A Government Lawyer Turns to Charity Advocacy

By Suzanne Perry

Tim Delaney, chief executive of the National Council of Nonprofit Associations, jokes that his new job will give him a chance to “atone for my past sins.”

As a young lawyer, he says, he sometimes advised charities to avoid trying to influence legislation because he thought it could jeopardize their tax-exempt status — a “mantra” he picked up from partners at his firm. Now, he says, he realizes he was mistaken.

“You can lobby,” he says. “Your voices can and should be heard. You have a constitutional, First Amendment right, and you have a moral duty to step forward and speak truth about what the community needs are.”

Mr. Delaney says he will give top priority to getting more charities to advocate for social causes, citing one of his heroes, Abraham Lincoln: “All of us, even today, need to be sure that ‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth.’”

Mr. Delaney — who moved to Washington from Phoenix, where he was founding president of the Center for Leadership, Ethics & Public Service — was hired just as his new employer decided to change its name.

Instead of the National Council of Nonprofit Associations, later this year it will become the National Council of Nonprofits to signal that it represents all types of nonprofit groups — not just state associations of charities, its traditional membership.

While still in Arizona, Mr. Delaney helped his predecessor — Audrey Alvarado, who served as executive director for nine years — set up the Nonprofit Congress, which debuted in 2006, as a way to bring charity leaders together to map out strategies for increasing nonprofit clout in their states.

In June, he spoke to the second meeting of the group in his new capacity as designated president, urging participants to buy a “high-quality hammer” so they could start “knocking down the silos that divide our sector.”

He also asked them to make sure their groups had filed Form 5768, the tax document that helps nonprofit groups calculate how much money they can spend on lobbying — and to get every staff member, board member, and volunteer to the polls in November.

“We need to hear the nonprofit voice at the ballot box,” he said.

Mr. Delaney, 51, who will earn $160,000 a year, brings to the job a varied background in law, ethics, state government, and nonprofit leadership. He counts among his achievements serving on the legal team that helped the State Legislature impeach Arizona’s governor, Evan Mecham, in 1988, and arguing a case successfully before the U.S. Supreme Court as Arizona’s chief deputy attorney general. The case involved a challenge to Arizona’s child-support agency.

He says he first turned to public service when he started feeling like a “billing machine” and an “automaton” while working at a large law firm early in his career. That led him to serve eight years on the Phoenix Parks and Recreation Board.

Since arriving in Washington, Mr. Delaney has given top priority to getting charities to push Congress to raise the tax deduction that volunteers can claim for car mileage — now 14 cents, compared with 58.5 cents allowed for business travel.

He calls the disparity an “un-American tax on volunteers.”

In an interview, Mr. Delaney discussed his goals in his new job:

You’ve worked as a lawyer, you’ve worked for the government. What appeals to you about working in the nonprofit world?

I’ve been touched, I’ve been molded, I’ve been shaped by nonprofits. I used to fear public speaking. If we would sit in a room at a small table like this and ask everyone to introduce themselves, my heart would be racing, palpitating — am I going to remember my name? Then I started getting involved with nonprofits and I’d have to go to meetings, then ultimately I’d start chairing the meetings, then I would chair the board and I’d have to go give public presentations. I view our nonprofits as those spaces where they serve as our leadership laboratories.

When you refer to breaking down silos in the nonprofit world, what would you like to see happen?

I’ve been in a lot of conversations in the nonprofit sector where we gather together in our own conferences, our own conversations, our own convenings, and we wring our hands and ask, Why don’t “they” understand us? Why don’t “they” care about us more? And our body language when we’re having these meetings, we’re all internal, all leaning into each other, all looking at each other, and not quite sure who the “they” is. That’s where I think we need to reposition ourselves, put our backs to each other, and look at the broader community that’s out there. It’s not just the nonprofit sector. There’s also the government and business sectors. And we need to be building bridges out to them.

How should nonprofit groups build those bridges?

A lot of people, when they hear about an interest in doing advocacy, there’s this presumption they’ve got to go in and beat up on government. We need to be prepared to go in and speak the truth and do it plainly. But at the same time, I would encourage people to be involved in the front end, to establish collaborative relationships.

My own humble experience tells me you can have the greatest impact at the local level by getting involved in your local levels of government. We can help come up with some pilot projects in localities, not just the state, but a given municipality or school district.

How do you plan to get your members to do more advocacy?

One of the keys is helping [nonprofit groups] understand that this is how they can achieve their mission. If they can go out and change government policies in a positive way, they might not have to raise as much money, they might not have to do as much of the same kind of work. It can then free them up to do other kinds of things to serve the community. Part of this is changing the mentality, to get people to recognize (a) it’s legal, (b) it’s part of your mission, (c) it’s fun. It’s a way that you can raise visibility for your organizations.

What do you see as the council’s role on state issues?

It’s something that we will be elevating, to monitor those activities and report trends. It’s more than a full-time job, watching what goes on in one state, let alone across the entire United States. We’re not able to go out and tell State X, there’s this administrative rule that’s being proposed by your department of health care. That’s not within our bailiwick. However, we can monitor the trends that are happening, and we can say, Well, this type of bill got introduced in Washington, Oregon. Hey, California, you’re next on the list; Arizona, watch out. The states already do that, governments do that, corporations do that. We in our sector need to do that.

Why did your organization change its name to the National Council of Nonprofits?

Economic forces being what they are these days, there’s a need to try to reach out and provide more services. How do we provide services to nonprofits in those states that don’t have a state association?

It’s not for us to go in there and anoint someone and say, You’re now the state association here. It really has to percolate from the grass roots. It’s really more of a recognition there are nonprofits out there that need help that aren’t getting it today so we want to expand it so it’s not just of, by, and for the state associations, but it’s of, by, and for nonprofits writ large.