Many Needs, One Stop: How Some Nonprofits Are Responding to Clients’ Multiple Challenges—with Success

“There’s never just one problem,” Orion Bell shared at the Greater Cleveland Food Bank (GCFB) one morning last year. He was referring to the numerous challenges that lower-income people often face on the way to self-sufficiency.

Bell, president and chief executive officer of the Benjamin Rose Institute on Aging, represents one of more than 15 partners who are co-located at the GCFB’s new Community Resource Center. The center serves people in need of fresh food, but it also functions as a “one-stop shop” that helps people find affordable housing, good employment, and quality healthcare, among other things.

The Community Resource Center is one example of how workforce and health and human service organizations are responding to individuals’ multiple challenges at once. Unfortunately, multiservice delivery to those who are most in need is hard to implement and sustain, and its effectiveness is often not well understood.

To help address this issue and thus strengthen lower-income people’s connection to the broader economy, our team observed three examples of multiservice delivery providers over the past year to get some clues about what’s working.

Three Models That Are Working (with Measurable Results)

The GCFB’s Community Resource Center is one model that is catching on. Dozens of food banks from across the country visited the center in 2024 through the Feeding America Network and are now offering or interested in offering a similar array of service providers on-site. The GCFB’s model is informed by the Urban Institute’s Upward Mobility Framework, which promotes a holistic definition of upward mobility that relates to work, education, placemaking, health, and governance. Since its launch in late 2023, the Community Resource Center has served approximately 47,000 people and generated over 15,000 connections to on-site agencies like the Benjamin Rose Institute on Aging in a service area where 1 in 7 people are food insecure, according to the GCFB’s website.

The head of the center, Tiffany Scruggs, acknowledges that she’d hoped more people would take advantage of its services during its first year. However, the center has seen an increase in one key metric: The percentage of households who originally came to visit only the fresh food market but were then connected to other services rose from 8 percent in December 2023 (after the center’s launch) to 32 percent one year later.

Scruggs emphasizes that the success of the center does not rely on merely putting providers together in a physical space. For it to work, she says, providers must be committed to things like communication and connection with one another, continuous improvement based on feedback from individuals and families, and data-sharing. She also says providers must commit to a deeper understanding of the lived experiences of people who walk through the door.

Towards Employment is another provider that is using the multiservice delivery model. The workforce development nonprofit, also based in Cleveland, partners with many organizations including the GCFB and offers various services in addition to skills training. Jobseekers who come through the door have access to services like financial and mental health counseling, legal assistance, digital literacy classes, and career coaching that continues even after they are hired. Towards Employment CEO Jill Rizika continues to believe that career coaching in particular was—and is—a “key ingredient” to her clients’ success in moving up the career ladder.

Research by the nonprofit, nonpartisan organization MDRC backs this up, including an evaluation of the WorkAdvance program, which includes two sites in Northeast Ohio led by Towards Employment. The evaluation showed that, among workers who underwent training specific to sectors like healthcare and manufacturing, services like post-hire career coaching boosted their earnings growth four to eight years after they exited the WorkAdvance program.¹ Additionally, MDRC’s cost–benefit analysis of the program showed a positive return on investment for individuals, government, and society.

Rizika acknowledges that, despite the broad range of services that Towards Employment offers, the organization still can’t adequately address additional challenges like childcare, affordable housing, transportation, or loss of benefits when income increases (the “benefits cliff”). Because all these issues may stand in the way of getting and retaining a job, Towards Employment is engaging with local and national networks to develop more effective policies and practices to mitigate them.

The multiservice delivery model is also making an impact in northern Kentucky. Just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati lies Newport, a socioeconomically diverse community that is home to the Brighton Center. The nonprofit’s mission is to create opportunities for individuals and families to reach self-sufficiency through family support services, education, employment, and leadership. The organization provides programs and services both directly and through the help of partners. Last year, Brighton offered 47 distinct programs that impacted 31,076 individuals across nine counties.

Like the organizations mentioned previously, Brighton understands that making sustained positive change in people’s lives often requires a comprehensive suite of services provided in partnership with public, private, and nonprofit entities. The secret sauce in successfully working with families, according to CEO Wonda Winkler, isn’t just what services are offered but also the integrated way in which they are provided to children, parents, and caregivers—understanding that individuals’ success also hinges on the support of family, friends, and community members.

The issues and challenges that people face are “bigger than Brighton,” she said.

Take for example a 22-year-old mother we met who is enrolled at Brighton’s Center for Employment Training. When she first entered Brighton, she had a 9-month-old child and lived with her mother. Brighton helped her secure housing, but she dropped out of the program due to lack of childcare. However, once she was introduced to Brighton’s Childcare Assistance Program, she was able to continue her training. Brighton also connected her to food assistance and work-study support since she did hair on the side to make ends meet. The integration of services across many providers not only ensures continuity of care but also removes bottlenecks like childcare (in this example), transportation, or unanticipated medical expenses, all of which can result in painful delays or cause people to fall out of the continuum of care altogether.

Fundamental to maintaining a responsive approach to community needs is listening to the voices of those who are served.

Brighton uses a Family Centered Coaching framework when partnering with families on their journey to self-sufficiency, starting with an initial screening and continuing through an individual’s engagement with Brighton’s services and beyond. Since 2010, the center has used a tool called the Arizona Self-Sufficiency Matrix to assess progress. The matrix allows the center to evaluate an individual’s or family’s strengths, needs, and level of independence by analyzing factors such as income, employment, education, housing, health, and social support. Individuals can then prioritize needs and create their own goals and actionable steps to achieve them. Staff members continue to follow up with individuals regarding their progress toward self-sufficiency goals, and the matrix is updated as necessary to reflect emergent or changing needs and circumstances. In fiscal year 2024, 67 percent of individuals who were reassessed showed progress toward self-sufficiency.²

Thinking Big, One Need at a Time

There are often opportunities to rethink the mix of services that nonprofits provide to those in need while striving to deliver these services more efficiently and effectively. Our observations of three providers suggest that collaborative problem solving, actively listening to individuals to determine their evolving needs, and monitoring and measuring results are key to multiservice delivery that can be achieved and sustained.