In Brazilian peripheries, relations among citizens and the state are often mediated by grassroots civil society organisations. Local forms of organisation act in a complex field where public sectors' departments, multilateral organisations, charities, local politicians and the private sector interact with dwellers, social movements, cultural collectives, religious groups and neighbours’ associations. All these engagements come into play in social projects carried out in slums, usually targeting especially women, children, adolescent and youth at "social risk”. This work is not a mere provision of social services and care. It is usually carried out along socialisation into civic life, collective action practices such as claim making and negotiations for civic participation. Locally referred to as “community work”, these actions are mainly carried out by women actively engaged in brokerage of social services, institutional articulation, communication, public relations and lots of management work. Insights from previous research I carried out in the periphery of Salvador (Brazil) among 2010 and 2017 suggest that black women community leaders’ political role is becoming more relevant, while they move beyond their “communities”, towards local electoral politics. In this paper I give ethnographic accounts of black women community leaders’ work and its multiple engagements with local state, participatory publics and electoral politics, in order to formulate research questions about their work and political relevance, in the face of contemporary social reproduction crisis, exposed even more by the effects of coronavirus pandemic.