pattern. Financial concerns draw attention toward immediate threats and leave fewer cognitive resources available for other tasks. The resulting narrowing of attention can affect planning, self-control, memory, and decision-making.
People experiencing precarity do not necessarily lack motivation or intelligence. They lack margin.
The contradiction facing bottom-up systems
KommunityKoin, and similar community-led models, offer a compelling response to weakening formal safety nets. They can help communities:
Identify local assets
Build trust
Recognize contribution
Share knowledge
Organize mutual support
Strengthen relationships
Reduce dependence on distant institutions
Create a visible record of participation
The difficulty lies in the startup conditions. Building a bottom-up system requires agency, leadership, trust, time, communication, and sustained effort. Those are precisely the resources depleted by prolonged insecurity.
People who are struggling to keep their children housed cannot reasonably be expected to organize neighborhood meetings, recruit participants, negotiate agreements, manage communications, and build new institutions. It is like asking people who are drowning to organize a boat-building cooperative. The boat may still be the correct long-term solution. But someone must first keep people above water.
III. Why Conventional Case Management Is No Longer Enough
Community resource case management generally works by identifying a need and connecting the person to a program capable of addressing it. This model works best when:
Programs are open
Funding is available
Eligibility rules are clear
Applications are manageable
People can provide the required documents
Transportation and communication are available
The person has enough time and capacity to complete the process
Those conditions are becoming less common. Case managers and resource advocates are increasingly referring people to programs that:
Have exhausted their funds
Open for short application windows
Serve limited ZIP codes
Require an eviction notice
Maintain long waiting lists
Accept few applications
Require documentation that is difficult to obtain
Provide no guarantee of assistance
The referral may be accurate while still failing to produce help. This creates a dangerous gap between resource information and resource access. A person may leave with a list of phone numbers and remain no closer to preserving housing.
The system has technically responded. The crisis continues.
The limits of navigation
Resource navigation helps people find existing doors. It cannot create a door when none exists. It cannot supply funding that has been exhausted. It cannot force disconnected agencies to coordinate. It cannot automatically replace lost transportation, missing documents, childcare, or time away from work. It cannot protect a household when the formal safety net is unavailable.
Community organizations must therefore retain case management while developing additional functions:
Direct stabilization
Advocacy
Negotiation
Flexible financial assistance
Legal partnerships
Volunteer mobilization
Cross-sector coordination
Data collection
Community-capacity development
IV. The Missing Layer: Capacity Scaffolding
The missing layer between crisis response and community self-organization can be described as capacity scaffolding. Capacity scaffolding means temporarily supplying the practical support that a person or household cannot currently provide for itself. The household retains control over its decisions. The community helps carry the weight required to act on those decisions. Capacity scaffolding might include:
Completing applications with a family
Gathering documentation
Calling landlords or utility providers
Arranging transportation
Coordinating childcare
Appealing benefit denials
Connecting legal assistance
Negotiating payment plans
Following up with agencies
Locating employment resources
Helping a person understand notices and deadlines
Coordinating several providers around one household
This model recognizes that agency is rarely absolute. People may have the desire to improve their situation while lacking the temporary capacity needed to navigate the system. The appropriate response is neither control nor abandonment. The appropriate response is borrowed capacity. When people temporarily lack the capacity to act, the community lends them capacity.
This creates an asymmetrical social safety net. People and institutions with greater capacity contribute more during a particular period. Households experiencing crisis receive more. Reciprocity may occur later, through another person, or across the community as a whole.
Immediate repayment is unnecessary.
V. A Stability-to-Agency Framework
A practical response should follow four connected stages.
Stage One: Protect Stability
The first responsibility is preventing irreversible harm. Priority situations would include:
Imminent eviction
Utility disconnection
Loss of food
Unsafe housing
Loss of essential transportation
Benefit termination
Immediate employment threats
The key question is: What intervention could prevent this situation from becoming substantially worse? Possible interventions include:
Flexible rent or utility payments
Landlord negotiation
Utility advocacy
Legal assistance
Benefits intervention
Food assistance
Transportation
Document recovery
Short-term childcare support
Legal assistance should be treated as a central housing-stability tool. HUD reports that 92 percent of households with tracked outcomes in its Eviction Protection Grant Program received a measurable benefit. More than 80 percent of households receiving extensive representation preserved tenancy, prevented an eviction filing, or negotiated a settlement.
