Charity and the Campaign

The presidential contenders, John McCain and Barack Obama, have a strong affinity for public service, generating optimism among nonprofit leaders that they will find a sympathetic ear in the White House no matter who wins on election day.

Both senators, for example, have promised to expand national-service programs, free up money for innovative social projects, and promote federal grants to religious charities.

Economy’s Challenges

However, the ever-darkening clouds over the country’s economy, which are exacerbating the ballooning federal budget deficit, have left some experts wondering whether either candidate will be able to fully deliver on his promises.

“I don’t think [nonprofit leaders] should hold their breaths for major new initiatives that will reconfigure the government’s relationship with the charitable world,” says William A. Galston, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution.

“This is really the first time in an election where the interests of the nonprofit sector were even mentioned at all,” says Robert Egger, president of D.C. Central Kitchen, an anti-hunger group in Washington, who started the V3 (Voice, Value, Votes) Campaign last year to get nonprofit groups more involved in electoral politics. “At one level, it was a significant turnaround year for us,” he said, citing discussion of ways to help charities such as setting up a new federal office. “Now comes the reality.”

The presidential candidates both entered the world of politics after spending time in public service, Senator McCain as a naval officer and Senator Obama as a community organizer in Chicago.

Senator Obama has direct ties to the charitable world — a connection that appeals to some nonprofit leaders. After watching both candidates speak about service at a televised forum in September, Patrick McWhortor, president of the Arizona Alliance of Nonprofits, concluded that Senator Obama “spoke in a language that we understood.”

Mr. Obama, a Harvard-trained lawyer, headed the Developing Communities Project, in Chicago, for three years in the 1980s, working with churches to train unemployed people and set up after-school programs. He also headed a project to register African-American and low-income voters and served as a board member for two Chicago foundations.

And the Illinois senator was on the founding board of Public Allies, a group that trains young people as nonprofit leaders with federal money from AmeriCorps, the national-service program. His wife, Michelle, became the first executive director of the Public Allies Chicago office in 1993.

In an interview with The Chronicle last spring, Ms. Obama said the senator’s proposals to expand the country’s national-service programs were influenced by her work for Public Allies.

“He saw me work in that environment,” she said. “Of all the jobs I’ve had, if I were to do anything again, at the drop of a heartbeat it would be to work on this kind of program.”

Senator Obama’s work as a community organizer became a campaign issue when Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential candidate, mocked the job at the Republican national convention in August. (“I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities,” the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, told the audience.)

Speakers at a recent forum in Washington sponsored by the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal speculated about how Mr. Obama’s community-organizing experience would influence his governing style.

Harry Boyte, a senior fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, and James Capraro, founding executive director of the Greater Southwest Development Corporation, in Chicago — both advisers to the Obama campaign — said the senator would focus on listening, rather than prescribing, and work to get people involved in strengthening their cities and towns.

International Causes

Senator McCain’s ties to the nonprofit world are more modest, although his wife, Cindy, is deeply involved in the charitable world.

She started the American Voluntary Medical Team, which provided medical care to poor children worldwide from 1988 to 1995. She sits on the boards of the Halo Trust, a group that removes landmines, and Operation Smile, which provides facial-reconstruction surgery to children in poor countries — and she travels widely on their behalf.

Mr. McWhortor says the Republican nominee has few dealings with charities in Arizona. He adds that despite numerous entreaties from nonprofit constituents, the senator has declined to co-sponsor a bill that would increase the mileage income-tax deduction for volunteers who use their vehicles for charity work, which lags far behind the business-mileage deduction. (Senator Obama is a co-sponsor of the Giving Incentives to Volunteers Everywhere, or GIVE, Act.)

However, Senator McCain often emphasizes the importance of working for causes greater than self-interest, a value he says he cultivated as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.

Lewis Feldstein, chairman of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, in Concord — who has seen many presidential contenders up close during his small state’s primary seasons — says he was impressed by the senator’s interaction with nonprofit groups during his visits there. “He got their work, he seemed to be genuinely respectful,” he says.

Government’s Role

While each candidate has offered policies with implications for tax-exempt institutions, experts predict that an Obama administration and a McCain administration would approach the issue of how the federal government interacts with charities somewhat differently.

Senator Obama, still competing in the Democratic primaries last year, said he would create a Social Investment Fund Network to distribute government and private money to charities working on innovative projects, and would create a Social Entrepreneurship Agency to improve coordination of federal programs that support nonprofit groups.

“While the federal government invests $7-billion in research and development for the private sector, there is no similar effort to support nonprofit innovation,” he said in a speech.

The Democratic candidate has also proposed creating 20 “promise neighborhoods” in areas with especially high levels of poverty and crime that would be modeled after the Harlem Children’s Zone, a charity that provides a wide range of services to youths in an entire neighborhood from birth to college. (See article on Page x.)

Senator McCain has pledged to create a White House Service to America office to streamline national-service efforts, hold “volunteerism summits” where people could share information about effective programs in their areas, and get more students participating in the Federal Work-Study program to do community service.

He made a point at a forum on national service of saying he was wary of too much government involvement in charity work, reflecting the Republican Party’s traditional preference for small government.

“The essence of volunteerism starts at the grass-roots level, does not start necessarily at the federal-government level,” he said.

Stephen Goldsmith, a professor of government at Harvard University who is advising the McCain campaign, says the Arizona senator may look for ways to funnel more money directly to individuals rather than to the nonprofit organizations that use AmeriCorps volunteers.

In the area of national service, Senators McCain and Obama have both agreed to co-sponsor the Serve America Act, which would expand the number of participants in yearlong national-service programs to 250,000 by 2013, create other new federal service programs, and set up special funds to help nonprofit organizations expand innovative programs and recruit volunteers and help individuals start cutting-edge charities. That bipartisan spirit delighted an array of charities that have been working to unite Democrats and Republicans to support national service and social entrepreneurship.

A coalition of more than 100 nonprofit groups that are working to promote civic engagement, ServiceNation, was able to entice both major candidates to answer questions about public service at a televised forum in New York on the seventh anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

But the country’s financial crisis, which prompted Congress to authorize $700-billion to rescue financial institutions in September, could end up dashing either candidate’s best intentions.

Senator Obama’s public-service plan would cost $3.5-billion a year, which he said he would pay for with some of the savings from ending the Iraq war and by cancelling a provision affecting tax deductions for interest payments that he says allows multinational corporations to pay less U.S. taxes.

The Kennedy-Hatch bill would be cheaper, at $5-billion over five years, but the sponsors have not yet said how they would pay for it.

“We’d be crazy not to be worried at this point,” says Kim Syman, managing partner of New Profit, a group in Boston that organized the America Forward coalition of 71 nonprofit organizations that focus on health, education, and other causes.

However, she says she hopes the new president will consider government partnerships with innovative nonprofit groups — the approach her coalition is pushing — as a relatively inexpensive way to help get the country back on track.

Given the financial bailout and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the nonprofit world can expect the belt-tightening that intensified during President Bush’s second term to continue, says Alan Abramson, a George Mason University professor and senior fellow at the Aspen Institute’s Nonprofit Sector and Philanthropy Program. But things might be worse under a President McCain, he said.

“Obama seems interested in finding ways to continue some discretionary spending to try to address the nation’s problems,” he said, , while McCain has signaled that he believes the government is “still wasting a lot of money and he has no interest in raising taxes.”

Senator McCain has said in recent debates with his rival that he would consider freezing all federal spending except for defense, veterans affairs, and “entitlement” programs like Social Security.

Senator Obama, who has proposed increasing taxes on families earning $250,000 or more, has said he would continue to give priority to issues such as early-childhood education, energy independence, and fixing the health-care system.

As the deepening financial crisis aggravates the social problems that charities deal with every day — while shrinking the government and private money available to cope with them — nonprofit leaders must unite to convince whoever occupies the White House to recognize that he has an obligation to help vulnerable people, says Diana Aviv, president of Independent Sector, a coalition of big charities and foundations.

She says her group plans to make a big push to influence both the new president and the new Congress.

“We have no choice but to play a role,” she says. “We have to be clear on what we think are the priorities and make clear what cannot be cut. We have to agree that all options have to be on the table, including revenue increases.”