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. (more…)
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. (more…)
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. (more…)
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. (more…)
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. (more…)
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: (more…)
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: (more…)
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).
In establishing the national budget, the Executive proposes, and Congress–beginning with the House of Representatives–appropriates the moneys.
President Barack Obama’s proposed Fiscal Year 2010 budget just received the House Appropriations Committee treatment—with nonprofit interests among the winners and losers in the final tally. The dynamic of note to the nonprofit sector revolves around 5 key factors cited by the Committee for its decisions at variance with President Obama’s budget recommendations:
Of course those rationales may be in part covers for successful lobbying by interests for or against various programs, so some of these decisions may simply reflect solid program constituent mobilization. Nonetheless, the rationales are worth noting for ongoing and future nonprofit budget advocacy. What is clear is that President Obama is not getting exactly what he wanted, and in some cases, the messages from Congress convey implications that even though Congress and the White House are both controlled by Democrats, they do not always see eye to eye.
Here is part—and only a small part–of the Housing Appropriations Committee FY2010 budget scorecard of particular interest to the nonprofit sector. (more…)
Today’s (July 23rd) reports of widespread corruption arrests in Hoboken, Jersey City, and other Hudson County, New Jersey communities (and some outside of Hudson County as well), netting three mayors, state legislators, city council members, and others, have special resonance for me. I was an appointed city official for four years in Jersey City, and it is where I gained my revulsion to the corrupt use of public and, in the case of nonprofits, quasi-public dollars. (more…)
Notwithstanding the White House meeting on immigration reform and commitments by the likes of Senators Reid (D-NV) and Schumer (D-NY) to get something done in Congress this year, the momentum for immigration reform action does not feel much like a juggernaut. In the Washington Post, Tamar Jacoby of ImmigrationWorks (an employers group advocating immigration reform) and Jorge Castenada (Mexico’s foreign secretary from 2000 to 2003 under Vicente Fox) described President Obama’s position on the content of immigration reform as “studiously vague.”
If there is no action in Congress, don’t think that there’s nothing happening on immigration that should concern nonprofits that believe in human rights and community building, that realize that most of our communities have immigrants in their midst (even if they somehow fail to see them), that realize that the vast majority of us are immigrants, the children of immigrants, or the descendants of immigrants. (more…)
Some people might think that a concern about documented and undocumented immigrants is sort of outside the ken of most “regular Jane and Joe” nonprofits, the groups that aren’t immigrant-founded or -run, the groups whose agendas ostensibly have little to do or nothing to do directly with immigration reform.
That’s not true. All nonprofits have a stake in treating, serving, advocating for, and supporting immigrants in this nation. What should nonprofits be prepared to do? We have some suggestions.
Despite lip service, rural America is the forgotten landscape of the U.S. political arena and certainly in American philanthropy. Foundation grantmaking and federal government support to rural communities should be a continuing, serious priority in this nation and within the nonprofit sector.
But unfortunately, for the moment, it appears that rural philanthropic grantmaking is tanking, not just because of the economy, but because of its low ranking in the priority lists of foundation grantmakers and some public decision-makers. This is contrary to what common sense should tell us: investing foundation dollars in rural communities is a sensible, constructive part of a philanthropic agenda for social progress, social justice, and economic recovery.
In this brief commentary, we touch on the following issues:
1. What happened in response to Senator Max Baucus’s challenge to foundations to double foundation grantmaking in 5 years? What did the foundation sector actually do?
2. Despite the problematic data on reported foundation grantmaking priorities, what do the trends in domestic U.S. rural development grantmaking look like?
3. How are rural development organizations experiencing and responding to the continuing diminution of foundation grant support to rural areas?
4. In what ways does foundation grantmaking relate to federal government policy and budget decisions?
5. What might be some public policy priorities that rural nonprofits and foundations might think about with clear and specific implications and parallels for the content of foundation grantmaking? (more…)
What is happening in Iran right now that Iranian-U.S. nonprofits can signal us to notice, help us understand, and mobilize us into appropriate action?
Take a look at Persepolis, either the graphic book or the movie by Marjane Satrapi, to understand the mix of hope and hopelessness, desire and dismay underlying the protests by so many young people in Tehran against the rigged election that apparently has reinstalled Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iran’s troublesome leader.
President Barack Obama has adopted a cautious, pragmatic response to the protests, not giving the mullahs the opportunity to blame the U.S. and its new young president for instigating the protests (so, of course, Ayatollah Khamenei has pinned the responsibility on the Brits led by the hapless, likely outgoing Labor leader, Gordon Brown).
Obama’s cautious response has garnered widespread support except in Congress where make-a-show resolutions have passed both houses demanding the president speak out in favor of the protests and against the Ahmadenijad/Khamenei sham vote count.
Shiites have good reason to be wary of U.S. verbal encouragement. Remember the predicament of the Shiites in southern Iraq encouraged by President George H.W. Bush to rise up against Saddam Hussein only to be hung out to dry with no support.
Lots of non-Iranian pundits in the U.S. from the left and right are talking about the protests in Iran. But what are Iranians in the U.S. saying about conditions in their home country?
It would be well worth the nonprofit sector’s attention and energy to start documenting what 501(c)(3) organizations are doing to generate new jobs as a result of their use of economic stimulus funds.
Because the early indications are that nonprofits are eager to take and spend funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the stimulus legislation passed in early 2009), but there’s not a lot that is necessarily reaching nonprofits, or reaching them as fast as it should, and nonprofits aren’t doing much to keep track of their sector accomplishments in the nation’s slow slog out of this recession.
In this post, we take note of what nonprofits are being credited with at this early stage of stimulus implementation. (more…)