This evidence suggests that effective eviction prevention requires more than cash. Financial assistance, legal knowledge, negotiation, advocacy, and timely intervention work together.
Stage Two: Restore Margin
Once the immediate emergency has been contained, the next goal is creating enough room for the household to think beyond the present crisis. This stage might address:
Benefits restoration
Employment stability
Transportation
Childcare
Healthcare
Debt
Documentation
Immigration-related barriers
Recurring expenses
Education or training
Social support
The purpose is not to construct a perfect plan for the household. The purpose is to reduce the number of simultaneous emergencies. A household with seven urgent problems may be unable to address any of them effectively. Resolving two or three can restore enough margin to begin moving forward.
Stage Three: Rebuild Capacity
After stability begins to return, the household can be offered tools that strengthen future capacity. These may include:
Benefits education
Tenant-rights education
Financial coaching
Digital-literacy assistance
Peer support
Leadership development
Community health education
Volunteer training
Employment connections
Relationship building
Participation must remain voluntary and proportionate to the person’s capacity. A person recovering from crisis should never be required to “give back” as a condition of receiving care. The invitation should communicate recognition: You have knowledge, experience, relationships, and abilities that matter. There is a place for them here whenever you are ready.
Stage Four: Create Pathways Into Participation
Participation can begin through small and manageable contributions:
Translating a document
Sharing information
Making a phone call
Welcoming a new family
Giving someone a ride
Helping at a distribution
Participating in a neighborhood exchange
Teaching a practical skill
Becoming a peer resource advocate
Serving on a community advisory group
These contributions rebuild agency and social connection. They also help a person move beyond an identity defined entirely by need. The person who once received assistance may eventually become one of the community’s most trusted guides.
VI. Proposed Community-Level Solutions
1. Establish Community Stability Hubs
Community resource centers should evolve into Community Stability Hubs. A Stability Hub would combine:
Resource advocacy
Emergency assistance
Housing intervention
Benefits navigation
Legal partnerships
Utility advocacy
Food access
Health connections
Volunteer mobilization
Data collection
Community participation
The goal would be to prevent household instability from advancing into displacement, homelessness, worsening illness, or family separation. West Avenue Compassion already possesses much of the relational and volunteer infrastructure needed to test this model.
2. Create a Flexible Community Stability Fund
A Community Stability Fund would provide rapid, limited financial assistance when a small intervention could materially alter a household’s trajectory. Funding decisions should focus on prevention:
Will the payment preserve housing?
Will it keep electricity or water connected?
Will it prevent job loss?
Will it restore transportation needed for employment?
Will it bridge a short-term gap while benefits are restored?
Will it prevent a more expensive emergency?
Funding could come from:
Churches
Monthly donors
Local businesses
Foundations
Hospital-community benefit programs
Financial institutions
Utility partnerships
Landlord contributions
Local government
Designated emergency campaigns
A $500 intervention that prevents an eviction may carry far greater value than several thousand dollars spent after the household becomes homeless.
3. Organize a Community Capacity Corps
West Avenue Compassion’s volunteer base could support a trained Community Capacity Corps. Volunteers could be organized into specialized roles:
Housing navigators
Benefits advocates
Document assistants
Utility advocates
Transportation coordinators
Employment connectors
Translators
Follow-up advocates
Peer support partners
Data collectors
The Corps would provide the human capacity needed to move families through fragmented systems. Volunteers would need clear role descriptions, training, supervision, confidentiality standards, referral protocols, and access to experienced staff when cases become complex.
4. Form Temporary Household Stability Teams
Households facing several interconnected problems could be assigned a temporary Stability Team. A team might include:
One lead advocate
One practical-support volunteer
One specialized partner
The specialized partner might represent legal aid, healthcare, housing, employment, benefits, transportation, or financial counseling. The team could remain involved for 30, 60, or 90 days, depending on the household’s situation. This provides temporary human infrastructure around the family.
5. Develop a Landlord and Utility Stability Compact
Community organizations should establish relationships with landlords, property managers, and utility providers before emergencies occur. Participating partners might agree to:
Contact the Stability Hub before filing an eviction
Allow a short intervention period
Participate in mediation
Accept structured payment agreements
Provide clear account information
Coordinate with authorized advocates
Consider limited guarantees or partial payments
In return, the Stability Hub could offer:
A reliable point of contact
Faster communication
Assistance resolving underlying problems
Limited financial intervention
Mediation
Reduced uncertainty
Support connecting tenants to benefits and employment
Housing stability requires cross-sector alignment. Recent Urban Institute research emphasizes that housing insecurity is connected to public health, social services, planning, code enforcement, and other systems, and that local solutions require coordination across these areas.
