Why Social-Services Groups Must Mobilize

The Census Bureau has just reported what many nonprofit organizations have known for some time: For the second year in a row, poverty is getting worse in the United States. That this happens as increasing numbers of charitable organizations are attempting to minister to the needy ought to send a powerful message to the nonprofit world: While social services may soften the impact of social problems, they can never resolve them.

For years, many leaders of nonprofit organizations have urged governments to do more to prevent drug addiction, family deterioration, child abuse, teenage pregnancy, domestic violence, hunger and homelessness, and other social problems. But it has become increasingly clear that those problems cannot be separated from one another and that nonprofit leaders need to band together to push for broad and more fundamental changes in policies that are hobbling low- and moderate-income Americans.

It has never been easy for social-service organizations to give advocacy a high priority. It is an anguished decision to turn attention, even momentarily, from trying to help someone in profound pain and desperation, to take the time to look beyond the immediate and compelling need, but that is exactly what nonprofit workers must do today.

A bigger challenge, however, now presents itself. It is to recognize that not only do nonprofit groups need to start pursuing advocacy campaigns vigorously and in new ways, but they must go beyond their own immediate agendas. Charity leaders can easily identify desired improvements in public policy and the functioning of government institutions specific to each and every area of human service. Yet, while they may win some social-change battles and prevent or reduce discrete problems, such as in trying to preserve Head Start, the nation faces a much more fundamental threat.

What is at stake today are basic questions about the role of our government, about our commitment as a society to generate and use government resources to solve public problems, about the need for our elected leaders to reverse policies that erode social, economic, and political justice. Those battles cannot be won by charities fighting alone for their own and their constituents’ concerns. They can be dealt with only by helping people, individually and collectively, to themselves see and act on common interests. A living-wage campaign, for instance, ultimately makes more sense for all types of human-services groups to pursue than does a battle to strengthen child-care regulations or expand funds for substance-abuse programs.

Promoting a different kind of advocacy requires aiding a charity’s clients, staff members, volunteers, board members, and other supporters to better understand the relationship between the causes they care about and the broader public benefit.

For instance, while people may be drawn to a nonprofit organization because they want to serve battered women, they should have an opportunity to learn about the relationship of domestic abuse to unemployment and job insecurity, wage depression and declining income, dwindling health care and neighborhood deterioration, and on and on.

Doing advocacy differently means enabling people to participate more effectively and assertively in the democratic process. Although charitable organizations must remain nonpartisan, they should help people to register and to vote, to make their views known to their neighbors and to elected officials, and to hold political leaders accountable to serve the public interest, not the interest of their biggest campaign donors. It means grass-roots advocacy that increases people’s political skills and activism, and builds enduring organizations and networks instead of stopping with ephemeral issue coalitions.

Foundations, although they have been notoriously averse to supporting such efforts, will need to make grants for advocacy work. Obviously, government money is not available for such purposes. Corporations are not interested in supporting advocacy that they feel might challenge the bottom line. Too few individual donors are willing to put money into advocacy efforts instead of much more tangible direct services for the neediest people.

Here’s why it is so important for a revolution today in the way nonprofit groups interact with government policy makers.

First, the growth in need is not small. The percentage of our population, as well as the actual number of people, falling below the poverty line continued to increase in 2002. The number of people who meet the federal poverty standard — those who make $9,183 or less, or $18,392 or less for a family of four — has grown to 12.1 percent, with the addition of 1.7 million people to the poor rolls last year. Try for a moment to imagine life at that income level. Next, try to imagine living with less than half that annual income; more than 14.1 million Americans lived in such extreme conditions in 2002 — that is 5 percent more than in 2001.

A key reason for the growth in poverty is the loss of more than two million jobs since President Bush took office. As the number of jobless continues to grow, more people are living without basic safeguards — for instance, 43.4 million lack health insurance, a figure that grew by close to 6 percentage points last year.

People at the bottom and in the middle of the U.S. economy can least afford the “jobless recovery” from the recession. Economic inequality is at an all-time high. In the last 15 years, the lower 40 percent of Americans saw their share of the nation’s wealth decline by about 75 percent while the top 1 percent saw their net worths grow by more than 40 percent.

