Locally led, community-based organizations (CBOs) have and continue to play the roles of safety net “intermediaries” and advocates within and on behalf of vulnerable communities. It is the ecosystem of local service and advocacy nonprofits in the most vulnerable Los Angeles communities that provide the support to address structural inequities.

Local nonprofit partners leverage critical assets that can be characterized by their ability to be intimately familiar with community needs and their status as trusted community messengers. However, COVID-19 ravaged the nonprofit sector, destabilizing this critical ecosystem while simultaneously, community members looked to them to support recovery. 

To mitigate the ongoing devastation in low-income, immigrant, Black and brown communities, the California Community Foundation focused on strengthening place-based coordination and community-based nonprofit infrastructure in five regions which include the San Fernando Valley, Antelope Valley, Southeast LA, Long Beach, and the San Gabriel Valley. These communities were selected as a result of a spatial analysis that found these regional clusters demonstrated not only density in COVID-19 cases, but also a concentration of other socioeconomic vulnerability factors. 

The Regional Recovery Hubs (RRH), shown on the map below, spearheaded community recovery in their respective regions following the impacts of the pandemic. These include Active SGV, Antelope Valley Partners for Health (AVPH), Centro CHA, Pacoima Beautiful, and the SELA Collaborative.