The fence around St. James Presbyterian Church, in a quiet suburb of Johannesburg, evinces a reality whose raw numbers can leave neighbors numb. 

A year into a pandemic that has taken over 50,000 lives in South Africa, church caretaker Leonard Makuya still wakes each day to hear the latest death toll on the radio, dunking bread in his milky tea as he listens. 

He and a colleague then solemnly take ribbons and tie them to the green palisade fence outside the property, a symbol of society’s growing emotional toll. Today, white and blue ribbons flutter in the wind the length of a city block.

“Each of these ribbons, we keep in our minds that that’s a person,” Mr. Makuya says.

His gesture represents one individual attempt to manage the unfathomable. Since the World Health Organization officially declared the global coronavirus pandemic on March 11, 2020, 2.6 million people have died. They have left millions of others bereaved and billions more are grieving abstract loss – of their expectations and sense of predictability, their rituals, the time they would have spent in faith communities or with family, friends, classmates, or sports teams.

Darcy Harris, a scholar who studies grief at King’s University College, Western University in London, Ontario, calls it “the loss of living our lives.”

The wave of anguish currently sweeping the globe exceeds anything the world has known for a century, says Robert Neimeyer, director of the Portland Institute for Loss and Transition, in Oregon. “All of us have had to grapple with an assault on a world of meaning that once seemed secure,” he says.

“And so,” he adds, “we’re called to … look for ways that we can draw on individual, communal, and cultural resilience to attempt to recover a fuller semblance of human life and possibility again.”

That starts at the personal level, where many of us have found reservoirs of strength, even if tinged with sadness for what has changed or gone forever. The ways in which people tap such reservoirs often reflect the cultural ethos of a place – whether they be a Mexican street food vendor hustling to survive, a Berlin artist finding a sense of purpose, a Syrian refugee in Toronto recalling worse suffering, or a middle-class real estate agent in Taiwan holding on to her faith in government guidance.  

Tacos under wraps

As the coronavirus tore across the globe, it knocked millions off their financial footing. The World Bank says that the pandemic’s effects threaten to push as many as 150 million people into extreme poverty by the end of this year.

Courtesy of Obdulia Montealegre Guzmán

Obdulia Montealegre Guzmán stands inside her plastic-wrapped food stall at a weekly market in Mexico City Feb. 12, 2021. Wearing masks and erecting a barrier between her team and her customers are among the measures she's taken to safely keep her prepared-food business going during the pandemic.

Among the most vulnerable are “informal workers,” those working outside the regulated or protected job market. In Mexico such workers make up 60% of the labor force, and in Mexico City some have seen their incomes halved or worse, says Tania Espinosa Sánchez, who works for WIEGO, a nonprofit advocating informal workers’ rights.

Among those hit is Obdulia Montealegre Guzmán, who has served homemade blue-corn tacos at her food stand for nearly two decades, a witness to the leisurely counter meals and small talk that make up the rhythm of daily life in the Mexican capital. 

But when the simple act of sharing food in a communal space became one of the riskiest behaviors of the pandemic era, her livelihood was threatened. She made a snap decision: to encase her taco stand in plastic. She and her staff wrapped the stall with three layers of industrial-grade plastic wrap, cutting out two tiny windows, one for taking orders and handling money and the other for delivering food.

She did shut down briefly early on in the pandemic, but she’s confident her family business will weather the storm.

That effort reflects a culture that knows how to hustle, says Héctor Castillo Berthier, a sociologist and coordinator of the youth studies unit at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “Mexicans are used to working – almost always – with things against us,” he says. “This makes you resilient almost by default. You have to be, in order to move ahead.”

Forced to slow down, Ms. Montealegre says the financial loss has been offset by improvements in her quality of life. She says she has gotten to know her 22-year-old daughter in new ways, rekindled ties with her husband, and had the leisure, for the first time in her own life, to reflect on how she can be a better family member.

“We are all so vulnerable right now, and [this year] has really helped me understand the importance of saying ‘I make mistakes,’” she says. “I have learned to accept them and to be humble and to ask for forgiveness.”

Perseus in the playground

George Bonanno, a professor of clinical psychology who heads the Loss, Trauma, and Emotion Lab at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York, says trauma is misunderstood.

His research into acute events such as war or 9/11 has found that as many as two-thirds of victims showed resilient behavior patterns as they recovered. The pandemic may sometimes seem as if it will last forever, but “human beings are much more resilient than anyone assumed they were,” says Professor Bonanno, author of a forthcoming book, “The End of Trauma.” “And people adapt to just about anything.” 

Hugo Tiedje is one person whose inner strength surprised even himself. The young actor was rehearsing for the performance of his budding career at Berlin’s iconic Volksbühne theater when the pandemic shut down playhouses around the world. He was to play Perseus, the great Greek slayer of monsters. Instead, he felt like the one who had been put to the sword.

Mr. Tiedje had just graduated from drama school. “I felt so out of control. I felt I would be forgotten,” he recalls.

Initially, he withdrew into isolation and fear. Then, he says, he began to think, to create, and to write. He connected with a friend on Instagram to read plays, novels, and poems together. He began to reflect in his writing. “I learned to be with myself more,” he says.

He also connected with a group of Berlin-based artists who’d begun a careful study of Germany’s COVID-19 lockdown rules. Heads together, they’d brainstormed a new way to perform: Twelve artists, including a pianist, a dancer, a singer, a French horn player, and an actor, each played a role in his or her own room in an old Berlin brewery, as socially distanced audiences of 10 swept through for mini-performances at five-minute intervals.

“The image of half-filled concert halls was depressing because all that does is call attention to what you’re missing. It’s only a lesser version of the full thing,” says Chris Lloyd, a concert pianist and co-founder of the 1781 Collective, which curated the performance. “We looked at our limitations and created something that fits our new reality, something more meaningful.” 

The 1781 Collective takes its name from the year Mozart shed his job as a court-employed organist, and set off on a topsy-turvy career as a freelancer. Born as a celebration of independent talent, the collective would not have survived anywhere but in a city like Berlin, say its members.

“Berlin is a playground, with the open-mindedness here. Artists are more willing to share their creativity,” says Mr. Lloyd. Just as importantly, the German government softened the lockdown’s impact somewhat by offering some financial aid to students, artists, and freelance performers.

For Mr. Tiedje, the state’s support and Berlin’s creative atmosphere were a lifeline. “I could only stay calm during the pandemic because I had this help,” he says. “If I hadn’t had this, I would have been scared all the time.” 

“I am so much more resilient now,” Mr. Tiedje adds. “When the next crisis comes, I will be able to find my peace so much faster.”

It could be worse

Most people, when their world is turned upside down, feel a sense of loss. But others, for whom the pandemic is not their first existential challenge, can draw on their memories of much tougher times they’ve lived through.

Courtesy of Hanen Nanaa

Hanen Nanaa was asked to introduce Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at a virtual event this winter to commemorate the 5th anniversary of Syrian refugees' arrival in Canada. Ms. Nanaa has kept her perspective on the COVID-19 lockdown in Toronto by recalling how it felt to be shut up at home in her native Aleppo, under bombardment.

Hanen Nanaa was a Syrian refugee when she arrived in Toronto just over five years ago with her five siblings, parents, and grandmother – the only one who spoke English.

The pandemic has been hard on the whole family, but especially for Ms. Nanaa, who leads a packed academic, professional, and volunteer life.

Lockdown meant she had to move her university classes online, and cancel events she had worked so hard to produce with BAM, a youth arts and performance collective she had founded. She struggled with the isolation. So she took up a habit she had developed when she lived in Aleppo during the Syrian civil war, and later as a refugee in Turkey: She began to write down her thoughts.

In one essay she compared her experience of pandemic lockdown in Canada with her recollections of being shut up at home in Aleppo. “I remembered the bombing,” she says. “That there were no schools. We could not go outside; there was no water and no electricity.  We didn’t even have technology.”

“At that moment I realized how grateful I am for this lockdown compared to the other ones,” she says. “Here we are safe.”

Indeed, she is flourishing. She has been working, organizing virtual BAM events and studying at university. In January she was asked to introduce Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in an online event marking the fifth anniversary of the mass arrival in Canada of Syrian refugees.

She framed her comparative essay and hung it on her bedroom wall. 

Do what you’re told

While pandemic resilience dwells in each person, its shape and nature will depend on social context. If a country’s public messaging is clear, for example, if its culture attaches greater importance to the collective than to the individual, or if compliance with government instructions is a driving national characteristic, such factors will influence the ways in which citizens confront the crisis, says grief expert Dr. Harris.

So in Taiwan, whose 978 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 10 deaths make it one of the world’s great pandemic success stories, real estate agent Yi-Ling Huang has kept her head down, finding strength in following government guidelines.

Courtesy of Yi-Ling Huang

Yi-Ling Huang, a real estate agent in Taiwan, took comfort from the way in which her fellow citizens readily complied with government guidance about health precautions to contain the coronavirus pandemic.

That’s not to say that chills didn’t run down her spine the day she found out about the new coronavirus in China, a country just 80 miles from Taiwan, where she lives in the capital Taipei. It surfaced bad memories of the deadly SARS pandemic that hit the island in 2003, when, as a young mother, she had done all she could to protect her two small children.

Last winter, she donned not only a face mask but protective eye goggles too, and carried a can of disinfectant with her – spraying it each time she stepped into her apartment building’s elevator. “We couldn’t take it easy; it’s so serious,” she says.

But Ms. Huang says the government reacted quickly, ramping up the production of masks, distributing them through pharmacies, and guaranteeing supplies for every citizen. The island nation closed itself to international travelers and instituted a strict quarantine regime with rigorous contact tracing for every case.

Taiwanese society readily complied with the measures, says Ms. Huang (Health Minister Chen Shih-chung saw his approval ratings hit 91%), giving her a sense of security that has helped her navigate the transformations her life has undergone since last March. “This is a very tough period. Everyone needs to work together,” she says. 

In a different society she might have felt differently, says Dr. Harris in Canada. “If you’re collectively identified around independence or ... self-reliance versus if you are more oriented towards the common good, that’s going to have big input on how people will respond to pandemic measures but also how people are supported in their grief and in their losses,” she says. 

“We can’t forget”

Historians say the losses and lessons of previous pandemics have been quickly forgotten as history churns and people indulge their desire to move on. Pandemic casualties may lack the heroic script of a war memorial or the sudden drama of a terrorist attack or plane crash, but Dr. Neimeyer says collective remembrance will be key moving forward, especially as a “shadow pandemic” of grief will likely follow the acute phase.

“Being willing to use things such as the power of ritual to acknowledge these collective losses, to solemnify these losses,” he says, “is a step toward healing.” 

He notes the light ceremony at the reflecting pool in Washington, D.C., ahead of President Joe Biden’s inauguration. But even the humblest undertaking, like that of Mr. Makuya at St. James Presbyterian Church, is fortifying.

He and his colleague Silva Kossa began a year ago, choosing white ribbons to mark each death. But they risked running out of space, so in January they decided to tie blue ribbons, representing 10 deaths each. One blank gray morning in late February, just after 8 a.m., Mr. Makuya walked to the fence with eight blue ribbons; 73 people had died the day before. It was the only sign of movement on the otherwise silent tree-lined street.

“Something like this helps give people a point of closure on this trauma,” says Vuyokazi Nelly Sharpley, a sociologist at Walter Sisulu University in Mthatha, South Africa, who has studied the disruption of mourning in the time of COVID-19. “It also creates a sense of community, and helps people narrate a shared history of the trauma of the pandemic.”  

For Mr. Makuya, the ribbons have been a way to mark the passage of time when it often seemed that time had stopped altogether. For the better part of the year, religious services have been prohibited here. Services are livestreamed from an empty chapel. Almost no one comes to the church anymore, except for funerals.

But a church needs looking after, all the same. Congregants no longer come, but the grass keeps growing. The hedges still have to be trimmed back from the electric fence. Mr. Makuya’s favorite purple lilies still bloom and die. Dust still finds its way onto window sills. It still settles over the empty pews.

Every day, behind the ribbon-covered fence, this place needs tending to, and that, in a time of deep uncertainty, is something Mr. Makuya still knows how to do.

“When people come back, I want them to find this place just as it was,” he says. 

And yet his wall of ribbons is a remembrance of all that will remain forever changed. “They’re reminding us every day,” Mr. Makuya says. “We can’t forget.”

Some months into the pandemic, Kanika Harris gave up on her video game rule. 

The director of maternal health for the nonprofit Black Women’s Health Imperative, Dr. Harris had been working remotely from her home in Washington, D.C., while her 3-year-old twins played in a learning pod in the basement. Her 8-year-old, Tezi, had been at home for months, and his youth basketball league had shut down – along with the play dates, the neighborhood picnics, and the extended family get-togethers. Her son was bored. He wanted to connect with other children.

And Dr. Harris just didn’t have the energy to argue. She is a Black woman in a pandemic that has disproportionately affected Black women, both physically and economically, during a moment of racial reckoning that has required even more painful conversations with Black children. Family members were losing jobs, friends were getting sick, work was intense, and the laundry and cooking seemed to never end. 

