The Editors

Initial press coverage of Monday’s report by former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger mostly described the conclusions of the report, focusing primarily on whether ACORN staff had engaged in potentially illegal behaviors in videotaped interactions with two people posing as a pimp and a prostitute (Harshbarger’s report found no actionable illegal behavior). 

Although Nonprofit Quarterly only reported on Harshbarger’s report, some NPQ readers were critical of both Harshbarger and the NPQ for seemingly whitewashing ACORN’s managerial and ethical indiscretions.  

In related news yesterday, several nonprofits, including seven civil rights and advocacy organizations including the Alliance for Justice and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights condemned Congress for having cut off government funding to ACORN in advance of an investigation that exonerated ACORN at least in terms of whether ACORN staff did anything expressly illegal.

So where does Nonprofit Quarterly stand on the ACORN imbroglio?  

Nonprofit Quarterly believes in the important role of nonprofit organizations that give voice and influence and representation to disadvantaged and disenfranchised communities. In fact, they should be powerful organizations. That does not mean that they can and should presume themselves above the precepts of good governance and good management, particularly important for the largest organizations by whose size and influence set the moral and ethical tone for the field. This is why Nonprofit Quarterly believes that ACORN bears a special responsibility to own up to, address, and affirmatively correct the problems identified in the Harshbarger report.  

NPQ has written about ACORN in the past, in the Cohen Report back in July 2008, a piece obviously critical of the predatory behavior of ACORN’s finance chief, Dale Rathke, the hushing up of the scandal by Dale’s brother, ACORN founder Wade Rathke, and the questionable governance and finance practices that were subsequently revealed. The Nonprofit Quarterly also maintained some coverage of the various news articles about ACORN in the aftermath of the pimp-and-prostitute videos, reporting on articles both favorable and unfavorable to the organization.

But Nonprofit Quarterly’s take on the Harshbarger report is probably different than ACORN’s critics and supporters, because the NPQ isn’t part of the ideological sturm and drang that has made ACORN a cause célèbre on Fox News and other venues long before the videos were (selectively) released. Because, however, NPQ  is attached to Harshbarger—because he’s an NPQ board member—NPQ commentary may be received with some disdain by some critics of ACORN and the report, but this is what the editors of Nonprofit Quarterly have to say about the Proskauer Rose report and the larger issues surrounding ACORN:

