February 26, 2009 | Read Time: 2 minutes
In an effort to rally nonprofit groups and highlight the role charities can play as the nation seeks to recover from the recession, more than 100 nonprofit leaders have signed an online “action agenda” outlining steps that should be taken to improve charity performance, financing, and relations with government.
Created by the Nonprofit Listening Post Project, a project of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civil Society Studies, the three-page document — “Forward Together: Empowering America’s Citizen Sector for the Change We Need” — has been circulating via e-mail for several weeks. It also appears in an advertisement that the Center for Civil Society Studies, after receiving a $20,000 grant from an anonymous donor to help disseminate the agenda, paid to have published in this issue of The Chronicle. Among the ideas being promoted:
- Persuading government to include charity “infrastructure” projects as part of the federal economic-stimulus spending.
- Offering foundations incentives to distribute more than the minimum requirement of 5 percent of net assets to help charities that are involved in the economic recovery.
In the longer term, the nonprofit leaders seek to improve government-charity partnerships and develop new approaches to finance nonprofit work, including new tax incentives and methods to increase private capital investment in social ventures.
Lester M. Salamon, director of the Center for Civil Society Studies, said the agenda was designed to influence both charity leaders and policy makers in the executive and legislative branches of federal and state governments. “It basically says that we as a nation should think really hard about renewing our compact with the nonprofit sector. It cannot go it alone, any more than government can go it alone.”
Among those who have signed the agenda are leaders of the United Way of America, the Girls Scouts of the USA, the California Association of Nonprofits, the National Urban League, and the League of American Orchestras.
The agenda can be viewed on the Nonprofit Listening Post Project’s Web site.
