CJ Dates, the Adirondack Foundation’s Director of Philanthropic Services, delivers the keynote address at the Adirondack Research Consortium’s 29th annual Conference on the Adirondacks on Thursday in Lake Placid. (Enterprise photo — Chris Gaige)

LAKE PLACID — The Adirondack Research Consortium’s 29th annual Conference on the Adirondacks went beyond quantitative data during its keynote address.

That was delivered by CJ Dates, who wove in the human element and perspective behind some of the most pressing socioeconomic issues facing the region. It’s a set of topics that Dates is well-versed in. As the Adirondack Foundation’s director of philanthropic services, he frequently meets with a wide array of people and organizations throughout the Adirondacks to raise and organize both human and financial capital geared toward improving those issues.

Dates had a captivated audience. The two-day conference brought together an audience of academics, nonprofit groups, local leaders, students and community members. Dates’ speech came on the heels of Adirondack Foundation’s Adirondack Regional Social Safety Network 2024 report, which was conducted by Adirondack Research’s Ashley Milne and Ezra Schwartzberg. The report focused on six core areas of analysis.

¯ Food security/access to foods that support healthy dietary patterns

¯ Health and specialty care access

¯ Transportation

¯ Workforce stability/child care

¯ Housing stability/quality of housing

¯ Social Cohesion

Dates encouraged the audience to read the report, adding that while he left much of the hard data out of his remarks, given his speaking time constraints and the fact that those are already available, knowing those are crucial to getting a better sense of the socioeconomic problems he laid out.

The report can be found in its entirety at adirondackfoundation.org/safetynet.

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Topline takeaways

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Dates began by acknowledging the uncertainty of the times with possible federal cuts to social safety net funding. He said he redrafted his speech eight times leading up to the conference to reflect the latest in a rapidly changing landscape, but acknowledged the work around rewriting a speech paled in comparison to the difficulties faced by those who are directly reliant upon the social safety net.

“The revisions of the talk are a nice little metaphor for the social safety net itself,” he said. “If I’m having to change just what I’m saying because of the news, then you can imagine what those of you who are working in the community are experiencing. Those people who are dependent upon the social safety net — what they’re experiencing.”

Reflecting on his many discussions throughout the Adirondacks, Dates shared some big-picture takeaways.

“Small hamlets and villages, they are wary of anyone sugarcoating their struggles,” he said. “Or, suggesting that solutions might come easily. And, they don’t want outside groups to try to suggest to them, or impose upon them, a solution.”

Though he said this would likely not come as a surprise to many in the room, Dates said it was important to state candidly.

“To that first point, this is me not sugarcoating it: our social safety net in the region is in rough shape,” he said.

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It gets personal

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The report provides ample quantitative data points demonstrating that precarity. Dates drew on experiences shared by friends and acquaintances in recent weeks through various community events he attended. One of which was a dinner.

Dates said community gatherings that provide free food, often intended as a way to simply grease the social skids and provide for something for folks to sit down with each other for, can take on a much more impactful role.

“It was at that moment that my friend jokingly said that this week she was on the free meal plan,” Dates said. “There was laughter among the group, because all these young people knew that through social media and text threads, there’s a community of people who know where a free community meal is available any given night of the week. And you can find them if you need it consistently or if you’re just in-between paychecks, you can share that information with others who might need it.”

Dates said that what was, in the moment, a light-hearted reaction to the comment was indicative of deeper local socioeconomic alarm bells.

“You can tell in that group the laughter is sort of a social psychological protection, right?” he said. “As a way of signaling to each other that there was no judgment about what … they were experiencing. They’re all facing these similar issues around housing and food access, which brings to sharp focus for all of us food insecurity.”

Dates added that the people sitting at the table with him that evening did not fit a stereotypical framework of a group who could not afford food, or housing. He said one person, despite having a full-time job, was forced to couch surf with co-workers for months after moving here from the West Coast, as they could not find an apartment despite actively looking.

“These are employed people, they’re not living extravagant lifestyles,” he said. “But they’re still having to make food access in budget choices like that.”

Dates shared a story of a mother he met at a different community event. Like the dinner table crowd, she was employed, though her hourly-wage job did not include healthcare.

