July 2, 2009 | Read Time: 5 minutes
During the first week of July, state governments will post their budgets for the 2010 fiscal year.
This time last year, 29 states announced that they would post deficits for 2009. All totaled, their projected shortfall was a staggering $47-billion.
While the remaining 21 states did not post deficits, few boasted financial strength, and none was prepared for the economic earthquake that hit just before last fall’s presidential election.
Since then, few states have been able to avoid draconian cuts. The fallout for nonprofit organizations and the causes and constituents they serve has been severe. Nineteen states have slashed health-care services to low-income families and children. Twenty-one states substantially raised eligibility costs or cut funds for Medicaid support, rehabilitative services and home health care for the elderly. Education cuts in 21 states forced the elimination of programs that serve students at all ages. In addition, most governments have frozen wages or furloughed employees.
Perhaps the hardest hit has been California, where Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state legislators have proposed profound cuts in every quarter to offset the state’s nearly overwhelming $23-billion shortfall. Those cuts will affect every Californian, including millions of students, older people, struggling working families, and retired municipal employees.
The $140-billion in money from the federal stimulus law that is now flowing to states has helped to stave off more immediate erosion; however, this one-time influx cannot offer the kind of economic buoyancy required for the deluge of red ink and renewed need that will soon be made evident.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that on July 1, 47 states will post 2010 budget deficits that will cumulatively amount to more than $130-billion — almost three times greater than those in 2009. Perhaps more troubling, the center, along with the National Conference of State Legislatures, tentatively projects that budget deficits for 2010 and 2011 could reach a combined high of $320-billion.
As states, which are required to make their budgets balance, look for ways to reduce spending, odds are that businesses will get what they want far more often than nonprofit groups will. And that is because nonprofit organizations refuse to take the steps they need to guarantee that their voices will be heard in the political process.
That must end. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin’s blunt advice to his often-quarrelsome colleagues following their signing of the Declaration of Independence: “Now we must hang together, or surely we will hang separately.”
Like our colleagues in business, we must build consensus around issues and ideas that affect every organization in the United States. Only then will we be able to demand detailed policy platforms, access to lawmakers, and a role in the decision-making process that our counterparts in corporate America are afforded.
The signs that nonprofit groups understand this are murky at best. Even now, as we look up from the depths of mounting national debt, too many nonprofit leaders still give harbor to the notion that the nonprofit world is too diverse to find common cause. Too many remain fixated on historic divides. Too many remain locked in silos with people who work on the same cause they do. Too many are so mired in the daily drudgery of trying to make frayed ends meet that they do not even think about working with other organizations.
Continuing that approach guarantees that countless outstanding organizations will be swept up in the coming budget maelstrom. Many will be forced to close, and those that are left will remain anemic and languishing — more agents of charity than champions for change.
The opportunity to galvanize nonprofit groups to work together for the common good must start with efforts at the local level.
In coming months, more than 375 cities nationwide will hold mayoral campaigns. In cities like Atlanta, Houston, Miami, New York, and Seattle and rural towns like Hickory, N.C., Lancaster, Pa., and Menomonee Falls, Wis., incumbents and challengers alike will campaign to win the votes of their fellow citizens. These candidates will present detailed plans to editorial boards, to local chambers of commerce, and on the Internet in the hope of securing endorsements and votes. This year, charities must be among the ranks of those courted.
Nonprofit groups in some cities have already taken steps to ensure that their combined economic role is recognized. During the spring, groups in Austin, Tex., El Paso, and Pittsburgh forged coalitions and held candidate forums to solicit policy promises from all declared candidates.
Yet, as exhilarating as those events were, they orbited around important but traditional causes — human services, the environment, education. This Balkanized tactic only exposes nonprofit groups to the vulnerability of empty promises, easily forgotten after Election Day.
Until organizations stand together — from the largest foundations to the smallest, front-line program — and present a united voting front to candidates, the nonprofit world’s promise, along with most campaign pledges, will remain unfulfilled.
The mayoral races should be just a starting point. Nonprofit groups’ opportunities to influence do not end following this year’s elections.
In 2010, in what Nathan Daschle, executive director of the Democratic Governors Association, calls a “once-in-a-generation political cycle,” 37 states, including California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Nevada, and New York, will elect governors.
This gives nonprofit leaders 18 months to arrange statewide meetings, where they can come to consensus and develop shared policy ideas that no candidate can ignore. Nonprofit employees, volunteers, donors, and concerned citizens can then vote for the candidate who, based on their responses, best articulates an inclusive vision for the state.
Only when charity groups unite will they move closer to the day when no candidates — from those who aspire to be the smallest town’s mayor to the president of the United States — will stand before a group of voters without being able to detail their knowledge of, respect for, and plans to collaborate with America’s innovative and economically vital nonprofit organizations.
Robert Egger is president of D.C. Central Kitchen, in Washington, and founder of the V3 Campaign, an effort to get nonprofit views considered in elections at the city, state, and federal levels.