So she and her husband agreed to let Tezi play Fortnite, the multiplayer video game.

“Before, it was, ‘Oh, Fortnite. We don’t do that,’” she says. “And we’d judge other parents for it. And now my son is totally addicted. We’re wrestling with that. But it’s hard to get your only break of the day and be, ‘Let’s play games, let’s color, let’s draw, let’s go outside.’ You’re just done.”

She is not alone in her feelings.

Michael Bonfigli/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Jua Fluellen and his 8-year-old son, Tezi, play video games at their home in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 21, 2021. Mr. Fluellen and his wife, Kanika Harris, have relaxed some of their parenting rules during the pandemic as they have tried to survive the pressures of work and child rearing.

As the United States surpasses the one-year mark of pandemic-related disruption, parents across the country are grappling with job losses, economic turmoil, and profound upheaval in the way they live, work, and send their children to school. They are also, in ways large and small, changing the way they parent. 

In the midst of what the American Psychological Association has called a “mental health crisis” for caregivers, those with children are starting to relax some of their rules. They are giving kids a bit more independence, and themselves a bit more grace. They are softening stances against screen time and are expecting more help with household chores. They are noticing that what once felt like individual parenting failures or triumphs are far more universal – and systemic – than they realized before.

And while these shifts can be uncomfortable, they are also casting a new light on the American culture of “intensive parenting,” a style of child rearing that requires concerted levels of attention, time, and money. While most people still believe in many tenets of this parenting method – an emotional connection with children is important, the vast majority of parents agree – there is also a growing recognition that families simply can’t follow all of the “shoulds” of modern-day caregiving. 

“The pandemic is showing us the ways that the pre-pandemic norms of ‘good parenting’ were, to a large degree, unachievable or unsustainable for the vast majority of families,” says Linda Quirke, a sociology professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, who studies parenting advice. “It’s pulling back the curtain.”

The rise of always-there caregiving

Much has been written about the pandemic’s impact on parents – the brutal intersection of job loss, child care loss, school closures, and financial stress. But according to many studies, parents – particularly mothers – were experiencing growing levels of anxiety even before COVID-19.

Part of this is because women have been increasingly taking on work for decades, both inside and outside of the home. By 2019, the majority of mothers were in the professional labor force – more than 72% of mothers with children under age 18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But they were also spending more time parenting than ever before.

According to time-use studies, working mothers in the 2010s spent more time engaged with their children than stay-at-home mothers did in the 1960s. Combine that with child care costs that have ballooned over the past decades, a rise in the number of mothers parenting on their own (nearly a quarter of all moms), and growing economic disparity, and it’s no wonder that many mothers report feeling burned out – some 86% in 2019, according to a survey conducted by Motherly, an online community for parents.

Michael Bonfigli/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Kanika Harris and her twins, Gyasi and Zindzi Fluellen, make brownies at their home in Washington on Feb. 21, 2021.

But there’s even more going on here, scholars say. And it has to do with the style of parenting.

Sociologists first started talking about “intensive parenting,” or “intensive mothering,” in the late 1990s. Academics began noticing a clear shift not only in the way parents behaved, but also in how they conceived of childhood itself. An intensive mother believed that families should be child-centered, that mothers were best positioned to give care, and that parents should fully invest in their children, emotionally and financially. Moreover, parents should provide intellectual stimulation and expert-guided developmental encouragement, this philosophy stated, while at the same time offering unwavering warmth, kindness, and security.

This sort of parenting involves not only a lot of time interacting with children, but also a huge amount of what sociologists call “cognitive labor.” That’s the time planning the birthday party, researching summer camps, emailing teachers, and figuring out where to take violin classes. It’s determining what baby food approach is best, and then Googling the ideal recipe for organic carrot-peach mush.

If “helicopter parent” is a pejorative term to describe a mother who swoops in to prevent harm befalling her child, intensive parenting is something else: a full-time job of “optimizing childhood,” as Dr. Quirke puts it.

“It’s the idea that there is a very important role for parents, that they need to be lining up experiences that are enriching,” she says. “It’s the idea that parents, especially mothers, should have a very prominent role in managing their children’s time and overseeing their children’s activities, with the aim of trying to foster their development in all these ways.”

If all of this just sounds normal, it’s because almost everyone in the U.S. at this point agrees that intensive parenting is the best way to raise children. This has not always been the case. Two generations ago, scholars point out, parents were cautioned against this sort of always-there caregiving, with admonitions that children would become too fretful or anxious.

In 2018, Cornell University sociologist Patrick Ishizuka highlighted the shift in the country’s attitudes toward parenting. He published a study showing that American moms and dads, across racial and socioeconomic lines, overwhelmingly approved of intensive parenting behavior. He concluded that different caregiving styles in the U.S. generally stemmed not from differences in ideology, but from differences in resources. In other words, if lower-income parents could spend large amounts of time and money on children, they would.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Ms. Woitkowski works from her desk in the upstairs hallway as her children, Swayze and Natasha, play in a bedroom. Ms. Woitkowski works from home as a lobbyist for a family advocacy group.

For those who study parenting and social trends, this is not that surprising. Societies with high economic inequality tend to also have intensive parenting cultures. Adults in these countries feel pressure to give their children advantages because the cost of “falling behind” is so great, according to Matthias Doepke, an economics professor at Northwestern University.

“We see that type of parenting across socioeconomic groups,” Dr. Doepke says. “It’s a worldwide trend wherever inequality is going up.”

It seems so important to get children into a high-quality college, for instance, because there is actually a big difference in financial security for those who have graduated from elite schools compared with those who haven’t. And because admissions processes are so random and mysterious, there is a scramble to give children one more activity, one more Advanced Placement class, one more enriching experience, all in hopes of getting them into Princeton or Penn. 

“People feel trapped by the whole intensive parenting thing,” says Dr. Joshua Coleman, a psychologist and senior fellow with the Council on Contemporary Families, a nonprofit academic group. “They feel really guilty if they aren’t doing it. Some people know it’s a scam – that kids don’t have to be involved in all these activities. Some older parents even feel sorry for kids because their lives are so structured. But [parents] worry that if they don’t do it, they’ll be denying kids something really important.”

Of course, this sort of parenting comes with costs. There are financial burdens, both to pay for all of those soccer clinics and to outsource menial labor, such as cleaning.

Then there is the time. The labor of intensive parenting is usually performed by mothers. Someone has to drive to ballet class. Someone has to write to the school administrator to ask why a child didn’t get into the higher math class.

All of this means that many parents feel they are constantly falling short. Big societal problems, Dr. Doepke says, such as income inequality, underinvestment in child care, and opaque college admissions processes, are shifted onto the shoulders of parents. And the anxiety of constantly striving and worrying is regularly transferred onto children.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Chris Woitkowski holds the family’s new pet, a bearded dragon named Mandy. Mr. Woitkowski, who works outside the home, adjusted his schedule to care for the children in the mornings.

So if there’s anything good about the pandemic, he says, it’s that it’s triggering some rethinking. “Are we doing this right? Is there an easier way, or a better way of doing this?”

Advocates for mothers agree.

“People across the country are waking up to the fact that we don’t have an epidemic of personal failures in terms of parenting,” says Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, co-founder and executive director of the advocacy group MomsRising. “We have a lack of countrywide structures.”

Ms. Rowe-Finkbeiner’s group has been making a concerted push for policies such as paid family leave, universal child care, and gender pay equity to help what she describes as “parents at a breaking point.”

“We were in a time crisis before the pandemic. Now the time crisis has become a time catastrophe,” she says. “It is simple. We need to value the paid and unpaid work of people who are doing caregiving.”

“This is crazy pants”

Rebecca Woitkowski knows all about structures. A lawyer by training, she is the policy coordinator for the Kids Count initiative at New Futures, a nonprofit that advocates for the well-being of children and families in New Hampshire. She spends her workdays lobbying the state legislature for programs and policies such as affordable child care and nutrition assistance. It’s a workday that she now tries to cram into the early mornings so she can then care for her 3-year-old and 7-year-old. 

It has not been easy. Those first weeks of the pandemic were the most intense. That’s when schools and businesses were shutting down, but her work, which was focused on arranging child care for the state’s essential workers, was more important than ever.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Ms. Woitkowski plays with Swayze and Natasha on a huge beanbag chair in their living room.

Her husband, who had previously left for work before breakfast, switched his schedule around so they could do child care in shifts. Although she felt grateful to be healthy and relatively financially secure, she also felt mounting anxiety.

“How do you pivot to be successful in your career and also be successful as a mom and a teacher?” she says. “That’s where the insurmountable nature of everything lives in my chest. I want to be really good in my job, be a really good teacher for e-learning with my daughter, and also be there for my little one and make sure he’s getting what he needs.”

Buddy Scarborough, a sociologist at the University of North Texas in Denton, says the double pressure to be both an “ideal worker” and an “ideal parent” is a hallmark of modern-day American culture. 

“We have these ideal worker norms where you work 40 hours a week if not more, you don’t complain, you’re ambitious,” he says. “And we also have these intensive parenting norms – time-intensive, productive, with extracurricular activities, high-quality time with kids all the time. They’ve always been in conflict. But now it’s on another level in a way that we’ve never had.”

Jessica Calarco, a professor at Indiana University Bloomington, has been following a group of 250 mothers with young children since 2018, and says women were already “holding themselves to almost impossible standards.” Many reported skipping showers or going without meals to care for children. Now, during the pandemic, many said they felt even more pressure to “make things OK” for their children. One full-time lawyer told researchers that when she started venting about the impossible workload, her mother-in-law advised her to “cherish these times” instead. Another mother received texts from a family member with “50 fun activities you can do with kids at home.” 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Rebecca Woitkowski runs near her home in New Hampshire as a break from the pressures of the day. The pandemic has put more stress on families, with everyone being at home.

Well-meaning as the suggestions may be, they are not particularly helpful, Dr. Calarco says. “The social norms we have tell mothers that not only should they sacrifice themselves to maintain and support children’s well-being, but in moments of crises they should double down on that investment,” she says. “We’re telling mothers that they should be making this time as normal, and even as special, as possible. And the rhetoric assumes that’s just going to happen automatically. It’s a lot of labor to protect kids’ well-being during this.”

Indeed, says Sarah Kooiman, the founder of Milwaukee Mom, a local online parenting group for mothers, “I think we’re all saying this is crazy pants – every single one of us. We’re at a different level of burnt-out exhausted than we’ve ever been.”

Women feel guilt for not meeting expectations in either the professional or mothering realms, she says, and then feel guilt for feeling guilt, because they know the mom next door lost her job and her kids are going hungry and they shouldn’t complain.

Exactly, says Emily Oster, an economics professor at Brown University who studies parenting. “If we think back to March and when all the schools closed and everybody ended up back at home with their kids, there was a moment in the high-pressure parenting space where people embraced that,” she says. “You know, ‘This is my opportunity to run the greatest home school on planet Earth. Here is my color-coded schedule, and we’ll be baking zucchini bread. ... That was all well and good for three weeks. Maybe a week and a half. And then the reality hit us.”

Mothers, she says, quickly realized that “some of this high intensity has to go.”

“This has prompted a shift in people’s minds of what is possible,” she says.

“It’s a snow-day approach”

This was certainly true for Ms. Woitkowski. Some days during the pandemic, she felt she was “nailing it.” Other times, she describes herself as “a complete hot mess.”  

But eventually, somewhere along the way, she noticed that she didn’t care as much if the house wasn’t perfectly clean. She didn’t actually miss the enriching classes that her children couldn’t attend. Her family spent time together rather than running from one activity to the next.  

Courtesy of Nikki Springer

“I’ve had to be more open-minded, more giving on things. ... I mean, there’s no reason you can’t sleep in your tent in the living room. And with school? They’re in first grade. They’ll survive.” – Nikki Springer, a single mother of 7-year-old twins in Orlando, Florida

“We never had breakfast together,” she says. “My husband would be at work. My kids would be there, but I’d be tossing the cereal bowls at them. I don’t want to go back to a place where we spend more time in a car than we do sitting next to each other and talking to each other.”

She also started focusing more on herself. She began running. She started to hike. Not only was her family OK without her, but she also noticed that her children were excited when she came back and could report that she had conquered the next one of New Hampshire’s 4,000-footers.

Nikki Springer, a single mother of 7-year-old twins who lives in Orlando, Florida, also recognizes some shifts. It started one day last spring when the news came on the car radio. Usually she tries to make sure her children don’t hear disturbing dispatches from across the world. But on this day it was a report about the pandemic, and she kept listening. “I realized I couldn’t shield them from this,” she says.

While letting go a bit has been difficult, it has also proved a relief. Her children have cut down on their activities. She sees their disappointment in not going to school or to scouting events. But, she says, while she would have once tried to make everything all right, these days “we’ve been using this time to build real empathy.”

She has also relaxed her own rules, even as she has spent more time working with her children on math and reading. 

