By now, everyone has heard of the church group that was stopped and arrested by Haitian authorities and charged with abducting Haitian children. It seems this mission may not have been quite so humanitarian after all. Continue reading »
It is embarrassing for the nonprofit sector to remain silent about the NFL’s sham practice of going through the motions of recruiting and interviewing people of color to be head coaches when it is simply a pretense—compliance with the “Rooney Rule” that requires teams to interview at least one person of color before they can then proceed to hire the white man they intended to hire all along. This is an issue for nonprofits–because behind the entertainment of the games, the National Football League is a big time, very wealthy, high powered tax exempt organization.
HUD’s announcement on January 14th of the second round of Neighborhood Stabilization Program grants (from the stimulus program) for the acquisition and rehabilitation of foreclosed residential properties is strong evidence of the importance of nonprofits in the nation’s economic recovery. In some cases, regional or national nonprofits got large sums for multi-city or multi-state work, sometimes in addition to their local affiliates getting funding through state or city grants: for example, $137.6 million to Habitat for Humanity International for work in five states and $137 million to Chicanos por la Causa for work in eight states. Among the 60 grant recipients are consortia in which nonprofits have significant design and implementation leadership responsibilities in very creative initiatives: Continue reading »
State budgets were a mess in FY2009, a debacle in FY2010, and look like impending catastrophes in FY2011. We’ve been visited by the Ghost of Christmas Present this past holiday season with rampaging budget deficits and corresponding cuts in critical social safety net programs and services. Knocking at the door is the Ghost of Christmas Future with warnings of continuing program rescissions and terminations unless governments and voters, like a dumbfounded Scrooge, come to their senses and radically change their revenue-raising and budget-allocating ways. Continue reading »
On December 30th, the White House released additional names of its visitors through the end of September. Some 26,000 visits are in the latest spreadsheets made available to the public.
Here are the problems: According to the Sunlight Foundation, approximately 100,000 people visit the White House each month. The numbers don’t match, even if you assume that the White House is deleting some names due to national security or privacy reasons. Continue reading »
Continuing their roles as scourges of what they see as wasteful earmarks, Republican Senators John McCain (AZ) and Tom Coburn (OK) have issued a report on wasteful projects getting money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the $787 billion so-called stimulus legislation passed early in 2009. In any large and rushed government expenditure, there are going to be opportunities for critics to take aim at expenditures that don’t look like they’re quite the wisest. Continue reading »
What should nonprofits make of the gubernatorial election successes of Chris Christie in New Jersey and Robert McDonnell in Virginia? State-specific and national-level clues abound, although hardly in the candidates’ own pronouncements. McDonnell was the candidate of job creation, Christie ran a campaign described by the Wall Street Journal as “content free,” but it takes some tea leaf reading to predict how nonprofits will fare in their administrations. Continue reading »
In Part I, we examined the emergence of online nonprofit newspapers and nonprofit investigative journalism venues, suggesting a potential new direction for U.S. journalism. Is the conversion of a for-profit newspaper to a 501(c)(3) public charity an answer for the future survival of newspapers? Will the legislation introduced by Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) and Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) help newspapers find their way to becoming nonprofits? Continue reading »
In March, Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) introduced the Newspaper Revitalization Act, which would allow daily newspapers under certain circumstances to become federally tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofits.
Perhaps he was concerned by floundering newspapers in Baltimore–the Examiner which has gone under and the Sun whose parent company, the Tribune Corporation, has filed for bankruptcy protection.
Is the nonprofit sector going to be the salvation of the U.S. newspaper industry? Is it possible that tomorrow’s Charles Foster Kane will find himself running a public charity and asking foundations for grants and loans? Will local nonprofits soon find themselves competing with entities named Times, Post, and Daily News for foundation largesse? Continue reading »
The Corporation for National and Community Service held a conference call on October 15th to describe the emerging Social Innovation Fund and address questions submitted by nonprofits and foundations that might want to participate. To say that the conference call was well attended would be an understatement. The SIF has generated lots of attention disproportionate to the relatively small $50 million appropriation recommended in President Obama’s FY2010 budget. One reason is that the SIF isn’t meant to fund specific nonprofit program topic or themes like youth or education or health or environment. Created by the SERVE America Act, the SIF will support efforts to strengthen and replicate nonprofit innovation.
According to the conference call, the CNCS will issue a Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA) for the program later this fall with grants to be given to regrantmaking intermediaries in the late spring or summer of 2010. At this late stage, it’s hard to imagine that the SIF program managers at the Corporation are going to rejigger the program design much beyond what they described in the conference call. But as observers and analysts of the intersection of nonprofit practice and government policy, we got to raise some questions about what the program will accomplish by delivering a paper at the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal on October 19th. Our paper, “Will the Social Innovation Fund Fund Social Innovation,” raised seven points or issues about the Fund: Continue reading »
There are three inescapable facts about how health care coverage and health care reform affect the nonprofit sector:
How can this nation continue to be so mystifyingly confused, contradictory, and sometimes downright incoherent about immigrants and immigration? The Summer 2009 issue of Nonprofit Quarterly is devoted to the challenges faced by nonprofits in serving, representing, and advocating for immigrant populations in the midst of a confusing public discourse. The authors in the issue describe the obstacles of punitive state and local laws, hostile public opinion, and chaotic shifts and reversals in national approaches to immigration–and what creative, inventive, intrepid nonprofits around the nation are doing to counter these conditions.
Punitive, hostile, chaotic? You can attach these adjectives daily to the challenges nonprofits and immigrants have to address every day. Consider these milestones of the last week or two: Continue reading »
Appropriations start in the House of Representatives, but require action from the Senate as well in order to pass a budget. The Senate’s Committee on Appropriations started to make some budget headway just this past week, passing a number of bills that will require negotiations and blending with their House Appropriations counterparts in conference committee.
Where is the Senate’s attention on issues of concern to the programs and finances of the nonprofit sector (knowing full well that nonprofits should be attentive to and involved in every aspect of federal government budgetary matters, not just those that lead to money filling nonprofit coffers)? Here is the beginning of a budgetary travelogue of the recommendations from Senate appropriators: Continue reading »
A number of programs of importance to nonprofits are lodged in agencies other than HUD, Education, Labor, HHS, and Agriculture. We note a couple of them in terms of how they fared with the House Appropriations Committee here: Continue reading »
It should come as no surprise to savvy nonprofit budget hawks that some of the appropriations for programs that would normally be distributed through competitive or formula processes have already been allocated through other means–as earmarks. In the House Appropriations Committee budget recommendations, there are significant slices of program lines that have already been awarded to various state and municipal government agencies and to nonprofits of varying sizes and stripes.
While we understand some of the arguments in favor of earmarks, especially those raised by rural groups that point out how earmarks constitute a small but important mechanism for getting money to rural areas notwithstanding the frequent built-in urban biases to many federal competitive programs, we tend to be unsympathetic toward earmarks in the federal budget. Relatively few nonprofits to our knowledge have the political connections or can pay for the earmark-lobbying experts to win these grants. The playing field for nonprofits competing for grant support of any kind is hardly level, we know, but earmarks clearly reflect one of the most uneven, asymmetrical dimensions of the federal grants scrum.
Without reprinting pages and pages of earmarks, we offer a selection of the House Appropriations Committee’s choices (including some that appear to been requested by President Obama and endorsed by Congressional co-requesters).
