New President of Independent Sector Seeks to Build Strong Coalitions

As a child growing up in South Africa, Diana Aviv once aspired to be a ballerina. Her new job as president of Independent Sector, a coalition of nonprofit groups and grant makers, will require a different kind of agility if she is to help steer that organization onto center stage in the nonprofit world.

Some nonprofit officials grumble that Independent Sector has lost focus, and say it lacks the clout needed to persuade the White House and Congress to pay more attention to concerns of the philanthropic world and its varied constituencies — particularly at a time when governments at all levels are cutting back on money for many activities they traditionally have supported.

Ms. Aviv, 51, whose training is in social work, moved to the United States from her native South Africa in 1975 and has worked for several nonprofit groups in the areas of domestic violence, health and human services, and public policy. She currently directs the Washington Action Office of United Jewish Communities, a coalition of local Jewish federations.

She becomes Independent Sector’s third president, succeeding Sara E. Meléndez, who served from 1994 until last year. Brian O’Connell, the first president, served from 1980 to 1994.

Some observers had hoped that Independent Sector would choose as its next leader a person of national prominence, perhaps a former member of Congress, whose appointment alone would raise the institution’s visibility, particularly on Capitol Hill. In selecting Ms. Aviv, whatever her talents may be, say several observers, the organization lost an opportunity to increase its public profile with a single stroke.

But others, including Independent Sector’s board members, disagree.

“We discussed this in great detail and determined that Diana in fact has the kind of networks, and gravitas within those networks, that Independent Sector needs today, and that she is remarkably well poised to grow into a household name,” said David Eisner, senior vice president of the AOL Time Warner Foundation and a new member of Independent Sector’s board. “The issue of where our next president would be welcome, which doors they’d be able to walk through, and how well they’d do at credibly carrying the weight of the sector they represent on their shoulders was foremost in our thoughts.”

“The choice is surprising but inspired,” said Leslie Lenkowsky, who directs the Corporation for National and Community Service, which runs AmeriCorps and other national volunteer programs. “She’s a woman of immense ability who can build the kind of broad-based coalitions that Independent Sector needs to build.”

He added: “It’s always good when organizations like Independent Sector go for the best-qualified rather than the best-known.”

Ms. Aviv is no stranger to Washington. For much of the past decade she has worked as vice president for public policy at United Jewish Communities, focusing on legislation and regulations that have had an impact on the work of local Jewish federations and the hundreds of health and social-service charities they support. In that capacity, she has lobbied to extend the charitable deduction to taxpayers who don’t itemize their deductions, for example, and to allow older people to give money to charity directly from their individual retirement accounts without incurring taxes.

She has extensive experience working with coalitions — not only with the local Jewish federations affiliated under the United Jewish Communities, but also, for example, with Asian, Latino, and Roman Catholic leaders to lobby for federal appropriations for health and welfare benefits to legal immigrants and refugees.

In her previous job with the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Ms. Aviv helped devise advocacy strategies on issues related to domestic civil liberties, health, and welfare policy. And she has served as director of programs for the National Council of Jewish Women, a volunteer organization focusing on issues that affect women and children.

She faces no shortage of challenges in her new job, starting with the need to shore up support within Independent Sector itself. The coalition’s membership — consisting mostly of the larger foundations and prominent national charities — has been stalled at around 700 for years, after reaching a high-water mark of some 800 organizations in 1990, a decade after its creation. Some observers predict further erosion in the membership unless the organization can quickly show a renewed energy and sense of purpose.

Following are excerpts from Ms. Aviv’s recent interview with The Chronicle.

How did your childhood in South Africa help shape your views on the role of civil society?

In South Africa, having been exposed to the profound injustices of racist apartheid, which permeated every social, economic, political, and educational institution, I made a commitment from an early age to want to make right what was wrong. It was those experiences of seeing the exclusion of people from full participation in society that made me believe we have to have engaged communities, and that we have to hold the government’s feet to the fire to make sure that we have a vibrant democracy committed to fairness, full inclusion, and empowerment.

You meet regularly with many members of Congress. What kind of reception do you receive?

When I’ve gone to Capitol Hill, I’ve gone as an advocate of people living in nursing homes, of refugees seeking resettlement, of low-income people seeking support services. I’ve gone in with very specific messages — with descriptions of problems, and with requests for partnership and assistance. I’ve found there is enormous resonance with the problems. There are very few members of Congress in either chamber and on either side of the aisle who are indifferent to the plight of the poor. What’s different is how people would solve those problems. Some of them believe that government has little role to play, and that charities, churches, and nonprofit organizations should do most of the work.

My job was to persuade as many members as possible that if donors have specific incentives to give, they’re likely to give more to the charities. I’ve found members of Congress on both sides of the aisle very receptive to those ideas. Where there was some resistance, it generally had more to do with the size of the impact on the Treasury than on the substance of the idea.

Do you detect any skepticism in Congress from the scandals that have rocked the nonprofit world?

I haven’t found much hostility to nonprofits. In the early ‘90s, there was much more hostility to nonprofits than I’ve seen in recent years.