“It’s a snow-day approach to a certain extent,” she says. “I’ve had to be more open-minded, more giving on things, which at the end of the day are really fine. I mean, there’s no reason you can’t sleep in your tent in the living room. And with school? They’re in first grade. They’ll survive.”

Evan Mann/Courtesy of Lenore Skenazy

“The idea that if you are not showing constant attention to your kids and amplifying and enriching every moment, you are leaving them behind – I don’t think that’s true.” – Lenore Skenazy, founder of the Free-Range Kids movement and president of the nonprofit Let Grow

Less anxiety, more independence

Not only will they survive, but they could thrive, says Lenore Skenazy, founder of the Free-Range Kids movement and president of Let Grow, a nonprofit dedicated to children’s well-being through independence.

Although she recognizes that many families are facing hardships because of the pandemic, she says there is also evidence that this forced break from intensive parenting is beneficial. This past spring, she and Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College, oversaw two studies of American parents and their children ages 8 to 13.

The survey asked how calm children felt compared with before the pandemic. It also asked for details about whether they had learned any new activities and how they would rate their anxiety levels. “There was so much worry that children would be suffering from being at home and not having their usual activities,” says Dr. Gray. 

What they found, he says, is that children reported feeling calmer during the early months of the pandemic than they had been during school. While parents’ anxiety levels had increased, children’s had decreased. Parents also reported that young people had more independence. They were also doing more chores around the house, learning new hobbies such as playing the guitar or cooking, and, yes, playing more video games. And in doing so, they reported far greater life satisfaction. 

“We keep hearing that everybody’s at their wits’ end,” Ms. Skenazy says. “Of course, people are at their wits’ end. ... But in terms of child development – we forget that children are resilient and adaptive.”

And we forget, she says, that children were suffering before the pandemic, with growing anxiety and depression levels. 

“I understand the economic fears. I really do,” she says. “But the idea that if you are not showing constant attention to your kids and amplifying and enriching every moment, you are leaving them behind – I don’t think that’s true.”

For parents, this may offer a modicum of relief. “Parents are seeing what their kids can do,” says Dr. Gray. “And it is changing the way parents are behaving.”

It’s a typical January morning somewhere in the desert outside Wickenburg, Arizona, and corporate strategy consultant Kenny D’Evelyn is heading for work. He kisses his wife goodbye, steps out of his 26-foot RV with the truck cab in front, squints into the still-rising sun, and walks 14 paces to a shiny aluminum horse trailer. He opens the door, pulls a chair across some straw, and sits at a makeshift desk. He fires up a computer. And he prepares – for the first but by no means last time this day – to Zoom.

It was not always thus. Until a year ago Mr. D’Evelyn went to work like most of us did – more than most of us did, actually, given his consultant’s life of spending four days of every week at a client’s site on the road. But then last March he was sent home. At which point he became an involuntary part of what might be the largest natural experiment in the history of work.

Says California-based corporate event producer Kelly Klopp, “Overnight, we went from full time in the office to working from home.” As the show-runner for a scheduled three-day, 20,000-attendee conference set in Las Vegas, she suddenly had not just her own work habits to sort, but a whole enormous business problem to solve. (Upshot: she and her client pulled it off virtually.)

Remote work had been strongly increasing even before the pandemic, says demographer Wendell Cox – amounting to 5.3% of the workforce, three times its 2010 share. But by last May that number had ballooned to 42%, Stanford University reported – eight times pre-pandemic levels. And the homebound workers were liking it. An IBM poll found that 54% wanted to keep working from home post-pandemic, and 75% wanted the option of working from home occasionally.

“What the pandemic made blazingly obvious,” says a Manhattan entertainment lawyer, “is that there is no need for a physical office.” Only a complete lack of imagination, he says, kept the realization from dawning sooner. “Before the pandemic, we wouldn’t have taken the question [of going virtual] seriously. It wouldn’t have seemed possible.”

Courtesy of Kenny D'Evelyn

Corporate strategy consultant Kenny D'Evelyn takes a selfie with his wife, postdoctoral researcher Savannah, as they ride horses in the desert in January 2021. They lived for a month in an RV parked on land owned by friends in the Arizona desert near Wickenburg during the pandemic.

Mr. D’Evelyn wouldn’t have thought it possible, either. By January, though, he’d mastered the new remote-work drill: 5 to 7 hours of Zoom meetings a day, prep work early in the morning, follow-up work after dinner at night. Only thing is that in January, when he and his wife repaired for a month to a friend’s land in a rented RV, the day included horses. Up at 5:30, horses “grained and fed” by 6, an hour of reading, then ... ride. By 8:30, out of the saddle and back to the desk – but even seven hours of Zooming feel different when a day starts like that. “On the whole,” says Mr. D’Evelyn, “I’ve been ecstatic.”

And yet, “I’m very over working from home right now.” Live meetings used to energize him; Zoom meetings exhaust him. Work hours have expanded. “I’m not sure how sustainable it is.”

The entertainment lawyer, despite having discovered the functional “pointlessness” of the office, has nevertheless tired of home-working, too. “I hadn’t realized how much the social aspect of work was important to me. I miss my work family!”

So where has our massive work style experiment left us? Will we leave remote work behind as the pandemic ends, or perpetuate it, or craft it into something new?

Answer: It’s complicated. The pandemic has certainly sowed chaos on numerous economic levels – from supply-chain disruptions to job losses and an attendant worsening of economic inequalities. The rise of remote work is one shift that, while not necessarily helping all workers, is being greeted widely as positive and more than temporary. 

The lasting impulse may be especially toward hybrid work modes, more than full-time work from home. But the growing detachment of jobs from geography is ushering in greater flexibility even as it tests and reshapes social bonds that so often have been forged at work in the past.

The rise of “Zoom towns”

“The most important outcome of the pandemic wasn’t that it taught you how to use Zoom, but rather that it forced everybody else to use Zoom,” MIT economist David Autor told The Atlantic. “We all leapfrogged over the coordination problem at the exact same time.” 

It’s hard to find a management expert who doesn’t judge the work-from-home experiment a resounding – and somewhat unexpected – success. A survey by the recruiting firm Robert Walters found that 77% of professionals believe they’ve been equally or more effective when remote, and that 86% of employers plan to continue remote work “in some form” after the pandemic ends. A January survey by the consulting firm PwC revealed that employer satisfaction had risen even as the year dragged on, with 83% now assessing remote work successful for their company, up from 73% last June.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File

Workers at an online retailer help customers by phone in Boston, in October 2010. As more work goes remote, some analysts predict that people’s social connections will shift from offices toward their local communities.

Wrote one top manager in an email posted by economist Tyler Cowen: “Speaking from personal experience as a white-collar Exec, the productivity gains for our highest value workers has been immense. The typical time-sucks and distractions of in-office work have been eliminated.... Mental focus on productive efforts is near constant. Perhaps most importantly, work travel is not happening.”

But is remote work just an anomaly suited to crisis, or will it last? To know, it helps to consider what workers, company managers, and investors each want – and what they’re already doing.

Executives, in particular, seem to have made up their minds. Fewer than 1 in 5, according to the PwC survey, say they want their organizations to return to the office as it was pre-pandemic. Among managers, more than 80% are “grappling with how widely to extend remote work options.” Meanwhile, companies including Twitter, Siemens, Shopify, Facebook, and State Bank of India have announced that they will make remote work permanent.

Some investors also appear sold. Among venture capitalists and venture-backed entrepreneurs, 74% now expect their companies to be majority or fully remote. And after venture-backed founders told surveyors before the pandemic that the “most beneficial location to start a company” was San Francisco, this year they answered that the best location was none (“distributed or remote”) – which received seven times the votes it scored a year earlier.

Lucas Jackson/Reuters/FIle

Stores were shuttered on Fifth Avenue and streets were empty due to the outbreak of the coronavirus in the Manhattan borough of New York on May 5, 2020.

As for workers, Gallup recently found that they, too – Zoom-fatigue notwithstanding – would still rather work remotely than in their workplace, a preference they’re underscoring by voting with their feet, according to Joel Kotkin, a geographer who directs the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. “Even before the pandemic,” he says, “big cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago were losing population to suburbs, lower-cost metro areas, and less expensive states in what Zillow called ‘a great reshuffling.’”

The trend has accelerated, Mr. Kotkin says. “In just the past six months, New York City lost almost as many residents as it gained since 1950.” He notes that a recent report by Upwork, a freelancing platform, suggests that 14 million to 23 million Americans are seeking to move to a less expensive and less crowded place. Welcome to the “Zoom towns.”

It may be that the remote-work phenomenon is an instance in which the incentives of workers, employers, and customers align. One example is the business model for the $241 billion management consulting industry in which Mr. D’Evelyn works.

For decades consultants would travel to client sites first thing Monday, work inside the client’s offices (and stay in nearby hotels and eat in nearby restaurants) until Thursday night, then travel home to spend Fridays in the consulting firm’s own building. All that client-site in-person work has been replaced by Zoom schedules like Mr. D’Evelyn’s, along with all that travel. And somewhat to the surprise of all parties, when the work shifted online, its quality didn’t change. “We discovered we can deliver the value without being there,” says Mr. D’Evelyn.

Suddenly, consultants were freed from the burnout-inducing road trips; employers saw their talent pool expand (the incessant travel had always driven consultants from the business as they grew older and had families); and customers got a discount due to avoided hotel and food bills. Win, win, win. When incentives align, change tends to stick – even though consultants will still spend some time on the road.

Still, the pandemic experiment has also uncovered ample drawbacks to remote work. Virtual teams function well when their members know each other and projects are already underway, but they’re not so good at launching new projects or convening strangers. As economist Dr. Cowen wrote last year, “Virtual [teams] simply can’t replicate the intellectual frisson of ‘gathering the smart people’ together, and this could damage performance and innovation.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File

Employees at a Boston energy-information company meet in a glassed-in conference room in August 2013. Many workers and employers see benefits from gathering in person that promise to endure after the pandemic – alongside work-from-home models.

And then there’s the fact that remote work can be lonely, not least because remote workers are alone. Every worker who spoke with the Monitor admitted to exhaustion. This despite their universal conviction that telecommuting works, and that they wanted to keep doing it some of the time.     

It’s that phrase “some of the time” that makes all the difference, experts increasingly say. Hence, the ascending idea of “hybrid” remote work – a work pattern mixing both office hours and home hours.

In surveys, both employees and leaders support it. According to PwC, over half of employees (55%) would prefer to be remote at least three days a week. Most executives (68%), on the other hand, say a typical employee should be in the office at least three days a week.

The market research firm Forrester predicts a 60-30-10 split among organizations: post-pandemic, 60% will be hybrid, 30% will be all-in-the-office, and 10% will be all-remote.

Which is a very long way from where we were a year ago.

A revival for social connections near home?

Experts can point to only one other work style “experiment” like the one caused by COVID-19, though its sample size in comparison was minuscule. When a 2011 earthquake demolished Christchurch, New Zealand, the entire community turned immediately to telework. Then the city rebuilt, renewing its stock of office space. Yet years later a study revealed that Christchurch’s workers continued to operate remotely, away from their freshly available workplaces. “When [the crisis] was over,” said a researcher, “they didn’t go back.”

If the expert consensus proves right, Americans won’t go back, either. 

“As remote working has boomed during COVID-19,” summarizes a study by the University of Utah, “the rise in the number of people working from home has prompted many to reconsider where they wish to live.” Which means, as the survey data already indicate, that as many as 40% of office workers could scatter outward from the name-brand cities to places more spacious and affordable. Maybe some of the time even to an RV surrounded by mesquite and sky, as Mr. D’Evelyn did for a spell. Maybe to a place with horses.

Courtesy of Savannah D'Evelyn

Kenny and Savannah D'Evelyn lived for a month in an RV parked on this land owned by friends near Wickenburg, Arizona. The rise in the number of people working from home is prompting many of them to reconsider where they live, some researchers say.

A shift of workers to the periphery would be an economic boon to the places they go. The Zoom towns and suburbs and countryside would, under this scenario, profit from the migration of skilled jobs: Economists estimate that one skilled job generates 2.5 more jobs providing local goods and services. (Studies say tech workers generate an even higher multiple.)

Of course, working remotely will change not only where the work is done (and where people can live while doing it), but what work feels like, and what it can be relied on to provide in daily life. If people aren’t at the office, they’ll have to find alternative sources for the human interaction they used to find there. 

The economist Robin Hanson writes, “As life at work [when remote] will be less social, people will have to get more of their socializing from elsewhere. So people will choose where they live more based on family, friends, leisure activities, and non-work social connections. Churches, clubs, and shared interest socializing will increase in importance. People will also pick where to live more based on climate, price, and views. Beach towns will boom, and the largest cities will lose.”

So workers will be more dispersed, and more of their working hours will be spent where they live instead of elsewhere in an office. The question is: Could all this lead to a “reset” of the locus of community in America?

