A Nonprofit Takeover of City Hall

Charity officials take elected office as they seek ways to better society

When Dom Betro made plans to run for a city council seat in Riverside, Calif., in 2000, he received plenty of encouragement

from his fellow nonprofit executives.

“They wanted human services to be funded better, and saw me as one of their own,” says Mr. Betro, president of the Family Service Association of Western Riverside County.

Mr. Betro’s successful bid now means he holds two jobs and is engaged in a balancing act that is playing out in many cities and counties around the country as charity leaders enter the political fray in the hope of gaining a direct say in setting government policies. The benefits of winning an elected post, however, come with demanding schedules and the potential for conflicts.

Although nobody collects statistics on the number of nonprofit executives who run for office, more and more charity officials seem to be willing to put their names on election ballots and are winning positions as mayors, city council members, and state legislators.

Some, like Mr. Betro, come from social-service groups and learned about politics from public-policy councils run by state associations of nonprofit organizations. Others, such as Michael B. Hancock, the former head of the Urban League of Metropolitan Denver and now a city council member there, decide to run for public office partly to make sure that the interests of charities win more attention from elected leaders.

The skills needed to run a charity and succeed in office have a lot in common, say people who have filled both roles.

As a charity leader, “you learn how to react to a lot of different situations,” says Mr. Hancock. “Plus, you learn to play the game and develop important political relationships so you can compete for dwindling government and private money. Those relationships were the hallmark of what I did as a nonprofit leader. They’re the foundation of what I do as a councilman.”

Tomorrow’s Leaders

Nonprofit chiefs are a particularly good fit for political office, says Jordan Schwartz, the state director in Pennsylvania for the Center for Progressive Leadership, in Washington, a national institute that cultivates political leaders. The organization’s first class of 53 leadership-development trainees, which is set to graduate this summer, includes 10 nonprofit executives.

“They can think in a nuts-and-bolts way about what needs to get done today, but also about what’s important to get done next year,” says Mr. Schwartz. “There’s no question in our minds that many of tomorrow’s political leaders can be found in nonprofits.”

And charity leaders seem more receptive to the idea. Says Jon Pratt, executive director of the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits, in St. Paul, “Nonprofit people feel both more comfortable with the idea of running for office and more strongly that they need to get involved.” In addition to the many who hold local positions, the number of nonprofit leaders turned state legislator in Minnesota has grown from one to five in the past five years, he adds.

Heavy Work Load

But participating in public office takes a lot of work and a willingness to load up a schedule.

Sam Singh, East Lansing’s part-time mayor and president of the Michigan Nonprofit Association, a statewide coalition of 922 organizations, says he routinely works between 70 and 90 hours per week. And at age 34, he has put parts of his personal life on hold so he can effectively perform his part-time mayoral duties, for which he receives $7,800 per year, and his association job, which pays him $101,000.

“I don’t have some of the commitments that people have, which makes it easier to run from one meeting to the next,” says Mr. Singh, who is single. His nights frequently stretch well past dark, as dinner meetings with charity leaders are often followed by attending a film festival or having a drink with a legislator.

Mr. Singh has had some time to get used to serving dual roles: He spent 10 years on East Lansing’s city council before running for mayor. For many of those years he also ran the Volunteer Centers of Michigan, before he moved to the Michigan Nonprofit Association.

The prospect of double-booked scheduling and endless days proves too much for some. Mr. Hancock, the city-council member in Denver, says he decided to leave his $100,000-per-year job as president of the Urban League of Metropolitan Denver seven months after being elected three years ago.

“It’s too demanding to separate the two,” says Mr. Hancock, who represents 55,000 people in his district and is paid $74,000. An endless string of 14- to 16-hour days scared him off, among other things, he says.

“Looking back, I could probably have done it, but it is difficult conceiving of days spent on two jobs — particularly when they overlap in some potentially troubling ways,” Mr. Hancock says.

Serving Two Masters

Fund raising presents one of the thorniest issues, and elected leaders say they work hard to steer clear of raising charitable donations from people or companies that might turn around and ask them for political favors. To do otherwise could end up alienating potential charity donors as well as constituents, pointing up conflicts that can arise when someone holds two public jobs.

Mr. Hancock says he helped raise $2-million to $2.5-million each year at Denver’s Urban League “because I knew how to play the political game.”

But when many of the same people he would ask for money as president of the organization began making requests of him in his role as a public servant, Mr. Hancock knew he’d had enough of doing both jobs at once.

“No one ever came up to me and said, ‘Hey, we’ll give to the Urban League if you help us,’” says Mr. Hancock. “But there’s no question they looked at me differently. When people you’ve courted come to you for changes in zoning laws as a normal part of their business, you have to re-evaluate how effective you’ll be in both positions.”

As is the case with East Lansing, Riverside, and many other cities and towns, Denver’s city council is nonpartisan, even though many observers know which party an officeholder belongs to, says Mr. Hancock, a Democrat.

Despite Mr. Hancock’s experience, some who hold nonprofit jobs and positions in government say a nonpartisan government seat makes it easier ethically for the charities run by politicians to raise money.

“If I held a seat in a partisan body, I might scare off folks from a competing party who may have been considering making a donation,” says Mr. Betro, the city council member in Riverside, Calif. “From an ethics standpoint, it’s much better for the nonprofit for the seat to be nonpartisan. It at least gives the appearance that the charity is above playing the political game.”

Avoiding Entanglements

Mr. Betro’s charity and others have created rules to govern situations such as his. He does not solicit donations directly, leaving that job to his fund-raising staff and volunteers. And even though Mr. Betro’s charity receives 65 percent of its $13-million annual budget from local, federal, and state government sources, he refrains from making appeals to his council colleagues to raise the amount Riverside grants to it. (The Riverside city council’s contribution to Family Service Association has remained flat since he won his seat in 2004.)

Worried that his dual career might come under scrutiny, Mr. Betro asked the Riverside city attorney in 2004 to seek out the opinion of California’s Fair Practices Political Commission as to whether there was a conflict between his two jobs, and whether Family Service Association would need to disclose large donations to the state because of Mr. Betro’s seat on the city council.

The commission ruled that, as long as Mr. Betro did not receive increases in pay linked to fund raising or control Family Service Association on his own, the charity would not need to disclose its donations.

The decision, made last June, has been cited by other California towns and by charity leaders who hold office in them, Mr. Betro says.

Those who hire and monitor nonprofit executives say that having a leader run for office can mean more stresses for the charity — and for the dual job holder. When Mr. Singh first discussed becoming East Lansing’s mayor, some board members at the Michigan Nonprofit Association wondered whether he could handle the extra load.

“My fear was that he wouldn’t be able to have a life and do two jobs,” says David Seaman, board chair of the state association. “I knew Sam would stay focused and committed, but how would he handle it personally?”

Mr. Seaman says Mr. Singh’s high energy level has enabled him to balance professional and personal duties just fine. “It turns out we didn’t have anything to worry about,” he says.

Some people who have held nonprofit and political jobs at the same time say the benefits outweigh the long hours and potential for conflicts.

Like many council members across the country, Mr. Betro and Mr. Hancock are faced with decisions on grants and taxation that affect charities.

Under Mr. Betro’s leadership, the Riverside city council built a new shelter for the homeless and added some new programs to help people who do not have a place to live, he says. The city’s commitment of $1-million, made last year, is about 10 times the amount it had spent in earlier years to help homeless people.

“I was able to challenge and change the long-held mindset that providing services increases the numbers of homeless people,” Mr. Betro says.

In Denver, the city council’s Board of Equalization determines the tax payments of some nonprofit groups. Because three city council members, out of 13, have nonprofit backgrounds and understand that charities are often budget-strapped, charities in Denver have not faced the kinds of increases that they might otherwise have seen in their tax bills.

“We on the board who have come from nonprofits know that the $4,000 or $5,000 they’d spend on taxes might be better spent on their mission,” Mr. Hancock says. “We’ve been there. We’ve done that. We know that the good that they do greatly exceeds that $4,000 or $5,000.”

But even though nonprofit groups have gained from the growing number of elected office holders among their ranks, charity leaders say that a glass ceiling of sorts may keep political jobs mostly to the local level. More than 4,700 state legislative seats nationwide — about two-thirds of the total — require more than part-time commitments, as do the top jobs in many cities. It would be much harder for charity executives to commit the time and avoid the appearance of conflict to run for the state senate, for example, some say, particularly since many of them would have to run on a Democratic or Republican ticket.

Even so, some charity leaders remain hopeful that a growing number of executives from the nonprofit world will seek out public office in the coming years.

For many years, there has been a sheepishness among nonprofit managers about getting involved in politics, says Robert Egger, author of Begging for Change: The Dollars and Sense of Making Nonprofits. “We’ve historically waited to see what government can do for us, but that era’s over,” he says. “We have to become more participatory.”

He says efforts like the Nonprofit Congress, a meeting planned for October in Washington, will aim among other goals to find new ways to close the divide between government and charity. The effort has raised $100,000 in total grants from the Ford Foundation, in New York, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in Seattle.

Adds Mr. Egger: “Nonprofits need to believe that we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for. We can’t wait for some politician to ride in on a white horse.”