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})Service Gaps
Overlaying nonprofit coverage with poverty and social vulnerability
Key finding Nonprofit coverage and community need are misaligned at both the county and neighborhood level. Spokane County has the region’s highest CDC Social Vulnerability Index score and 22 of its 38 high-vulnerability census tracts — but the region’s lowest rate of human-services nonprofits per resident. At the ZIP level, 27 of 100 populated ZIP codes combine above-median poverty with below-median human-services coverage — nearly half in Spokane County, including urban-core neighborhoods, with the rest spread across rural Stevens, Lincoln, Kootenai, and Whitman counties.
How to read this page
“Coverage” here means registered human-services nonprofits (NTEE I, J, K, L, O, P) per resident — a measure of organizational presence, not service volume or quality. “Need” is measured two ways: the share of residents below the federal poverty line (Census ACS 2019–2023) and the CDC/ATSDR Social Vulnerability Index (SVI 2022), which ranks every county and tract nationally from 0 (least vulnerable) to 1 (most vulnerable). Where high need meets low presence, residents likely travel farther, wait longer, or go without.
County level: vulnerability vs. coverage
Bubble size = population. The lower-right corner — high vulnerability, low coverage — is the gap zone. Spokane County sits closest to it, with the region’s highest SVI (0.56) and lowest human-services density (7.8 per 10k). Kootenai County pairs the second-lowest coverage with fast population growth.
Neighborhood level: poverty vs. coverage by ZIP
Each dot is a ZIP code (bubble size = population). The dashed lines mark the regional medians, dividing ZIPs into four quadrants; the upper-left — above-median poverty, below-median coverage — is where gaps concentrate. Red dots are the 27 gap-quadrant ZIPs.
ZIPs with fewer than 250 residents excluded; coverage clipped at 3 per 1,000 for readability. College-town ZIPs (Pullman 99163, Moscow 83843) show high “poverty” rates driven largely by students. Data: NCCS BMF, ACS 2019–2023 (ZCTA), see Methodology.
Where the most vulnerable tracts are
The CDC flags 38 of the region’s 214 populated census tracts in the top quartile of national social vulnerability (SVI ≥ 0.75) — home to about 165,000 people, one in five regional residents. Their distribution shows the double geography of need: a dense cluster in urban Spokane plus scattered rural tracts.
The gap list: high-poverty, low-coverage ZIP codes
The table lists every gap-quadrant ZIP — above-median poverty, below-median human-services coverage — sorted by poverty rate. Small rural ZCTAs carry wide ACS margins of error; treat individual rows as flags for local verification, not verdicts.
What this suggests
Three patterns stand out for funders, policymakers, and nonprofit leaders:
- Spokane’s paradox. The county with the region’s deepest institutional bench has its thinnest per-capita human-services layer — its large organizations serve many people, but the count of distinct service points has not kept pace with concentrated urban need.
- Rural coverage is nominal, not operational. Small counties look well-covered per capita, but their “human services” organizations are often tiny, volunteer-run, and food-pantry-scale — while the highest poverty ZIPs in Stevens and Lincoln counties have no registered human-services nonprofit at all.
- Kootenai’s growth gap. The region’s fastest-growing county pairs low vulnerability today with the region’s second-thinnest overall nonprofit infrastructure (after Spokane itself) — a capacity question as its population ages and diversifies.