Might the center of gravity shift at least somewhat from the office to the neighborhood – back, in a sense, to something closer to a pre-industrial model? What might it mean for our culture if the human contact that offices used to provide is replaced by closer-to-home human connections? And how might that affect the health of local communities and even levels of societal trust?

Mr. Kotkin, whose work has involved researching these dynamics for decades, answers by saying, “Places change people.” And people change places. “I think we’re going to see Americans reinvent themselves, as they’ve always done, as villagers,” he says. “I think they’re craving that. Their attention will be on their local communities in ways it wasn’t when they left that community every day for work. I think we’ll see more civic involvement. I think we’ll see new forms of local affiliation. We’re villagers, basically, because we thrive on human-scale environments, and interdependence; things feel different when you know you can rely on your neighbor for help.”

Here Mr. Kotkin quotes Lenin: “There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.” 

Perhaps generations from now, he suggests, there will be historians who conclude that this pandemic year has been filled with such weeks – and that the world ahead of us will make plain the size of the change.

As a dirty, disheveled punk rocker fresh to Austin in 1978, Jon Dee Graham’s hippie roommates had bad news for him: “Dude, you just missed it.”

What was “it”? A weird, fun Austin that didn’t exist anymore. That’s the axiom that new arrivals have been hearing for decades. But it’s also a myth, says Mr. Graham.

Back then, for example, The Continental Club was just another local venue. Mr. Graham would pay the $2 cover some Monday nights to hear Stevie Ray Vaughan. Back then, the 20-something high school dropout wasn’t yet a legendary Grammy winner. The Continental Club wasn’t yet iconic.

On any given night pre-COVID-19 there could be over 100 shows happening in Austin, including rock, opera, and everything in between. That environment helped Mr. Graham craft a decadeslong, genre-spanning career that was so influential the Austin Chronicle declared it “too [darned] complicated” to place him exactly within the city’s family tree. He’s opened for The Clash and the Ramones. He’s a three-time inductee into the Austin Music Hall of Fame. He’s seen local acts like Spoon and Gary Clark Jr. hit the big time.

He doesn’t feel like he’s missed anything. Until now. 

“We’re rapidly coming up on it being a full year since we played in public,” says Mr. Graham, whose recent performances have been “live” – Facebook Live – from a floral-print couch in his living room. 

There are more than 250 live music venues here, making Austin (according to one article, at least) the best city for live music in the country. From the crowded dance floor at the Broken Spoke to the ornate Paramount Theatre, music accounted for over $1.8 billion in economic output in 2014, noted an economic analysis by the consulting firm TXP. In 1991 the city branded itself the “Live Music Capital of the World.”

Henry Gass/The Christian Science Monitor

Fingerpistol plays for dancing concertgoers at Sam's Town Point in Austin on March 4. As the city's renowned music scene endures the COVID-19 pandemic, more hybrid indoor-outdoor venues like it are the short-term future of live music in Austin.

But where sounds of folk, blues, and Americana once filled these low-rise streets around the Colorado River, there’s now the symphony of construction site jackhammers and excavators echoing off steel and glass skyscrapers. Explosive development in recent years has been pricing musicians and music venues out of the city. And after a year of pandemic restrictions, Austin’s “Live Music Capital” moniker is being challenged like never before.

In the eye of this latest storm, Austin’s music community hopes its intrinsic value is now being properly recognized. Meanwhile, musicians are finding solace and strength in each other, and the knowledge that their resilience and talent for reinvention will continue to help them survive.

“Anything that’s alive changes. If we didn’t change we’d be a dead town,” says Mr. Graham. “But people who were the foot soldiers, who made Austin the sort of place people wanted to come to ... we’re just sort of kicked to the curb.”

Closures and construction cranes

In 1972, Willie Nelson moved back to Texas from Nashville – choosing to pitch his tent in Austin. It proved to be the start of a seminal decade for music in the city.

Iconic venues like Antone’s and the Armadillo World Headquarters – the ’Dillo – opened. “Austin City Limits,” now the longest-running music series in American history, premiered on KLRU – with Mr. Nelson the star of the pilot episode.

Since then Mr. Graham has watched the artsy, affordable college town grow into a modern jungle of condos and tech companies. The civic bird of Austin, he says, is the construction crane – the skyline is dotted with them.

About 170 people have been moving here every day in recent years. In the meantime, venues have been closing and musicians have been moving out. Owning a house has helped Mr. Graham cling on; but even before the pandemic, that was getting unsustainable. During the pandemic he’s been selling his artwork to make up for his lost income from music.

Henry Gass/The Christian Science Monitor

As Austin development in recent years has increased property values and forced out many musicians, jazz singer Sarah Sharp – here, outside her downtown home in February – has managed to stay in the city by renting out her house on Airbnb.

Owning a house has also been crucial for Sarah Sharp and her three children. But the jazz singer, who moved here in 1999, has had to find another way to survive. She can’t afford to live in her house all the time.

“The way I adapted was to Airbnb my house,” says Ms. Sharp.

In 2019 that meant spending 101 nights of the year somewhere else. Last year, after the pandemic canceled the world-famous SXSW festival, it meant losing 20% of her annual revenue. Property taxes increase constantly. 

“It’s always been hard,” she adds. “I’m lucky. I own a house. I have equity in it. But how long can we hold on?”

The city has been trying to help. The city council revised local noise ordinances to allow venues to stay open later into the night, and in 2019 it created a “live music fund” from an increase in hotel taxes. Voters approved a $12 million bond for creative spaces in 2018.

But public support has only been able to do so much amid Austin’s rising rent, property taxes, and hipster allure. The ’Dillo closed in 1980; Soap Creek Saloon closed in 1985; Threadgill’s – home to a weekly gospel music brunch – and Barracuda both closed last year. Meanwhile, companies like Dell, Oracle, and Apple have been setting up shop. In January reports broke that the Music Lab, a popular rehearsal space for decades, would be converted into a Tesla showroom.

“The [music] industry and the artists and the support folk all are an increasing priority to the city,” says Mayor Steve Adler.

Henry Gass/The Christian Science Monitor

A statue of Stevie Ray Vaughan – one of many artists molded by Austin's music scene – graces downtown Town Lake. Along with the pandemic, the rapid economic development stoked by the hip music scene now threatens local music's sustainability in Austin.

Pandemic relief specifically for musicians and venues was slow to arrive – to the point that local music industry members were rallying outside City Hall. It came late last year through the city’s SAVES Resolution and the federal Save Our Stages program – worth $5 million and $15 billion, respectively. A privately funded Black Live Music Fund, to help support Black musicians in the city, launched in November.

