Nonprofits, Eat Your Spinach
The way for service organizations to fight budget cuts is to describe the local impacts.
National Journal Daily
By Fawn Johnson
March 28, 2011
The tea party has served up some bitter pills for nonprofit and charitable institutions that depend on federal money, but the sour taste of the Republican-sought budget cuts could become for them what spinach was for Popeye. The local networks that antipoverty and service groups are developing to beat back the proposed cuts could place them on more solid ground than ever with local lawmakers and ensure that their influence will be felt forcefully in elections.
Groups like Catholic Charities USA, AmeriCorps, and Habitat for Humanity are fighting for the very existence of a range of community-service programs. Their members are using the same homespun organizing tactics that put the very people who are advocating cutting them off in office.
“I don’t think Washington-based, inside-the-Beltway lobbying really works anymore,” said Tom Sheridan, a principal with the Sheridan Group, a consulting firm for nonprofits. “I don’t think that’s where the power of the tea party came from. This came out of angry town hall meetings.”
To save their skins, service groups are aiming to harness the same public anger that caused House Republicans to insist on slashing federal spending by $100 billion annually. Their key to survival will be in making their message wholly local, with almost no reference to a big philosophical picture. Their talking point should look like this: “This budget will eliminate 75 teachers from the high school across the street.” Not like this: “Poverty assistance and community development should be a national priority.”
Catholic Charities is facing cuts in everything from homeless shelters to food-stamp outreach to refugee aid. The budget crisis has forced the 100-year-old group to pivot away from its former lobbying notes to Congress, which began with broad ethical statements about poverty, to more specific recommendations about where “efficiencies” can save money and avoid slashing entire programs.
“In the past, our advocacy [message] was, ‘The budget is a moral document, and it needs to advance the common good,’ ” said Candy Hill, the charity group’s senior vice president of social policy and government affairs. Catholic Charities members now are offering financial-redesign proposals “at a local community and individual level” to help lawmakers make smaller cuts with the least amount of damage, she said.
The House-passed spending bill for the fiscal year eliminates funding for the Corporation for National and Community Service. If that cut becomes a reality, 1,800 full-time workers in high-need public schools would be on the unemployment lines, said AnnMaura Connolly, the campaign director for Save Service, a coalition of groups that have banded together to fight the service line-item cut.
Connolly said the service community was shocked to see its funding zeroed out in the House Republican spending bill. For at least the last decade, groups like Teach for America and City Year have relied on the White House or a few powerful congressional supporters to save them during inevitable conservative calls to cut federal dollars. They can’t count on that kind of rescue this time around. The White House has already caved on cutting home-heating assistance, and it might be all congressional Democrats can do to maintain funding for perennial conservative targets like Planned Parenthood. Everything else, from national service to foreign aid could be ignored.
“We find ourselves, like a lot of other causes and organizations, sort of scratching our heads and thinking, ‘How are we going to be heard?’ ” said Connolly. “What we’re trying to do now is really help people understand elimination. What would that look like?… What exactly does this mean in Topeka? What exactly does this mean in Fargo?”
For the groups funded by the Corporation for National and Community Service, whose efforts are key to many local school and community organizations, that means talking to Republican lawmakers on their home turf and telling them that they have voted to cut service-group jobs. Save Service dispatched 2,600 people to 83 Senate offices and 295 House offices during a recent congressional recess. “The organizations that these leaders know as community leaders, many of them didn’t know that National [and Community] Service was part of that equation. They didn’t realize they were hurting organizations that they support,” Connolly said.
Conservative voters also respond positively to the local message, but only if nonprofits are willing to trumpet the good things they’re doing. “What frequently happens in this charity space is that people don’t really know. Charity is supposed to be humble. People don’t know that the next-door neighbor is a foster parent,” Sheridan said.
Still, charities and service groups wield a big advantage in grassroots lobbying because they can deploy a ready network of do-gooders, many who have already volunteered in electoral campaigns, to spread their message. The only challenge they face is tailoring that message to the community. “It should be specific enough so that people have an invested interest in it. You also need to have it be big enough so you can have those grassroots numbers,” said Pete Kavanaugh, an associate at the political-consulting group Hilltop Public Solutions.
Many of the young charity and service activists seeking to stave off the proposed budget cuts also were involved in President Obama’s 2008 campaign as students. Their current work on the budget forms the perfect staging ground for action in the 2012 election, Sheridan said. The key distinction between then and now is that in fighting for their lives, these groups are setting in stone advocacy procedures that also guarantee their own continued life.
“You have to kind of disrupt the culture of dependency—‘I don’t want to take on the government because they’re giving me money,’ ” Sheridan said. “The service movement was not oriented toward this field operation, this very aggressive field operation, until now. My hope is that they’ll never go back.”
This article appeared in the Tuesday, March 29, 2011 edition of National Journal Daily.