I’m very mindful of the fact that I’m likely to face the challenge of helping nonprofits ensure that their practices are transparent, legal, and supportable. In the wake of the scandals in the business world involving companies like Enron and others, the question of who serves on nonprofit boards — all those kinds of questions are likely to come up. We as the nonprofit sector have to be prepared not only to answer those questions but to have a transparent set of activities that will make donors and the community at large want to support our work.

What are your priorities for Congress and the White House?

The overall image of the nonprofit sector is important. We should be working with the White House about the possibility of convening a conference on philanthropy, bringing together nonprofit foundations, corporate foundations, with the philanthropic sector, to look at the challenges we have in front of us. Wall Street has not yielded good results for many foundations. For the foreseeable future, at least the next 10 years, we face big federal budget deficits, so the challenge in front of us, to find ways to fund what’s important for us to fund, is a huge challenge.

But it also brings an opportunity. We have seen a large expansion of nonprofits in the last 15 years. We now have a chance to see what may need to be consolidated, how we can make organizations more efficient and more effective, to share practices, and not to assume that expansion is the only solution or the only sign of success. An organization like ours that can bring together communities of interest to discuss these issues is one way we can go. And we hope to engage the White House in that effort as well.

What should Independent Sector do to cast a larger shadow across the nonprofit landscape?

Independent Sector needs to have a very clear message, so that potentially new members or old members who’ve allowed their memberships to lapse will be inclined to join. What Independent Sector brings to the sector is the ability to convene very diverse organizations along with foundations to talk of issues of relevance to our third sector. That sector’s job is to protect and strengthen our democracy, to insure that government is fair, reliable, and a generous partner to our communities, and to encourage openness, quality, and integrity among the organizations that are serving the common good, while also contributing to building a more vibrant democracy, dedicated to opportunity, hope and compassion.

We’re living in a society where many people don’t see the relevance of government or politics, where fewer than 50 percent of the people voted in the last election. We’re facing a crisis in confidence in the institutions of governance.

What kind of leadership should the organization exert on issues on which its membership is seriously divided?

It really depends on the issues. If it’s an issue where the membership is deeply divided, then which part of the sector are you representing — the 45 percent or the 55 percent? You have to be careful; I don’t know how you stake out a leadership position if the sector’s that divided. On the other hand, if the board and I believe that one side has a strong moral imperative, it would be our job to educate the members and try to bring them around to that perspective.

I spend a lot of time working with various organizations to try to build common ground, and then to move in a common direction. But one would have to pick one’s battles very carefully, because otherwise Independent Sector is not representing anybody but themselves.

Should Independent Sector be larger than it is today?

We now have about 1.5 million nonprofits in this country. I’m not suggesting that all of them should join Independent Sector, but there should certainly be more than 700. Growth of membership matters, because if Independent Sector wants to represent the entire nonprofit sector it needs to have a more diverse membership.

Which parts of the nonprofit world are underrepresented in that membership?

I’ve talked about reaching out to ethnic organizations, and to those representing young people. We’re also about to have a vast cohort of seniors who will retire, and who form a massive untapped resource for our communities — those are the types of groups we should include. We should also explore recruiting local affiliates or regional affiliates of national organizations as members of Independent Sector.

Looking ahead three or four years, how do you see Independent Sector as having changed?

The agenda will be broader, including democracy, civic engagement, and collective action. I also hope in five years that Independent Sector and its partner organizations will be a real force on Capitol Hill. In our research and social-policy work we need to partner with think tanks, with university policy experts in talking about trends and opportunities, and to be a convener, so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

When we talk of broadening the reach, it’s also because we’re living in a global society. Independent Sector has a responsibility to encourage agencies to think globally as well as nationally. We can partner with national organizations in other countries that are also working to build and strengthen their civil societies. It was civil society all around the world that helped to bring the apartheid regime to its knees, and to bring in a government that was responsive to its people. Certainly learning from one another in strengthening our own societies is important to do.

What attracted you to the Independent Sector job?

When the idea was first broached with me, the question I asked myself was, why would I want to go there. I decided it would give me an opportunity to promote the issues that have been important to me my whole life, like democracy, civil society, and civic participation. I hoped that if the search committee were interested in these things, they would invite me to take the job. And I also hoped that if they weren’t interested, they wouldn’t, because I would be perfectly happy to stay where I was.

I found the members of the search committee to be extraordinarily responsive to what I was saying. That’s why I feel so excited about it. Many leaders around that table have been thinking about this and wanting this, and I’m looking forward to getting there, meeting people, and taking the excitement I feel and building a better society.

ABOUT DIANA AVIV, PRESIDENT OF INDEPENDENT SECTOR

Education: Received a bachelor’s degree in social work in her native South Africa before attending the School of Social Work at the University of Haifa, in Israel, and receiving a master’s degree in social work from Columbia University.

Previous employment: Worked as a psychotherapist in New York and New Jersey and as director of Alternatives to Domestic Violence, a group that counseled and lodged victims of domestic violence. She also served as director of programs for the National Council of Jewish Women before moving to Washington in 1994, where she became vice president for public policy of United Jewish Communities and director of that organization’s Washington Action Office.

Charitable interests: Serves as chairwoman of the National Immigration Forum and as a board member of the Coalition on Human Needs.

Most recent book read: A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry.

Vacation highlights: Hiking in the Alps and Andes, and visiting New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and Uzbekistan.