But long term the question remains: Can Austin’s growth be maintained without destroying the artistic community that has helped fuel it?

“It has to be, because it’s existential for us as a city,” says Mayor Adler. 

New faces, new places, “same spirit”

Jeannette Gregor hasn’t been able to work for most of the pandemic, yet she still believes Austin’s music community can not only survive, but adapt and progress.

Normally a festival production worker and employee at Mohawk, a venue in the Red River District, she co-founded The Amplified Sound Coalition last year to advocate for pandemic relief for Austin’s music community. 

“This is an opportunity,” she says. “We have time to think about these things. We can look [critically] at our practices.”

She’s not alone. Indeed, changing with the times has been a hallmark of Austin’s music scene. Look no further than Antone’s. The blues hub has had six locations since it opened in 1975. Austin’s musical center of gravity has shifted constantly through the decades, riding the peaks and troughs of real estate values.

Where downtown Sixth Street once dominated, there’s now East Sixth, the Red River District, and South Austin – the latter with Sam’s Town Point at its heart, another potential vision of Austin music’s future.

Ramsay Midwood found Sam’s by accident after taking a wrong turn on his way to a Super Bowl party in 2003. Searching for places to gig, the country blues singer impressed the owners of the nondescript dive at open-mic nights and soon became a regular.

As condo buildings and mall complexes began rising around Sam’s, Mr. Midwood was talked into becoming a co-owner of the “lowfalutin’” oasis of live music. Now, hybrid outdoor/indoor venues like this are likely to be the short-term (at least) future of live music in Austin.

“I kind of fell into it over there,” he says. “Now all of a sudden it’s in the middle of like eight new bars, just because of the nature of the city. It’s growing that way.”

Henry Gass/The Christian Science Monitor

Country blues musician Ramsay Midwood is co-owner of the live music venue Sam's Town Point. HIs association with the club that now operates as a hybrid indoor-outdoor venue is symbolic of Austin's "Live Music Capital of the World" brand and the legendary number of live stages there. Mr. Midwood, as a hungry, young musician, accidentally found the venue when he made a wrong turn on his way to a Super Bowl party in 2003.

Austin “seems like it’s getting back to what it used to be,” he adds. “The same spirit is here, it’s just not in the same place.”

Geography may not be all that shifts. The police killing of George Floyd last summer roiled Austin as much as any other city in the country – for decades, while the city’s overall population has been growing, its Black population has been declining. In that moment, local Black musicians, like Jonathan “Chaka” Mahone and Jackie Venson, gained traction for longstanding campaigns to improve equity for musicians of color, from financial support like the Black Music Fund to more exposure in an industry they feel has long overlooked them.

“In the past I think bookers and promoters had blind spots,” says Akina Adderley, a local Black singer and songwriter. People like Mr. Mahone and Ms. Venson, she says, “have done a great job of capturing that moment to hold our city, and our gatekeepers of artistry, accountable.”

Ms. Adderley has been relatively productive, musically, during the pandemic. She’s recorded and released a single, and recorded back-up vocals for other artists – all done remotely from home. She’s performed live twice, including an audience-less “Austin City Limits” taping with Ms. Venson.

“To be reminded that you could do such a thing, perform music with humans together [and have] all that energy being passed among the band members, was really amazing,” Ms. Adderley says.

And it’s evidence of how music in Austin can adapt and survive even through these toughest of times, she adds.

“Our greatest resource is the people and the community and the really creative folks we have,” she continues. With that “we definitely have a shot at just not necessarily rebuilding, but starting anew.”

Mr. Graham yearns for that. The past year has been a shadow of his normal life. He starts his livestream at 7 p.m. every Wednesday. That’s when, for almost 25 years, he’s taken the stage at The Continental Club – the same stage where, for $2 in the 1980s, he could hear Stevie Ray Vaughan.

On a cold Wednesday night in February, Mr. Graham nestles into a floral print sofa with his son, William, performing with him. Bold black glasses accentuate his thick white beard and gray beanie. Hugging a guitar, he thanks the few dozen Facebook Live viewers who’ve been listening. He shouts, he laughs, and he sings of moonlit skies and Amsterdam sunshine “sweeter than Van Gogh yellow.” But it’s all bittersweet.

He notices that the one live audience member, his dog Winston, has slept through it. He doesn’t know when he’ll return to The Continental Club, but when he does, he says, he’ll probably cry.

“I don’t see an unchanged society coming after this,” he adds. “But the griot, the troubadour, the vaudevillian – they have never gone without work.”

AP

Volunteers carry food to waiting cars at a mobile food pantry in West Valley City, Utah.

A Gallup Poll in December noted a sharp rise in the number of Americans who would prefer to live in smaller localities. Nearly 50% would choose a town or rural area rather than a city or suburb. That’s up from 39% two years ago, or before COVID-19. During times of national upheaval like a pandemic, Gallup noted, more people search for safety in less-crowded places. These are also communities with higher levels of trust where people tend to know each other, often providing what Abraham Lincoln called “the bonds of affection.”

This new preference for smaller communities fits with another trend over the past year. Of the more than $20 billion in charitable grants provided for COVID-19 relief, more than half were given by hundreds of community foundations. These are local philanthropies whose pots of money range from $100,000 to $1.7 billion, while the median grant size is only about $10,000. With their on-the-ground knowledge, community foundations are better able than national institutions to listen to the needs of local people. In 2020, their work was supported by more than 1,000 charity groups created in response to COVID-19, such as new food banks.

“Philanthropy has responded to COVID-19 like no other crisis in recent memory,” states a report by two charity-related groups, Candid and the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, that included a tracking of community foundations.

The report explains that many communities already have “highly resilient support networks” that can be easily reached by donors. This is especially true for marginalized Americans. More than a third of philanthropy for COVID-19 relief went to Black and Indigenous communities, and other minority groups.

“If a large giver can support a community foundation, then the [everyday] gifts can flow through with little or no overhead,” said Bill Gates of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at a seminar last month. He refers to local giving as “deep engagement.”

Local giving is hardly new. “Giving circles” that rely on individuals in a community sprang up in the 1980s. By 2017, they numbered more than 1,600 in the U.S. Last year’s post-Thanksgiving donation day known as Giving Tuesday netted an estimated $2.47 billion, a 25% increase over 2019, with much of that money going to local needs. The internet has helped local givers to better pool their donations for greater impact.

Yet “COVID-19 has inspired a groundswell of response to human need,” wrote a group of philanthropy scholars in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. “These expanded ways of giving promote greater participation and reshape the meaning of citizenship.” They are also expanding the bonds between people within communities in the spirit of what Lincoln called “charity for all.”