Participants report challenges across multiple areas of life #

Participants rarely face a single, isolated problem. Instead, they are navigating overlapping pressures that span multiple areas of life at once. We ask participants how things are going across many domains, including health, housing, support, caregiving, transportation, education, relationships, safety, work, and government or legal matters. The most commonly reported areas of difficulty after finances are health, work, and transportation, with similar distributions across the three counties.

Financial barriers cut across domains #

When participants rate a domain as challenging, they are asked a follow-up question about the specific barriers contributing to that difficulty. Across those responses, financial barriers accounted for 46% of all specific barriers selected, regardless of domain. When people are struggling with health, work, housing, or transportation, the specific barriers they point to are often financial: they cannot afford medication, cannot cover car repairs, or cannot pay rent.

Barriers overlap and compound #

But finances are not the only thread connecting these challenges. On average, participants report three domains as challenging, and more than a quarter (26%) report two or more areas that are very challenging. The barriers participants identify within each domain frequently overlap, not only because financial pressure runs through many of them, but because constraints in one area often create or worsen constraints in others.

Transportation offers a clear example. When participants report transportation as challenging, they almost always rank it among their top three most challenging domains. The specific barriers participants identify—a vehicle that needs repairs or is unreliable, no vehicle at all, or transportation costs that are too high—extend far beyond transportation itself. In interviews, participants describe how unreliable transportation affects their ability to work, access healthcare, buy food, and manage family responsibilities. One participant in Beaufort shares a vehicle across five adults in her household. As a result, no one can maintain full-time employment. Without stable work hours, the household does not qualify for SNAP, forcing her to rely on food banks she struggles to reach without consistent transportation. What begins as a barrier in one domain quickly becomes a constraint in several others.

Work-related challenges are similarly entangled. Among participants who report difficulty with work, the most common barriers are that available jobs do not pay enough or lack benefits and are too far away. But these are often compounded by other constraints. The next most common work-related barriers participants identify are health issues, caregiving responsibilities, and transportation problems. Together, these constraints shape what jobs participants can take, how many hours they can work, how far they can travel, and whether they can sustain employment over time. Employment challenges reflect both the structure of local labor markets and the realities of participants' lives outside of work.

Qualitative interviews show how this looks in participants' daily lives #

The qualitative data make the interconnected nature of barriers especially clear. Across the three counties, roughly half of participants were working at the time of their interviews. Among those who were not, most were out of the workforce due to disability or serious health conditions, caregiving responsibilities, or temporary medical leave. Here too, barriers rarely operated in isolation. One participant has been unemployed for nearly a decade since his employer closed; ongoing health issues and lack of transportation limit his job search to a narrow geographic area with few opportunities. Another turned down job offers because she needs to be home when her children get off the bus. In both cases, employment barriers are inseparable from health, transportation, and caregiving barriers.

Health challenges follow a somewhat different pattern. While health is the second most commonly reported area of difficulty, the barriers participants identify are often the conditions themselves rather than structural factors like cost or provider access. Ongoing mental health conditions and physical health conditions are the most frequently reported barriers, a near-even split that underscores how central both are to participants' daily lives. 

In qualitative interviews, only one third characterize themselves as being in good health. Many live with chronic conditions that shape daily routines and limit what is possible. Some have never been able to work because of their health. Others point to a sharp turning point where a crisis disrupted an otherwise stable situation, leading to job loss, financial strain, and reduced mobility. This distinction matters: some barriers are closely tied to immediate financial constraints that may shift as resources change, while others reflect longer-term conditions that participants have managed for years.

Challenge breadth and severity vary #

The typical participant is managing moderate challenges across an average of three domains of life, but there is meaningful variation. While about half report no domains that are "very challenging," those with the lowest incomes face both more widespread and more severe difficulties, with fewer reporting zero very challenging areas and more reporting difficulty across three or more.

As challenges become more severe, the nature of barriers shifts as well. For participants without any “very challenging” domains, financial barriers make up the majority of reported barriers. But among those facing serious challenges across multiple areas, financial barriers are joined by social ones, such as isolation or lack of support, and local or structural barriers, such as limited job opportunities or inadequate services. For these participants, financial pressure remains central, but it is only one part of a more complex set of constraints.

Taken together, these patterns show not only which barriers are most common, but how participants experience them as interconnected and mutually reinforcing. A central question going forward is how these dynamics evolve over time: which barriers, if any, ease, which persist, and and how shifts in one area of life affect others.

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