Meeting the Local Mission: Flexible Staffing Solutions for Community-Based Organizations

Brian Moore June 9, 2025 Reading Time: < 3 minutes

1

Community-based organizations (CBOs) are the lifeblood of America’s neighborhoods, filling in gaps of service to address critical social, health, and economic needs of underserved populations. Whether it’s providing vital healthcare services or social support, CBOs contribute to stronger, healthier communities — all while facing their own uncertainty. Evolving government programs, shifting federal priorities, and fluctuating demand for services add up to a challenging environment for CBOs.

A primary problem facing CBOs nationwide: staffing and recruitment, among other scarcity of resources. In September 2024, just 10%¹ of CBO leaders felt equipped to support their capacity needs, pinpointing shortcomings in staff recruitment, data and technology infrastructure, and staff development. In another study, 88.9%² of CBOs cited deficiencies in internal infrastructure, staff, and data development. Staffing is a recurring theme — one that mirrors the challenge facing the entire healthcare industry.

Community-Based Organization Staffing Hurdles

CBOs are in a constant state of adaptation. As nonprofit organizations, they rely on the ebb and flow of state and federal funding for a significant portion of their budget. Their operations are also often dictated by the introduction of new government programs or the conclusion of others. These changes in funding and the project-based nature of their work combine to create a range of staffing challenges for CBOs.

The need to quickly scale teams up or down based on program requirements can be a logistical nightmare, diverting precious time and resources away from core service delivery. Beyond the cyclical nature of funding, CBOs face ongoing difficulties in maintaining consistent staffing levels and securing specialized talent. These challenges manifest in several critical ways:

Intense workforce shortages: Nearly all community-based providers, approximately 95%, reported moderate to severe staffing shortages in 20233, leading to significant operational strain. This highlights a fundamental imbalance between demand for services and available talent. For example, 77% of community-based providers reported turning away new referrals, and 72% experienced difficulty adhering to quality standards in 2023.³
Limited budgets for salaries: Since CBOs rely heavily on grants and fundraising, they cannot offer the competitive salaries and benefits of their for-profit counterparts. This constraint hinders their ability to attract and retain top talent. It’s not a problem unique to CBOs, as 72% of nonprofits cited it as their top challenge⁴.
Smaller candidate pools: The lower compensation and specific skill sets required for community work leave CBOs with a limited pool of qualified candidates to tap into, intensifying recruitment challenges.
High turnover and low retention: Often losing employees to higher paying opportunities or more stable jobs, CBOs struggle to retain talent. This turnover creates a recurring need to fill vacancies, increasing recruitment costs and disrupting continuity of service continuity.
Stress and burnout: The demanding nature of healthcare work in underserved communities, often coupled with limited resources and high caseloads, contributes to significant stress and burnout among CBO teams. This impacts morale, productivity, and further degrades retention.

These persistent hurdles can overwhelm already lean administrative teams and interfere with an organization’s ability to focus on what matters most: fulfilling its mission to serve the community.

Community-Based Organization Staffing: The Medix Approach

CBOs need flexible staffing solutions to match their fluctuating needs. A specialized staffing partner like Medix with experience in community-based organization staffing is ideal. Medix understands the unique demands of CBOs and provides flexible healthcare and care management staffing solutions that align with project needs and changing priorities.

The benefits of partnering with Medix directly answer many challenges CBOs face:

Agility and responsiveness: With temporary or contract-to-hire staffing models, Medix enables CBOs to quickly scale teams up or down as programs expand, shrink, or shift focus. This flexibility is critical in responding to immediate needs and creating a reliable source of future talent.
Access to specialized talent: Medix has a vast network of qualified local candidates, allowing CBOs to fill niche roles like community health workers, housing navigators, and care managers with specialized talent when and where it’s needed without the lengthy recruitment process of a permanent hire.
Reduced administrative burden: By leveraging Medix’s end-to-end hiring process, CBOs can significantly offload the time-consuming tasks of recruitment, screening, onboarding, and payroll management. CBOs often lack in-house resources specifically for talent acquisition, so a staffing partner relieves team members of the burden.
Cost-effectiveness: For temporary or project-based needs, flexible staffing can be more cost-effective than permanent hires, as it avoids the overhead associated with benefits, training, and potential severance.
Ensuring mission continuity: Ultimately, by streamlining recruitment, a staffing partner allows CBOs to maintain focus on their core mission: ensuring consistent service delivery and continuous community impact.

Solutions in Action: Supporting CalAIM Enhanced Care Management Staffing

Our solutions for community-based organization staffing are best illustrated through a real-world example. A recent case involves our partnership with a CBO to support California’s innovative CalAIM initiative, specifically the enhanced care management (ECM) program. This vital program delivers essential services to some of the state’s most vulnerable Medicare beneficiaries.

Background: CalAIM is a significant evolution in California’s healthcare landscape, introducing new programs like ECM that required immediate and specialized staffing to succeed.

The challenge: The client faced intense pressure to quickly operationalize new contracts under CalAIM. This demanded a rapid onboarding of qualified talent, including community health workers, housing navigators, and care managers, in geographically diverse areas, many of them in rural regions.

The solution: Using our flexible staffing solutions and leveraging our deep understanding of the healthcare and social services sectors, we worked with urgency to identify and deploy qualified candidates. Our extensive network allowed us to source local talent across a wide geographic footprint.

The results: In our work with the CBO, we have placed 91 care management professionals across 6 different roles since January 2024. This quick scaling of its team enabled the client to operationalize their new CalAIM contracts, ensuring the seamless delivery of essential services to vulnerable populations across California. This allowed the CBO to focus on program execution and positive patient outcomes rather than the resource-draining task of large-scale recruitment.

Partner With Medix for Community-Based Organization Staffing Solutions

CBOs are indispensable pillars of support for our communities, yet they must consistently overcome the complex challenges of unpredictable funding, evolving programs, and variable staffing. Traditional staffing approaches are often an insufficient answer.

A partnership with Medix provides CBOs with flexible staffing solutions that are reliable, efficient, and effective. By leveraging our expertise developed over nearly 25 years, CBOs can quickly respond to changing demands, access the specialized talent they need precisely when they need it, and reduce administrative workloads. This partnership empowers CBOs to remain focused on their core mission: making a profound and lasting positive impact on the lives of those they serve. Contact us today to start building your ideal CBO team.

Sources: