This is the second in my U.S. nonprofit infrastructure tour – you can find my interview with Jim White from the Nonprofit Association of Oregon a few posts back. I met with David Streeter, Director of Public Policy and Advocacy for Washington Nonprofits back in October, who gave me a great introduction to the work the organization does to try and represent and build the capacity of the sector. Washington Nonprofits aims to support health, thriving communities in Washington State through three main areas of work; an education and training programme funded through the Washington Secretary of State’s office (the bit that regulates charities), convening the sector through conferences and events, and public policy work, aiming to advocate for Washington’s sector as a whole at a state and federal level. It works mostly outside of Seattle, partly because there are other organisations in that space, but also partly because it was set up that way, to try and be more representative of the state as a whole. There is what sounds like a good network of infrastructure bodies across the state, with lots of long-standing board-level links. Washington Nonprofits tries to work with and through them, “to be supportive of them and help them to be part of the lead on those issues” that matter to the sector.
Inevitably, as a couple of policy folk, we focused a lot on advocacy, influencing and campaigning. “One of our roles is making sure barriers between nonprofits and government are broken down. Nonprofits in this country are essentially part of the government’s workforce in terms of delivering services and fulfilling needs that the government can’t or won’t do. But we still need to be in partnership with government.” Organisations’ ability to do this, however, will vary from state-to-state (and, indeed, within states). David has worked in similar roles in other states as well as Washington and points out some of these differences: “It depends on where you are and what the culture is, how government is viewed, how nonprofits are viewed by government and how nonprofits view government. I’ll say in general this is a pretty positive state to be a nonprofit in. There’s obviously things that you want to make a little easier so the climate is friendlier to nonprofits, but in general there isn’t a lot of opposition to nonprofits … in terms of the climate here legislators are pretty appreciative of nonprofits, they generally know what nonprofits are in their district, they usually serve on a couple of boards, there’s a pretty high advocacy among legislators for nonprofits. We’re trying to build on that to really deepen the relationships.”
Part of this involves building nonprofit capacity. “One of the things we’re working on is really trying to get nonprofits to be engaged in advocacy with their state, federal, local government.” Washington Nonprofits is designing an advocacy toolkit to this end, to try and dispel the rumours and misconceptions about whether or not nonprofits can engage in the first place (see my lengthy tax blog), and to help show them how. “For a lot of organisations the conversation about whether or not to do advocacy stops and starts with the Board member saying well we’re a nonprofit, we can’t get political, and that’s it,” says David. “Which is totally false. 501c3 nonprofits are more than allowed to lobby, it’s a best practice of management, it’s good for everybody if nonprofits are engaged in the public policy process.” There are a number of barriers the toolkit is trying to overcome: “There’s fear of jeopardizing tax status, there’s fear of angering an official, there’s also the staff capacity element for an organization, because it does take staff work to do the work. Some organisations might have concerns about mission creep or others may just simply be perplexed how to get started, because it is kind of confusing to figure out how to get started. There’s a lot of material out there regarding nonprofit advocacy, figuring out where to start can be really hard.” There are also a lot of reporting and disclosure requirements, and county and city-level regulations that even David admits can be pretty open to interpretation, and pretty off-putting too. Does he think these create a ‘chilling effect’, as is suggested back home? “Yes – I don’t think it’s intentional, but I think it’s become that way.”
Nevertheless, David’s actually seen an increase in nonprofits wanting to campaign. “Organisations are really hungry for policy advocacy. A lot of that is motivated by the outcome of the 2016 election… whether it’s local economic development, homelessness, gun control, the environment, nonprofits are coming to the table on these issues, grassroots groups or established groups that want to make this a part of their service portfolio.” This is good to hear, but David points out there’s a challenge for his organization to also get groups to think about issues affecting nonprofits as a whole. And you and I know, dear reader, that while this kind of policy is really our jam, it’s not what gets most people excited. But it matters. The Trump administration has put forward a number of policy proposals that would harm the nonprofit sector, including repealing the Johnson Amendment which prohibits charities engaging in party political activities, like endorsing candidates or funding campaigns (getting rid of this runs the risk of opening the door to phony groups channeling funds in illicit ways – see National Council of Nonprofits for more). It has also passed tax reforms, which dramatically reduced the number of taxpayers who are able to get a tax deduction for their charitable contributions, while creating new burdens and liabilities for nonprofits. Dismantling parts of the Affordable Care Act also means nonprofits may see a rise in demand. And proposals around expanding the “Public Charge” criteria for immigrants may create barriers to service delivery, which has implications in terms of how those organisations are valued and seen by government (read Washington Nonprofits’ policy bulletin for more). “We’re in this position of trying to encourage folks to do advocacy on behalf of the entire sector, while at the same time, if you’re a human service provider, or work in immigration or the environment or things like that your world’s on fire all around you. One of the things that we’ve been asked to do is really try to set up a way for subsectors and nonprofits to be supportive of other each other’s advocacy. Slowly but surely we’re getting there, it’s going to be a while before we’re where we need to be on that but that’s something where we’ve made a goal for ourselves.”
David would like to see funders with a better understanding of advocacy work, and a greater will to fund it – a wish I think will be shared by my English friends. They need to understand it’s a long game, he says. There is also a challenge in trying to get people involved in what is a dysfunctional political system, where there’s a high sense of disillusionment and distance from power. And there’s a frustrating gap in education about how that political system works (regardless of its efficacy, or lack thereof), which carries another equality dimension: “what we’re finding is that there are major gaps between what folks who grew up in certain communities know about government and what folks who grew up in other communities know. So that’s a challenge we have, trying to raise that level of knowledge.”
But there’s lots of opportunity too. “There’s so much energy among nonprofit organisations to be at the table. It’s challenging and stressful times but we’ve seen it, we’ve increased our numbers and policy participation, people are hungry for policy expertise, and there’s opportunities for us to meet that. My hope is the momentum doesn’t go away, people don’t get discouraged and walk away.”
Thanks to David for all his time and expertise. There’ll be more to come from infrastructure pals soon!
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