Community Action Transit Supports Whole Communities

Community Action Agencies (CAAs) are locally governed organizations that work alongside communities to address the local causes and conditions of poverty and support economic mobility for individuals and families. There are just under 1,000 CAAs nationwide, serving approximately 99 percent of U.S. counties. A defining feature of the Community Action model is the required Community Needs Assessment, conducted at least once every three years, which incorporates local data, the voices of community members, and input from key stakeholders. These assessments directly inform the services and strategies CAAs deploy. Because CAAs are designed to respond to local priorities, the strategies they deploy vary by community—but are consistently grounded in local evidence, lived experience, and coordination with partners.

While CAAs operate a wide range of services based on local conditions, common threads appear across the network. Many CAAs provide employment services to help people secure and retain work; early childhood services, including Head Start, to support children and families; and housing-related services ranging from energy assistance and weatherization to rental assistance and homeownership support. Across these domains, transportation repeatedly emerges as a shared constraint: people cannot reach jobs with nontraditional hours, health care is located outside public transit routes, or services exist but are inaccessible without reliable transportation. In response, CAAs are often involved in designing, operating, or coordinating transit solutions that reflect local conditions, including employment-focused transportation, rural transit models, volunteer driver programs, and partnerships that integrate transit with other services.

Insights From the Community Action Transit Forum

In December 2025, the National Community Action Partnership (NCAP) hosted its first Community Action Transit Forum, bringing together more than 100 participants to examine how CAAs are approaching transportation in different community contexts. The forum featured examples from Maui Economic Opportunity (HI), Panhandle Community Services (TX), and West Central Missouri Community Action Agency’s New Growth Transit (MO), along with resources from the Coordinating Council on Access and Mobility Technical Assistance Center (CCAM-TAC).

Across very different geographies and models, several clear insights emerged:

• Transit functions as a system, not a standalone service. Forum examples showed that transportation works—or fails—based on how well it is coordinated with other systems. Eligibility rules, scheduling, intake processes, referrals, and partner roles all shape whether a ride actually helps someone reach a job, appointment, or service. Vehicles matter, but coordination determines whether transit is usable in practice.
• Transit shapes workforce stability and service access at a community level. Transportation was repeatedly described as an enabling condition for community-wide wellbeing. When transit is reliable and aligned with local needs, employers experience improved retention, service providers see fewer missed appointments, and communities reduce friction between people and essential services. These effects accumulate across systems, not just individual riders, to support community-level well-being.
• Transit must evolve as local conditions evolve. Changes in employment patterns, service locations, and funding streams were common across forum examples. Transit routes, schedules, or eligibility structures that once worked often require adjustment. CAAs’ ongoing engagement with community members and partners creates the feedback loops needed to make those adjustments over time.

Connecting Communities Through Transit
The forum showed that when CAAs engage in transportation, it’s not just about moving people from point A to point B. Transit services allow communities to function more smoothly — getting people to work, taking kids to school, increasing access to services, and linking employers to reliable staff. By grounding transit solutions in local conditions and maintaining ongoing feedback loops, CAAs make systems work better for everyone, supporting mobility, opportunity, and resilience across the community.

Click here to watch the Community Action Transit Forum: Connecting Models, Communities, and CAA Practice

Click here to see the slides from the event