1. Nonprofit Quarterly editors know Harshbarger and stand by his professional and personal integrity. That being said, since ACORN paid for the Proskauer Rose investigation there is a feeling that the report is compromised. ACORN and Harshbarger should be encouraged to lay out clearly how the report was paid for and what kinds of reviews or approvals ACORN was or was not able to exercise over the content of the report. To the extent that some of the back-up documentation in the report can be released, it should be. To this point, some kinds of basic information on ACORN have been hard to come by, at least through the Rathke years. It’s time for an organization as large and as multifaceted as ACORN to begin making some of its operating documents publicly available, not only because ACORN has been in the eye of a scandal, but because nonprofit advocates and organizers ought to be able to make judgments about the good and less good of ACORN’s manuals and standards. Increasingly, in the wake of this investigation, some documentation has become more available; more should be done. 
2. The Proskauer Rose report really wasn’t about the theft of ACORN resources by Dale Rathke and the suppression of the news—even to the ACORN board and senior staff—by Wade Rathke, but the roots of ACORN’s management problems stem from an organizational culture that evolved under Rathke and others. The culture hinged on central control, a lack of transparency, an opaqueness in structure and operations, and a lack of free flow of information that didn’t just frustrate outsiders, but impaired the ability of board members and senior staff to know what they needed to know. Given that the new leadership of ACORN, from the top down, includes people who were longtime members of the organization under Rathke and, to greater or lesser degrees, complicit in not inquiring about some of the organization’s screw-ups or, when they found out, not moving on the Rathkes, NPQ (like some of the commentators in the news today) harbors suspicions whether the organizational culture has changed enough. The magazine hopes it has. One good step has to be the release of the Harshbarger report. Many nonprofits and foundations contract for similar management reviews, but the findings never see the light of day.  With this report, ACORN committed from the beginning that the results would be publicly available and did not renege on that as the report neared completion. A consistent commitment to organizational transparency would be welcome evidence of the beginnings of change in the ACORN political culture.   
3. As said in NPQ’s column yesterday, “there is no tabulation of ‘good works’ or ‘good politics’ (on either side of the political spectrum) that can and should be used to excuse failures of ethics and good management practice.”  In other words, ACORN’s behavior with the l’affaire Rathke and with the videos was completely ineffective and inexcusable—as Harshbarger’s report also said. The fact that some of ACORN’s leadership defended and dithered, even when the information from the videos is not completely verifiable due to voice-overs and editing, represents the opposite of what nonprofits need to do. When there are problems, nonprofits should own up to them, be candid, and take comprehensive corrective actions. Hiring Harshbarger to lay out a regime of managerial and governance changes for ACORN is exactly what was supposed to happen. Few nonprofits get to hire the likes of a former AG to review and correct their internal operations. That shouldn’t prevent appropriate public authorities—the Internal Revenue Service, state attorneys general, and others—from pursuing legal and regulatory investigations of ACORN as warranted. Harshbarger’s task was to identify the management flaws and recommend remedial actions. Now it’s up to ACORN and its advisors—and funders—to see that the changes are made.
4. What bothered many about the ACORN defenses encountered prior to the Harshbarger report were the legal and rhetorical devices to explain away what was amounted to a case study of nonfeasance, malfeasance and just plain awful nonprofit management practice. It doesn't matter that some of the ACORN corporate entities were nonprofits but not 501(c)(3) public charities or that some ACORN affiliates would produce audits but only when required pursuant to specific state and federal government contracts. That’s not good enough. The nonprofit sector shouldn’t hide behind what ACORN used so nefariously, a multiplicity of corporate governance layers to make the organization’s governance and finances all but indecipherable. Political rhetoric on behalf of a righteous cause also doesn’t excuse bad nonprofit management practice. Even yesterday, Bertha Lewis, the replacement for Rathke at the head of the ACORN tree, described the Harshbarger report as "tough but fair,” but made sure to add the coda of “what we (ACORN) still need to accomplish in having the most effective possible organization to represent the interests of the communities we represent—low- and moderate-income, African-American and Latino families". The “communities we represent” rhetoric is a device and it doesn’t work.  
5. Sadly, ACORN’s management and governance problems have had a deleterious impact on the credibility of a whole category of organizations in the nonprofit sector. There are many people in the sector who politically are as progressive as anyone in ACORN but are distraught by ACORN’s history of repudiation of the basic tenets of nonprofit management and good governance. The editors here worry that ACORN is not yet prepared to make the changes necessary. While presumably that this report was hardly a surprise to Bertha Lewis and her team, who had to have reviewed it before it was released, Lewis was described in press reports as unwilling to commit herself and the organization to following and implementing the nine Harshbarger recommendations. That is surprising. ACORN should have been prepared not only to acknowledge having received Harshbarger’s proposed roadmap, but Lewis and her colleagues should have been prepared to quickly identify which highways they would take and which they might bypass. Those answers should have been ready to present alongside Harshbarger’s report.
6. What about the nine specific recommendations in the report? Not being privy to the Proskauer Rose team’s interviews and data, outside observers can only react to what seems more or less on target. There’s no question that the creation of multiple corporate and governing board layers in the mélange called ACORN was intentional, meant to frustrate transparency and good governance. Moreover, these multiple layers of (c)(3)s, (c)(4)s, PACs, 527s, and for-profits lead to the tendency to move moneys and resources among the various related corporate entities in manners that are not wise (though in Dale’s case, he moved the moneys from the ACORN organizations to his wallet). Harshbarger is spot on in suggesting a radical restructuring and simplification of ACORN. Like Harshbarger, the NPQ thinks that ACORN ought to get out of a lot of the non-organizing services that they’ve decided to run over the years. Under Rathke—and his associates—the organization was ravenous, grabbing service contracts of various sorts that ACORN was hardly well-suited to deliver. Time for ACORN’s insatiable appetite to be reined in.
7. On the other hand, the suggestion of an ethics officer and the plan to create a strong independent national advisory board are underwhelming recommendations. The ethics officer is likely to be ignored or treated like a nosy pariah. It is easy to imagine this “inspector general” type of function relegated to the margins of effectiveness and impact in the organization. Regarding the board, ACORN already has an advisory board of some big name people. There’s nothing wrong with having an advisory board or reconstituting an advisory board, but the advice of advisory boards is easily ignored. The real question is having ACORN promulgate a specific plan for how it will make the managerial and governance changes the organization needs, put it to paper, and have much of the nonprofit sector then hold ACORN’s feet to the fire to see this done. ACORN’s funders have a role going forward too:  they could make their support conditional on ACORN’s adopting the good management and governance practices that foundations typically expect of just about all other grantees but have not, until recently, raised as concerns about ACORN. Why should nonprofits and foundations be concerned? Because if ACORN mucks this up, it will empower the Darrell Issa’s of the world (or of Congress) to characterize organizers, advocates, and nonprofits with an ACORN tarnish. ACORN should not allow itself to be turned into an adjective to describe pathetically bad management practice.  

All that said, Nonprofit Quarterly believes that hiring Harshbarger’s firm for a review of management and oversight of service programs was the right thing for ACORN to do, even if it took the a combination of salacious videos and a million dollar embezzlement to move the organization from defensively rejecting criticism to inviting someone to bring the criticism home a la the Proskauer Rose report. Can the new leadership of ACORN, much of it nurtured in the Rathke era and the organizational culture of that time, rise to the challenge posed by Harshbarger? Nonprofit Quarterly will be monitoring how ACORN responds and whether the results will restore ACORN’s credibility and effectiveness.

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