It’s summer in Washington, D.C. The mercury has topped 90 degrees for days on end and the humidity outside flattens you like a steam roller. It’s just as challenging inside the Capitol with issues like how to implement landmark health care legislation and reform the financial services industry – all amid prolonged fallout from an uncertain economy.

In healthcare reform, IS and our members advocated successfully for incentives to help small nonprofits provide insurance for their employees. We’ve also been engaged in the financial overhaul legislation, specifically in support of creating a consumer financial protection office and lowering transaction fees for charitable donations (so more money goes to the cause, less to credit card companies and banks).

Our efforts would have gained even greater traction if the nonprofit community concerned with these issues had the freedom and resources to advocate more powerfully on behalf of the sector. For example, journalist Dan Eggen reported that pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, insurers, and others spent over a million dollars a day in the first quarter of this year to protect their business interests. According to the coalition “Americans for Financial Reform,” lobbying by the finance industry amounted to $1.4 million daily to influence Congress. Nonprofit charitable organizations have neither deep pockets for such lobbying nor the freedom to do so under current law.

That brings to my topic. It is high time to update laws governing our advocacy considering some are nearly 40 years old.

Advocacy: A Defining Tenet of Our Work

Since America’s founding, engaged citizens have used charitable and public interest organizations to express their vision of the world and orchestrate their voices. Major social movements such as abolition, temperance, child welfare, workers’ rights, women’s suffrage, and civil rights began with individuals forming or joining voluntary organizations that speak not in their own self-interest, but to give voice to those who are not heard – a fact made clear by the Latin root, advocatus.
Ad = “to” + vocare = “to call.” An advocate is “one called to aid,” a noble calling indeed.

People expect nonprofits to identify problems, push for improvements, and speak out for action that will serve the public good. Perhaps this explains findings in the 2009 Edelman Trust Barometer, where 45 percent of 5,000 respondents said they trust nonprofits. Compare that figure to business (39%), government (32%), and media (32%).

Nonprofits and foundations seek to ascertain which solutions will work – and which won’t – in a variety of different capacities: to save endangered wildlife, to deliver humanitarian aid; or to improve early childhood education. Those delivering services via government grants and contracts have expert knowledge on how best to improve this process. Sharing such knowledge with lawmakers and other public officials can only serve to better inform the decisions and policies that are under consideration. Why would we not also want foundations to confer with policy makers? And why should they not be able to fund directly the advocacy activities of organizations they otherwise support? They too are trying to improve quality of life here in the US and around the world and have demonstrated an enduring commitment to serving the public good. Yet our laws bar foundations from conferring with Congress unless specifically invited by an individual lawmaker to do so or in defense of a particular practice pertaining to the foundation’s operation.

Charitable nonprofit organizations have been prohibited from engaging in partisan political activities since 1954, but their right – and responsibility – to engage in non-partisan advocacy and lobbying has been recognized in our nation’s tax laws since 1976. At that time, Congress placed specific limits on nonprofits conducting nonpartisan lobbying activities. While private foundations have been generally prohibited from lobbying (other than for self-defense), the regulations implementing the 1976 law established clear guidelines for the kinds of support foundations may provide to organizations that lobby. Given the valuable contributions that both nonprofits and foundations offer society, we have a responsibility to ourselves and the communities we serve to ask if legislation over four decades old should not be modified, not in favor of allowing partisan engagement, but to allow a greater capability to advocate.

Working Across the Aisle

We best leverage our credibility and the ongoing support of the public by remaining nonpartisan. We must be transparent about who we are, whom we represent, and the myriad ways we serve the common good.

Our work touches every aspect of life from health care to human rights, from educating our children to economic development. We employ some 13 million people – almost 10% of the U.S workforce – and we accounted for 5.2 percent of the national gross domestic product in 2008. Despite these mighty contributions, our sector can at times seem conspicuously invisible.

Yet we live at a time when business is gaining even greater flexibility to invest in political campaigns. Even before the Supreme Court ruling of , business had more resources than our community to allocate for such purposes. The Supreme Court decision further lowered the barriers to corporate participation. Why would we too not seek support for increasing our advocacy capacity, albeit in a nonpartisan fashion? We can take the silver lining this opportunity presents and call for sensible revision of the laws that constrain both foundation and nonprofit capacity to advocate. I am not talking about entering into the partisan fray, as mentioned, but simply making it possible to advocate more effectively for the causes to which we are committed. (For specific policy proposals on advocacy, see please #4 of our public policy platform.)

Conclusion

In 1915, Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin published a picture of a vase outlined by two opposing faces. Few people could see both images at first glance. If people identified the vase first, they needed substantial prompting to see the faces – and vice versa. Rubin’s vase is an apt metaphor for advocacy, which has the power to help our public officials see the same issue yet from a different perspective.

Lifting the constraints placed on our sector around advocacy would enable us to raise much greater awareness on issues that are vital to the communities we represent. What if our sector had the capacity, freedom, and resources on par with other sectors, so we too could invest over $1 million every day to tell the stories of our constituents – the homeless woman in need of medical care or the middle-class family who lost their home? Imagine how many more people would have been profoundly moved and inspired to action. Imagine how lawmakers might have crafted both health care and financial reform differently. Imagine our collective ability to create a more robust, healthy, and vibrant society for all.