Dates said she was instead reliant on WellNow Urgent Care and Planned Parenthood, though those were not easily reachable from where she lives. While balancing work and caring for her children, this woman was only able to seek care on weekends, as opposed to when it was most needed.

“She told me she has consistent lower-back pain, but cannot afford the prices for specialty care for real medical attention,” Dates said. “So she works through the pain in order to provide for her children.”

Dates said she was denied Medicaid benefits to receive special care for this — and the woman told him that even if she had, specialty care is so far away that it would be difficult for her to arrange the time to seek it out or justify driving the distance, given the price of gas and its impact on her budget.

He said this personal anecdote, while heartbreaking, was in accordance with what Adirondack Foundation’s report had found. People have had to pass up the medical care they would seek or the groceries they would buy on account of not having the means to physically get there.

“Our study shows that people in the Adirondack region are making budget choices about food and transportation in conjunction with one another,” he said. “They’re buying cheaper groceries, sometimes on credit, choosing cheaper foods, spending more on cheap foods from gas stations that are closer to them because they live in a food desert, rather than spending more on gas to drive farther for better-quality foods.”

Dates said food choices, in turn, have well-documented downstream effects. While obvious to many, he said it was important to state the connection and emphasize its cyclical nature.

“Of course, the cheaper foods have the compounding effect of being worse for the environment in their production process and packaging, as well as being nutritionally deficient, leading to complicated health outcomes like obesity, heart disease, hypertension (and) diabetes,” he said.

Just as the problems are interrelated, Dates said it’s the same issue for people and groups, many of which are already operating on shoestring budgets, as they look to try to tackle the problems laid out in the report — where to start?

“We’re facing this sort of chicken and egg question,” he said. “Do we put jobs before housing? Do we put housing before jobs? Do we put childcare in to create job stability? Do we put family housing access before childcare capacity? You can offer anyone a competitive salary and access to childcare, but if there’s nowhere to live, how do they move to the region?”

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A potential nexus

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Dates said the Adirondack Foundation came to a realization in recent years that being able to fix the problems is dependent on, as a precondition, a strong community fabric. It’s one of the reasons why the foundation launched its Kindling Awards program, which provides $1,000 in funding to 30 events each year throughout the Adirondacks that aim to bolster community connections.

“Community collaboration and social cohesion are going to be the infrastructural and relational loom upon which any reweaving will occur,” he said.

Dates spoke about the research conducted by sociologist Seth Kaplan in his book “Fragile Neighborhoods.” He said it showed that there are two types of poverty in America: economic and social. Kaplan argues that while they are often related, they are not always concurrent with each other, and places with a strong sense of community tend to be more resilient, which is important when investing in solutions meant to uplift a regional economy.

“We’re aiming to do this in the Adirondacks, because Kaplan’s research shows that solutions to economic issues have more chances of sticking when communities have strong networks of neighbors,” Dates said. “You can throw as much money as you want to in the form of federal funding or nonprofit programs or volunteer initiatives at a problem if you want. If there is no cohesive community for these efforts to adhere to, they won’t last and they won’t have much of an impact.”

Dates said social cohesion is not a partisan matter, and improving those ties — as an antecedent to improving a region’s socioeconomic condition — requires ideas and cooperation from both sides of the aisle.

“Government assistance, a tool favored by the left, and more efficient markets, as favored by the right, are both badly needed, but not nearly sufficient,” he said. “In fact, the places that have benefited most from these are those that have put robust social institutions in place. So, for scale and impact, we need to put structures that shape the nature of our relationships first and foremost.”

Dates said getting these structures in place starts at the street level. He encouraged people, if they don’t already, to make an effort to get to know their neighbors, share ideas on how to address the problems they see in the community that they both have a stake in seeing be its best.

As for a starting point, Dates said reading the 2024 Adirondack Regional Social Safety Network report may spark ideas between neighbors and new friends on where to begin engaging to improve communities and the social fabric.

“Maybe you could get some other people and friends together to read it,” he said. “I’ve heard that it pairs well with warm coffee, dark chocolate, red wine (and/or) shared meals.”