Purpose-Today, low-income people seeking resources from the federal government must often work through non-profit organizations. The purpose of this paper is to examine the constraints that the poor must face today to secure resources through non-profit organizations. Design/methodology/approach-This is a conceptual paper. The authors review cases of non-profit organizations providing federally supported resources to the poor across multiple sectors. Findings-The authors find that to accept government contracts serving the poor, nonprofit organizations must often engage in one or several practices: reject clients normally consistent with their mission, select clients based on likely outcomes, ignore problems in clients' lives relevant to their predicament, or undermine client progress to manage funding requirements. To secure government-supported resources from nonprofits, the poor must often acquiesce to intrusions into one or more of the following: their privacy (disclosing sensitive information), their self-protection (renouncing legal rights), their identity (avowing a particular self-understanding) or their self-mastery (relinquishing authority over daily routines). Originality/value-The authors show that the nonprofits' dual role as brokers, both liaisons transferring resources and representatives of the state, can complicate their relation to their clients and the predicament of the poor themselves; the authors suggest that two larger trends, toward increasing administrative accountability and demonstrating deservingness, are having both intended and unintended consequences for the ability of low-income individuals to gain access to publicly funded resources.

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Sociological writings on panhandling have depicted protracted donor relationships as one of panhandlers’ surest paths to an income, while portraying the fleetingness of one-off appeals as a major barrier. In this article, I recast fleetingness as a facilitator of panhandlers’ fundamental task: trying to seem worthy of aid without attracting unwanted legal attention. Using participant-observation data from a Chicago neighborhood, I outline two favorable elements of fleetingness: it allows panhandlers to evoke sorrowful compassion only for a moment, denying passersby the chance to get stuck in the feeling; and grants passersby only a brief period to evaluate the candor of panhandlers’ appeals. Together, these limit potential givers’ deliberative capacity—their capacity to determine that the panhandlers before them are bothersome, intimidating, deceitful, censurable, or the like. Protracted time horizons still matter, but primarily insofar as panhandlers work continuously, and collectively, to uphold the neighborhood conditions that enable their fleeting appeals.