Page 54 - BusinessWest May 26, 2020
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  Prices
Continued from page 9
describing the global economy as a grid of connected nodes represent-
ing manufacturing sites, warehouses, freight service providers, distribution centers, and demand points. A disrup- tion at any of those nodes reverber- ates throughout the grid — and the economy has endured many such dis- ruptions over the past year, on both the supply and demand sides.
“We’ve seen all sorts of shocks
— supply shocks, different kinds of demand shocks, and, more recently, what’s happening with freight issues, from port congestion to the Ever Given blocking freight in the Suez Canal.
“With lumber, some of it has to
do with higher tariffs on Canadian lumber,” she went on. “We don’t have containers in the right places to ship lumber. Freight costs are going up, and there’s all sorts of demand on imports from Europe.”
In short, things are chaotic right now, and that globally connected grid is under plenty of stress.
Inflation Spikes
Which brings us back to rising pric-
Nonprofits
Continued from page 35
es on, again, almost every- thing. U.S. consumer pric- es in April increased 4.2% from a year earlier, more than the 3.6% economists had predicted, and the largest 12-month increase since September 2008. The biggest driver of
last month’s inflation
jump, CNN reported, was
a 10% increase in used
cars and trucks, which
accounted for more than
one-third of the overall
inflation increase. Over the
past year, used-car prices
rose 21%, due in large part
to a spike in demand — as
people sought to travel last
year without relying on
public transit — just as car manufac- turers were closed or running at dimin- ished capacity.
Other factors in April’s inflation report include rising costs for furniture — a casualty of the shipping backlog — and hotels, airline tickets, and recre- ational activities, a trend that speaks to growing demand among Americans to get back to normal life.
Restaurants are feeling that
demand, and are struggling, in many cases, to staff up to meet it.
“More places are reopening, and restrictions are being lifted,” Graham said. “That goes to supply and demand — demand was down for so long, and now it’s back up.”
However, he noted, federal unem- ployment benefits have kept service workers — who are in some cases, being paid more for not working —
One major
cost issue right now, Bob Bolduc says,
is businesses having to compete with unreasonably high unemployment benefits in attracting workers.
away from available jobs.
Bob Bolduc knows this story well.
The CEO of Pride Stores said he recent- ly shuttered four stores because he didn’t have anyone to staff them — and he blames unrealistically generous unemployment benefits.
“We’ve been competing with the
Prices
Continued on page 57
    quality-of-life services.
“We’re important to education, and we’re very
important to helping solve racial inequality,” she explained, “but it’s not frontline work.”
She is expecting that funding will improve this year and next, as the pandemic recedes, and in the meantime, she’s coping with a smaller budget and having to present programs virtually, which, while not ideal in most respects, still allows the mission to be carried out. And in some cases, especially with more remote regions of the area, it allows the agency to serve more young people.
But the in-person model is much preferred, and at the moment, there are many questions about when, and to what extent, volunteers will be allowed to return to the classroom.
“I think those classrooms will have to get re- acclimated to the school the way it used to before the pandemic,” Connelly explained. “And I’m wondering if the schools won’t invite people until we see how the fall goes — do people need booster shots, for example?
“We’ll follow the COVID restrictions, and we’ll talk to our companies and see how they want their vol- unteers to be involved,” she went on. “And, of course, we’ll follow the school guidelines; we’ll have plan A, plan B, and plan C, which is hybrid.”
Food for Thought
Indeed, many nonprofits are developing a host of plans right now. For the survival centers in Amherst and Northampton, COVID has brought about radi- cal changes — again, out of necessity — to how their respective, and very similar, missions are carried out. And these changes, or lessons, if you will, will shape how they do things moving forward.
Ben-Ezra noted that, when her agency was in “full operating mode,” before COVID, it served as a com- munity center that provided a wide range of resourc- es to help people meet basic needs. It was (again,
healthcare, or other
the past tense) a one-stop shop where people could access meals, groceries, clothing and housewares, medical care, and a resource center that could con- nect them to other resources.
Since COVID, the facility has stayed open, but it is far less of a gathering place. Meanwhile, there has been a sharpened focus on meals and groceries in the wake of surging food insecurity prompted by elimination of jobs, especially in the hospitality and service sectors.
“Our meals program has exploded — it’s tripled in size, and that’s a strong indicator of the need in the community,” she explained, adding that the food pantry has nearly doubled the amount of food it is handing out to area residents.
While the numbers are changing, so, too, is the way meals and food are distributed. Indeed, while there was limited, as in very limited, curbside and delivery before the pandemic, now far more than half the meals and food are dispensed in that fashion. This model, while more expensive and labor-inten- sive, also brings some advantages, especially the abil- ity to expand hours, to the convenience of the clients.
The question moving forward involves just what kind of model will be put in place. Like Nortonsmith, Ben-Ezra said a good amount of time and energy is going into answering that question.
“Moving forward, my hope is to combine the
best of what we were. There are many people who are absolutely desperate to get back to our commu- nity center. We want to be a gathering place, a place where people make connections and share resourc- es,” she said. “But we’ve also really tapped into the realization that that the reason many people couldn’t get to the center was because the bus stopped run- ning in March [of 2020] for a while, or they couldn’t carpool because it wasn’t safe.
“But there were a lot of people we’re delivering now to who were new to the food pantry,” she went on. “Their food insecurity wasn’t new; it wasn’t that they lost their job to COVID — they had been food insecure for a long time. And their transportation
challenges weren’t new; it was that, previously, we didn’t have a good way to serve them. So it’s very important for us to continue this additional access.”
Nortonsmith agreed, noting that discussions are taking place on an almost daily basis about how to operate for the short and long term, with the answers driven by the desire to come up with a model that best serves the clients of the agency.
“In the future, I think there will be less of a one- size-fits-all approach, and more of a diversified model of food distribution,” she explained. “Our building is being used quite differently than before; it’s full of food and equipment — boxes, crates, refrig- erators, and carts — to get the food out and delivered, and as full with people as we can safely manage right now.
“That makes it tricky to figure out how we’ll expand deliveries, keep some outdoor distribution, and also begin to think about letting some interested clients back into the building at some point,” she went on. “These are the details that have us scratch- ing our heads — and longing for a crystal ball — right now.”
Bottom Line
Indeed, everyone in the nonprofit sector is looking for a crystal ball. Without one, they’ll just continue their juggling acts and plan, as Nortonsmith said, to devote attention to both what’s happening today and what can happen tomorrow, as well as that proverbial ‘someday.’
COVID has made this assignment more difficult in some respects, but it also opened agencies’ eyes to new and, in many ways, better ways of doing things.
And this means that, while there might be a return to how things were before the pandemic, in some respects, nonprofits won’t be turning back the clock completely. u
George O’Brien can be reached at [email protected]
 54 MAY 26, 2021
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