Group That Encourages Charities to Lobby Is Gaining Independent Status

By GRANT WILLIAMS

Charity Lobbying in the Public Interest, a project formed two years ago by

Independent Sector to educate nonprofit organizations about the role lobbying can play in achieving their goals, is about to separate from its parent and become a full-fledged charity.

Bob Smucker, co-director of the project, says the move is amicable and a logical step as the project grows. Independent Sector has supported Charity Lobbying in the Public Interest by providing money and assistance from staff members. Now, the project will turn more and more to foundations for help as it doubles its budget from $225,000 to more than $500,000 over the next year.

“The need by charities for help and information about how they can legally lobby is immense,” says Mr. Smucker.

In 1997, only 1.4 percent of the 218,649 charities that filed informational tax returns with the Internal Revenue Service reported any lobbying expenditures.

Mr. Smucker says that his project has found that charities face several “barriers” when they consider lobbying, all of which can generally be surmounted with information and guidance.

For one, many charities are simply confused by federal lobbying laws. And when groups turn to experts for help, they frequently don’t get good answers, Mr. Smucker says.

“Lawyers and accountants and others who advise charities are scoundrels if they don’t take the time to learn the law and pass on sound advice about the rights to lobby,” he says.

Other charities are afraid to lobby because they have been alarmed in recent years by federal and state proposals to limit their ability to lobby. While those attempts failed, some charities decided it would just be safer not to get involved in the legislative process, says Mr. Smucker.

Still other groups just don’t know where to get information to learn the facts, he says. While charities can easily get help with fund raising, strategic planning, accounting practices, and program development, they frequently don’t know how to find advice on government relations, advocacy, and lobbying.

Charity Lobbying in the Public Interest, led by Mr. Smucker and the project’s co-director, David Arons, is working to inform nonprofit groups about the broad latitude the law affords for their participation in public policy-making and to encourage groups to act.

Over the past two years, the project has set its sights on volunteer, board, and staff members of charities at local, state, and national levels; nonprofit academic and management-training centers; lawyers and tax advisers to charities; and the news media and other opinion leaders.

Among its efforts, Charity Lobbying in the Public Interest has:

• Helped train 25 officials of state associations of nonprofit organizations so that they could spread the word about lobbying to charities throughout their states.
• Developed a graduate-level curriculum on lobbying and advocacy for academic centers that teach nonprofit management, including Georgetown University, the New School for Social Research, and Ohio State University.
• Created a Web site, http://www.independentsector.org/clpi, that elicits more than 5,000 requests for information each month.
• Published The Nonprofit Lobbying Guide (available free on its Web site) and produced two instructional videotapes, one aimed especially at board members.
• Encouraged the Internal Revenue Service to write one letter describing the basic lobbying rules, a document that the organization intends to forward to the quarter million charities that file federal tax returns, and a second letter stating that organizations that embrace an alternate way to have their lobbying work measured by the government do not increase their chances of being audited.

Charity Lobbying in the Public Interest is currently working with Tufts University and OMB Watch, a Washington group that monitors government spending, on a study that is designed to learn more about the reasons why charities choose not to lobby. The study will be based on a survey of 1,140 groups and in-depth interviews with 30 of them.

“Charities know that the direct services they provide are of crucial importance to society, and that’s what they focus on,” says Mr. Smucker. “But they also need to know that sometimes they need to lobby — that only government can provide the changes in the law or the funds that they need to serve their clients and communities.”