Second, when things go wrong, Americans usually turn to government and nonprofit organizations. Given recent federal policy decisions and the ideology of conservative politicians, however, neither is in a position to respond to the demands for help.

The $1.3-trillion in last year’s tax cuts, followed recently by another $350-billion, have contributed mightily to a crippling of government. Add to that the costs of the war in Iraq, which just to date could have paid for health insurance for more than 23 million children or for well over a million four-year college scholarships, and too little money is left to support critical domestic services.

The president’s 2004 budget proposed cuts of 13 percent in community and regional development, 5 percent in education, training, employment, and human services (with some program areas facing cuts of more than 35 percent), 3 percent in consumer and occupational health and safety, and 3 percent in welfare and other “income security” programs.

What is very important for nonprofit leaders to keep in mind is that the lack of government money for social services comes from a deliberate effort by the Bush administration and its congressional allies to reduce the size, scope, and regulatory authority of government.

In pushing the initial round of tax cuts, then-House Majority Leader Dick Armey said that “restraining government was step one. Step two is a rollback.” Grover Norquist, a key Republican strategist, unabashedly said, “Kill the taxes and you kill government.” And the strategy is working: It helped take us from a $127-billion budget surplus to a projected $500-billion deficit. That shamefully brings us to the lowest rate of tax revenue measured against the gross domestic product since 1950 and the highest rate of deficit since World War II.

State governments also are in terrible shape, adding to the problems of social-services groups that depend on the money states provide as well as the way state governments funnel federal funds to them. The irresponsible tax cuts many states adopted during the boom of the late 1990s have meant that the vast majority face record deficits — and 49 states require balanced budgets. With the revenue shortfall expected to total 15 percent to 18 percent of states’ aggregated budgets this fiscal year alone, more cuts in aid to social-service groups are coming.

Since government has put itself in this hole, Americans depend more than ever on the support of nonprofit organizations. But charities, especially organizations that serve those in greatest need, rely on state and federal governments for more than 30 percent of their revenue. On top of that, the United Way campaigns, another principal source of funds for social services, are off by 7.5 percent nationally, with more than 20 percent of the largest United Ways reporting double-digit percentage declines. Foundation grants, corporate support, and donations from individuals are also getting harder to obtain. And while client fees collected by human-service groups increased by 600 percent from 1977 to 1997, it is unlikely that cash-strapped people will be able to afford to purchase more help.

So, nonprofit organizations are in a bind. People’s needs are growing at the same time that the resources to support social-service programs are decreasing. The touted compassionate conservatism that often casts social problems as individuals’ own fault because of moral lapses cannot make voluntary action an adequate substitute for public agency.

Furthermore, while many charities can achieve greater cost efficiencies, the current crisis is well beyond the pale of technocratic management fixes.

The nature of the new challenge facing the nonprofit world has prompted some organizations to begin to figure out new ways to confront fundamental government policy making. The Alliance for Children and Families, whose affiliates serve eight million people, has brought together directors of its local units to think about how to promote social change and deal with tight budgets. Volunteers of America, which traditionally focuses on providing services in 300 cities and towns, has set social justice as a strategic priority. Demos, which works to reframe policy and politics, is exploring ways to make social-movement methods and strategy more available to community-based organizations. The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy is working to define activities that promote social justice and to persuade more grant makers to finance such efforts. The Ford Foundation is working to improve and expand its own efforts and those of others in the field of social-justice grant making. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund has refined its general concern about organizations representing the nonprofit world and focused specifically on how those groups might strengthen participatory democracy.

Such efforts are crucial because simply trying to find new ways to alleviate our society’s needs and to support charitable services offers little but continuing frustration and a spreading despair. Foundations are key because they alone can support significant effort that goes beyond the imperative many charities feel to meet immediate need; to do so, philanthropy must give up its fears about challenging policy makers and support groups that are willing to do so. Most important, front-line charities that serve the needy must claim their essential place in the vanguard of pushing for social justice.

Mark Rosenman works in Washington as a distinguished public-service professor at Union Institute & University, whose headquarters is in Cincinnati. He has started a project, under the auspices of Union Institute & University and Independent Sector, to explore ways to help human-service leaders pursue social-change efforts.