6. Build a Community Observatory
The Community Resource Center should systematically document what families are experiencing. Data should include:
Rent-assistance requests
Utility-assistance requests
Food requests
Amount of arrears
Eviction notices
Disconnection notices
Employment losses
Reduced work hours
Benefit reductions
Transportation barriers
Programs contacted
Programs without funding
Applications submitted
Applications approved
Amount of assistance provided
Amount of unmet need
Housing preserved
Utilities maintained
Repeat requests
This information could support a monthly or quarterly San Antonio Precarity Pulse. The report would allow West Avenue Compassion to move from anecdotal statements to measurable findings. Instead of saying: We are seeing many more rent requests. The organization could say: Rent-assistance requests increased by 38 percent over twelve weeks. The median household arrears were $740. Existing programs were unavailable in 71 percent of attempted referrals. An average intervention of $510 preserved housing for 24 households. Community-level data could guide:
Grant requests
Donor campaigns
Program design
Policy advocacy
University research
Government investment
Geographic targeting
Partnership development
The Community Observatory would also create an early-warning system. Community resource centers often see economic deterioration before official reports are published.
VII. A Proposed Stability-to-Agency Pilot
West Avenue Compassion could begin with a small demonstration involving 10 to 20 households facing imminent rent or utility loss. Each household would receive:
A whole-household assessment
A review of all underlying problems
Immediate landlord or utility intervention
Flexible financial assistance when appropriate
A temporary Household Stability Team
Benefits and resource advocacy
Thirty-, sixty-, and ninety-day follow-up
An optional pathway into community participation
The pilot should measure:
Housing preserved
Utilities maintained
Evictions prevented
Benefits restored
Employment maintained
Total dollars provided
Estimated costs avoided
Referrals completed
Health needs identified
Repeat crises
Volunteer hours mobilized
Partnerships activated
Participants later contributing to community activities
The pilot would test whether lending capacity alongside financial assistance produces better outcomes than referral-based case management alone. It would also provide the evidence needed to pursue larger grants and institutional partnerships.
VIII. Implications for Funders and Policymakers
Funders often support direct services, organizational administration, or highly defined programs. The emerging crisis requires investment in the connective tissue between those categories. Communities need funding for:
Flexible emergency assistance
Volunteer coordination
Community resource advocates
Legal partnerships
Data collection
Landlord engagement
Transportation
Translation
Technology
Follow-up
Relationship building
Community leadership development
These activities may appear less tangible than distributing food or paying rent. But they are the infrastructure that allows resources to produce lasting results.
Government agencies and foundations should also move toward prevention. Programs that require an eviction notice before assistance becomes available institutionalize crisis. They delay action until harm is imminent and administrative costs are higher. Public and philanthropic funding should support intervention when credible indicators of instability first appear.
The goal should be preserving stability rather than documenting collapse.
Conclusion
The growing demand for rent, utility, and food assistance is evidence of a deeper structural change. Households are losing margin. Formal resources are shrinking. Community organizations are becoming the place where the consequences arrive first.
The solution cannot depend entirely upon case management because case management cannot distribute resources that no longer exist. It cannot organize fragmented institutions by itself. It cannot expect overwhelmed families to complete increasingly complicated processes without substantial assistance.
Bottom-up social safety nets will become increasingly necessary. Yet they cannot begin with the assumption that people experiencing acute precarity possess the capacity to build them. The initial energy must come from those who still have some margin: community organizations, volunteers, churches, stable neighbors, universities, businesses, donors, healthcare systems, and public institutions. Their role is to organize and lend that capacity.
The process begins by protecting people from immediate harm. It continues by restoring enough margin for them to think, plan, and act. It grows by recognizing their knowledge and abilities. It matures when people are able to participate in supporting one another.
This is the missing bridge between the Community Resource Center and KommunityKoin. It is a system that stabilizes people during crisis, lends capacity during recovery, and creates pathways into participation when they are ready.
The safety net begins with grace.
Community capacity grows from there.
