Obama Promises Government Help for Nonprofit Groups

Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential contender, won headlines on Wednesday for vowing in a speech in Iowa to expand existing national-service programs like the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps and to create new ones.

But he also made a couple of promises to increase federal government help for nonprofit groups that won less attention. The Illinois senator said that if elected president he would create a Social Investment Fund Network to provide money to encourage innovative nonprofit projects and a Social Entrepreneurship Agency to give small nonprofit groups “the same kind of support that we give small businesses.”

“The nonprofit sector employs one in 12 Americans and 115 nonprofits are launched every day,” he said. “Yet, while the federal government invests $7-billion in research and development for the private sector, there is no similar effort to support nonprofit innovation.”

In a policy paper, Senator Obama said the Social Investment Fund Network would be set up as a government-supported nonprofit corporation, similar to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The corporation would receive both government and private money to distribute to charities working on innovative projects dealing with issues that have been identified by their cities as priorities—crime prevention or education, for example—and help expand successful ones to other regions.

In his speech, the senator named the Harlem Children’s Zone, which provides after-school activities and mentors to children in New York, as an example of a program that should be duplicated. “We need to make that model work in different cities around the country,” he said.

The Social Entrepreneurship Agency would be created within the Corporation for National and Community Service, with a mission to improve coordination of federal programs that support nonprofit organizations, foster nonprofit accountability, streamline processes for getting federal grants and contracts, and remove barriers that hinder smaller groups from participating in government programs.

The agency would also make grants to help nonprofit organizations strengthen their operations in areas like accountability, managing volunteers, and improving effectiveness, according to the policy paper.

Senator Obama said he wanted to “invest in ideas that can help us meet our common challenges, because more often than not the next great social innovation won’t be generated by the government.”

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