Everyday volunteers provided stopgap services during the shutdown in a show of community power

It started with a late October meeting between a lifestyle entrepreneur, a marketing professional, a restaurant owner, and a social worker at a brewery in the Florida panhandle.

- James Pollard

Within hours, Pensacola Grocery Buddies was born.

The four women wanted to pair people facing uncertainty over Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program food benefits with individuals who were charitably inclined and offered to cover grocery costs and deliveries. In just two weeks, co-organizer Hale Morrissette said they've made over 300 matches and raised more than $10,000 for those they cannot connect.

"Everybody's stepping up," said Morrissette, 35, the operations director at a local health nonprofit called ROOTS. "They know that this is not something that's like a partisan type of issue. It's about service and it's about taking care of each other."

Every day, people have improvised such stopgap efforts to support their communities through a historically long government shutdown that has deepened disruptions to federal services. Whether feeding hungry families or maintaining local museum tours, volunteers nationwide are strengthening social ties that they hope will continue making their neighbors whole in the face of persistent precarity.

At the Oklahoma City National Memorial, volunteers have stepped in, providing the grounds tours that were typically led by furloughed National Park Service rangers. The site honors the 168 people killed 30 years ago when a truck bomb detonated outside a federal building, the deadliest homegrown attack on US soil.

Pat Hall, a 74-year-old state lobbyist and memorial trustee whose wife was there the day of the explosion, said he was "honored to step up" and "keep the flame alive." His first tour group was a senior class that had traveled three hours by bus from their rural high school.

Hall said he wanted to ensure that the government shutdown didn't stop visitors from learning "the Oklahoma standard," a term born from the 1995 attack to promote a culture of caring throughout the state.