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).

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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:

• If an agency is a managerial nightmare, best get its house in order before asking for a major budget increase (example: the Corporation for National and Community Service).
• If a program has just been launched with through the stimulus, perhaps with funding not even yet allocated to recipients much less spent on needy communities, best wait until there are some demonstrable results before asking for a program re-up (example: the Strengthening Communities Fund).
• If the Executive Branch wants to fund a new program, best make sure that Congress has passed legislation authorizing the program in the first place (example: the Choice Neighborhoods program at HUD).
• If Congress has worked long and hard to reauthorize a program, best the White House carefully consider that fact before zeroing it out (example: the HOPE VI program for redeveloping distressed public housing).
• If budget recommendations are based on questionable evaluation findings, best to get better data before rescissions and terminations (example:  the Even Start program).

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. Continue reading »

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. Continue reading »

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. Continue reading »

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.

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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? Continue reading »

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?

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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. Continue reading »

In January 2008, the Cohen Report wrote about the Pigford litigation that had attempted, with limited effect, to redress the historic discrimination of the U.S. Department of Agriculture toward black farmers.  In “Still Fighting the Last Plantation,” we took note of the principled support of then Illinois Senator Barack Obama and Iowa Republican Charles Grassley calling for an extension of the time period and some flexibility in consideration of the applications of black farmers for Pigford settlement benefits.

We also described some of the nonprofits that were engaged in fighting for black farmers rights, including the National Black Farmers Association, headed by one John Boyd.  The June 21, 2009 Washington Post just did a front-page profile of Boyd, who has not dropped this fight one iota.  Since becoming president, Barack Obama’s first proposed federal budget included $1.25 billion as money to settle the claims of some 70,000 black farmers who contend that they either didn’t know about the original $1 billion settlement in 1999 or had been otherwise unfairly excluded (as a black farmer in Virginia, Boyd himself was among the 16,000 farmers who got something, in his case, $50,000, in the original Pigford settlement).  According to Boyd, the $1.25 billion is $1.25 billion too little.

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Nonprofits across the nation ought to know what legislation is pending in Congress that would change the rules–hopefully for the better–for America’s diverse immigrant population.

The most important legislative initiative related to nonprofits and immigration–other than the elephant in the room, comprehensive immigration reform–is the DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, S.729) . Continue reading »

Finding Nonprofits in President Obama’s FY2010 Budget

Welcome to the first NPQ/Cohen Report analysis of the federal budget proposals of President Barack Obama. Here we take a tour of the proposed FY2010 federal budget released to the public on May 7th to mine the meaning for the nonprofit sector. In this one, you’ll discover that the Obama Administration budget contains several programs of crucial importance for nonprofits, but it’s not all peaches and cream.

• Some of the budget lines expressly dedicated to nonprofits are “bubkis,” to use the vernacular. Nonprofits should not get lost fighting over next to nothing while the big dollars slide by nonprofit radar screens.
• Even those items dedicated to the nonprofit sector-for “social innovation” or to replace the Bush-era Compassion Capital Fund-frequently give scant attention to the needs and roles of smaller and medium-sized nonprofits, the organizations that comprise the overwhelming bulk of nonprofits on the front lines of addressing social needs in America’s urban and rural communities.
• And even with the otherwise friendly Obama Administration, nonprofits have to watch out for agency agendas that undo the intent of hard-fought legislative victories and redirect funds away from nonprofits into discretionary agency budgets-with the result that nonprofits might not see much less get the resources they need

Continue reading »

It is hard to fathom the outcry of the nonprofit sector, almost in complete unanimity, against President Obama’s proposal to cap the charitable deduction at the 28 percent tax level for households earning $250,000 or more.  The opposition was and is, to our mind, fueled by an unattractive sectoral insularity, shaped by “sectoral leaders” who, in their successful advocacy against the tax proposal, are transforming the nonprofit sector from a steward of the public interest to just another special interest.  There may be problems with the President’s plan for paying for part of health care reform with a change in the tax deductibility of itemized deductions, but the debate within or by the nonprofit sector has been less than illuminating.

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Is the recession that is currently whacking 501(c)(3) nonprofits hitting tax exempt “associations” such as the Chamber of Commerce? The front page story in the April 11-12, 2009 Wall Street Journal on the impact of the recession in Loganville, Georgia (population 9,500)[i] noted that the number of dues-paying members in the small town’s Chamber of Commerce had dropped from 300 to 180.

Maybe there are some recession-resistant businesses (“social media marketers”,[ii] Dunkin’ Donuts franchises,[iii] and Apple I-PODs[iv], perhaps), but its seems that even reliable nonprofit performers such as chambers of commerce are not among them. Continue reading »