Nonprofit organizations were consistently carved out for special funding during the COVID-19 pandemic. From community health and senior centers, to food banks and social service groups, organizations already not in the business of making money faced new challenges.
Walking around the Alaska SeaLife Center in Seward, you may not know how close the facility came to permanently shutting its doors five years ago. People reach into a touch tank of sea urchins and anemones, while parents push strollers and others watch marine mammals through wall-size picture windows.
On an average summer day, between 900 and 1,200 people visit the center. And at the beginning of 2020, Nancy Anderson says they anticipated a banner year.
“Now it's March 16, and the governor shuts the state down and you — what do we do? What do we do?” Anderson says. “And so there was not only the great pause that happened around the state, but holy moly, what are we going to do?”
Anderson is the SeaLife Center’s development director. She says more than half of their roughly $11 million annual operating budget comes from entrance fees. As visitor numbers plummeted, so did revenue.
“It looked like falling off a cliff,” she said. “That’s really the best way to say it.”
The center didn’t close. Anderson says that’s because of a wildly successful grassroots “Save the Center” fundraising campaign and $3.7 million in federal COVID-19 relief dollars. Most of that money came from the Paycheck Protection Program, which could be used to pay employees.
Dr. Wei Ying Wong is the SeaLife Center’s president and CEO. She says keeping their workforce whole was a top priority. And Anderson says it’s hard enough in a non-pandemic year to find employees who are willing to relocate to Alaska and have the skills necessary to care for their uniquely Alaskan menagerie.
“It's a special skill set,” she said. “Can somebody learn it? Of course, somebody can learn it. But we have experts in house who've been working with these animals for years.”
Most people experience the center as an interactive aquarium and learning center. But Wong says caring for animals comes first.
At the same time the SeaLife Center was rallying to keep its doors open, a few blocks away Jilian Chapman was dealing with separate but similar challenges.
She’s the chief executive officer of the Seward Community Health Center, a healthcare nonprofit that operates in the same building as Providence Seward Medical Center.
“With Providence running lab and imaging and radiology, we operate the primary care side of that,” she said. So, annual wellness visits, vaccines, all those things that keep people out of the ER.”
Chapman was on vacation in March 2020. The day after she came back, the federal government told community health centers they couldn’t see patients in-clinic, unless absolutely necessary.
“We shifted almost entirely to telehealth, like overnight,” she said. “It was just scramble and go live with Zoom, get all the paperwork in place, and teach providers how to use it.”
Chapman says they assembled “vitals kits” – boxes with a thermometer, blood pressure cuff and iPads that were delivered to a patient’s door. Patients could take their own vitals, then report it back to their provider.
But telehealth has limits. It isn’t always conducive to treating respiratory illness caused by COVID-19. Like when a provider needs to listen to a patient’s lungs to determine if pneumonia is setting in.
“We couldn't do the level of examination needed in a virtual way,” she said. “We actually needed them in the clinic.”
But that was tough, too. Sharing a building with Providence meant the center was already working in cramped quarters – trying to maintain six feet of distance was doubly difficult. So providers worked on a rotating basis, splitting time between the clinic in person and at home on telehealth.
Seward Community Health Center received more than half a million dollars in federal COVID-19 grants. Almost all was in non-emergency dollars from the American Rescue Plan Act. Chapman says federal funding is already baked into their budget. But during the pandemic, Chapman says there was an understanding that extra help was needed amid a dropoff in patients getting preventative care.
“We didn't even have to put in a request,” she said. “They're like, ‘Here's a grant. Here's $500,000, try not to lay anyone off, see all the patients. And luckily, there were not a lot of strings attached to that funding … as long as what you were spending it on was to the benefit of treating and testing COVID.”
There’s a box of unused COVID tests on the floor in a corner of Jay Bechtol’s office. He’s the CEO of Homer’s South Peninsula Behavioral Health Services. It’s a community mental health facility that offers therapy, a youth homeless program and housing assistance, among other things.
While providers around the world were addressing physical health needs, Bechtol’s team targeted their patients’ mental health needs. As in Seward, the early days of the pandemic brought an abrupt pivot to telehealth – one Bechtol says needed an adjustment period.
“Staff weren't super comfortable with it,” he said. “Clients weren't super comfortable with it.”
The new order of operations needed some fine tuning, with considerations for federal and local regulations, community fears and the safety of their combined 500 patients and employees. Computers with cameras were an immediate need. Bechtol says despite the initial hurdles, telemedicine became a hit.
“Our attendance went up probably in the neighborhood of 30%,” he said. “ … Some of our partner agencies and our state agencies were wondering, ‘What was the effect of the telemedicine?’ And what we found is kept appointments went up, and client reporting satisfaction went up.”
Bechtol says telemedicine was well received by young people. A federal report estimates more than 140,000 American children lost a parent or grandparent caregiver to COVID-19. And it says a survey of more than 80,000 young people found symptoms of anxiety and depression doubled during the pandemic.
In 2020, more than 80% of South Peninsula Behavioral Health Services’ roughly $8.5 million annual operating budget came from Medicaid and Medicare services.
“For about the first six months, there was a lot of scrambling, trying to reconnect with clients and doing things,” he said. “Our revenue went (down) because we were not billing nearly as much as we were before the pandemic.”
Bechtol says they lost about $1.5 million in billable services within a year. But that loss was offset by $1.1 million from the Paycheck Protection Program that Bechtol says kept staff employed.
Another couple hundred dollars from the city of Homer paid for telemedicine equipment and backfilled outstanding employee wages and benefits. And they used $165,000 from the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation to help clients pay for rent and utilities. Bechtol says that was especially beneficial for an already fragile population.
“Big disruptions in the world cause more mental health problems, caused more physical health problems, and work became harder, and people's money went away quickly,” he said. “So that was really helpful.”
But for all the concerns he says people had about mental health, his team didn’t observe a noticeable uptick in demand for services.
“All we would hear anecdotally was how depressed everyone was, how sad everyone was, how no one was getting the mental health help they needed,” he said. “And what we were seeing was that that was not happening on an emergent level.”
Bechtol says he doesn’t think people weren’t struggling. He says they weren’t getting help. When someone is brought to the local hospital for a psychiatric emergency, someone from South Peninsula Behavioral Health Services evaluates them. During a normal year, he says they respond to about 450 calls. During the pandemic, that dropped to around 300.
It wasn’t what they were expecting.
“Because of the added stress of the world, right?” he said. “You can't go to work, money. People were dying. There was just panic in general, and people with mental health issues who were doing OK, hanging on when everything was OK. Suddenly the world’s not OK, and their various lifelines, work, school, play, all evaporated very quickly. All those social contacts went away.”
In 2025, Bechtol says clients still benefit from the telemedicine infrastructure they used COVID relief funds to prop up. He says a downside is that it’s easier for people to end a session if they’re feeling uncomfortable – it’s easier to push a button than to stand up and walk out of a room.
In the end, he says pandemic aid made the difference between just staying open and staying open in a way that was meaningful.
“We could have, you know, later on off, had three clinicians answering phones and talking to people in an emergency situation and just everyone else,” he said. “Best of luck. You're on your own. But it kept our staff housed. It kept our clients safe. It meant everything.”
That was the third installment in a new reporting series by KDLL called “What a Relief,” which looks at the impact and legacy of federal COVID-19 relief funds distributed to the Kenai Peninsula. Tomorrow, we’ll hear from the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District about the ways more than $30 million in federal funding facilitated a pivot to remote learning and kept staff employed. This reporting project is supported by the Alaska Center for Excellence in Journalism.
