Seattle’s Social-Service Groups Band Together to Influence Policy

Like many cities, Seattle has been struggling to pay the bills. But every time city officials try to shave spending on community health and human-services programs, a formidable group is looking over their shoulders—the Seattle Human Services Coalition.

The coalition—which unites more than 270 nonprofits that offer programs to reduce domestic violence, homelessness, hunger, and other social problems—monitors the city budget from the time the mayor starts crunching the numbers until it is approved by the city council. And the group makes noise at budget hearings if it sees something it does not like. “If you have 200 people testify and 150 are testifying about health and human services, that has a big impact,” says Tony Lee, a member of the coalition’s executive committee and advocacy director at Solid Ground, an antipoverty nonprofit.

This fiscal year, the Seattle group—one of the few human-services coalitions that operate at city level—won an especially sweet victory.

With word that the city would face a shortfall in its 2012 general fund (later pinpointed at $25-million), the coalition began to make its case last summer, first to the mayor, then to each of the nine city council members: With so many people still suffering from the economic turmoil, now is not the time to cut the safety net.

“We had to point out to them how many more people needed the services in 2012 than in the year before—or the year before that,” says Julia Sterkovsky, the coalition’s executive director, who runs the two-person office that helps coordinate the advocacy campaigns.

As it does every year, the group drew up budget recommendations to let city officials know which services it considered essential, along with a set of priorities that rank second and third. The result: the council adopted a budget in November that not only spared human-services programs from cuts, but added $2-million to cover increased costs, make up for reductions in the federal Community Development Block Grant program, and bolster programs for homeless people and immigrant and refugee youths.

The Seattle group, which started in the 1980s and now represents 13 separate human-services coalitions, has developed a sophisticated advocacy operation that includes quarterly meetings with the mayor, a budget committee that assigns liaisons to each city council member, and an apparatus that springs into action when needed to recruit people to testify, attend rallies, or write letters or opinion pieces for local newspapers.

Seattle is a heavily liberal city, so voters are relatively supportive of social spending. But its mayor, Mike McGinn, a Democrat, says the coalition plays a “very significant role” in budget debates. “They do a lot of the legwork, bringing people together who are in the human-services arena to have a common message.”

The mayor and the coalition do not always agree. Last year, the nonprofit network successfully lobbied to persuade the city council to restore more than $300,000 in human-services cuts that Mr. McGinn had proposed.

But this year, in addition to agreeing on the budget, the nonprofits and the mayor are working together on an advocacy strategy aimed at another government body: the State Legislature, which they fear will cut revenue to cities in an effort to resolve its own budget problems.