The Foraker Group

The place where your child stays safe after school or plays soccer or learns an instrument

The place where your niece or nephew adopted their dog, cat, or guinea pig

The place where your neighbor gets a bag of groceries to make ends meet every few weeks

The place where your sister learns how to sing, dance, and perform

The place where someone you love seeks refuge

The place where your parents or grandparents seek daily elder care

The place you call in an emergency

The place where you get well

The place you tune in to stay informed, entertained, and up to date

The place where your auntie draws hope

The place where your community worships, explores, and connects with like-minded people

The place you turn to after a storm, a fire, or an earthquake

These are places that matter to you and so many others as part of everyday life. These are nonprofit places.

These are the places every Alaskan and American depend on – and often they don’t know they are nonprofits.

These are the places that make your life work, your neighbor’s life work, your community’s lives work.

And this work today carries forward the longstanding American tradition of residents coming together at the local level to recognize community challenges and solve local problems – the place where they practiced democracy. It was how our country organized itself. From the beginning, it was the basis for an efficient structure – one where government provided for the well-being of its citizens at a high-level, and nonprofits met those needs directly within communities.

To be sure, in each of our efficient and effective spaces, nonprofits take what they have and stretch it beyond anything that generally is practiced in a for-profit model because for them people and places matter, and the goal is to do all they can with what they have. Nonprofits fill the void – fill the gap – make it work.

What do nonprofits mean when they say: “we fill the gap or meet the need”?

To understand that question is to also understand that the nonprofit sector is called the “third sector.” By its name, it is the place where the government either can’t or won’t provide the service directly but still must meet legal obligations and fulfill its role to serve the common good. Serving the common good is often determined both with an ideological understanding of government’s role and through moral reasoning. While there are vast differences of opinion about government’s role in our lives, most would likely agree that if government has a role, providing the services directly is illogical when there is a nonprofit on the ground, in the community, who could be funded to do it better, cheaper, and faster.

So, on one side of the gap is the government and its responsibility to do or to fund for the greater good, while on the other side is the for-profit marketplace, which by its very nature is in business to make a profit. When the IRS determines nonprofit status, part of the litmus test is that the organization serves the greater good, is bigger and broader than the interest of a single person or small group of people, and that the purpose is inherently not viable in the for-profit marketplace. To that latter point, every nonprofit must rely on either a third-party payer (think government contract, government grant, insurance, Medicare/Medicaid, fee for service at below market rates, etc.) and/or it must raise revenue from charitable sources such as people, corporations, foundations, and other nonprofits.

While our revenue alone does not define the gap we fill, it does position us to have an interdependence with our funders that is often misunderstood and misjudged by how others think we should be able to make our missions work.

In this space in between, it is also important to clarify how in our democratic structure, our sector is also purposely separate from government. Our legal structure creates independence from government in and how we govern ourselves. It also provides some of the hallmarks of democracy that most of us hold as unequivocal – the opportunity to exercise freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom to provide for the greater good. Even the most ardent opponents of the nonprofit sector generally favor these hallmarks of our society, at least when it comes to their own personal use of them.

And here lies one of the root problems we face right now. In this world of misinformation and direct attacks on the sector, we need to do a better job of making this personal.

Listening to the news every night, we hear opinions of those with diverse views on the massive cuts to our federal workforce and to federal funding overall. It seems that to a person, for those who favor the cuts – the cutting is good – unless the cuts get personal. Their flooded home, their food bank, their neighbor, their program. Those matter. They should not be cut – but all the others, yep, that is fine.

The ability to deeply understand how each cut matters is simply too obscure until it is personal, and then it is too late. The cut is made. The damage has begun.

We learned a long time ago in so many movements for change that “the personal is political.” Each story, each example, each cut – it has to mean something for people to understand that taking away someone else’s rights or services or security could happen to them, too. It has to feel personal in their heart to overcome the narrative in their head.

So, as we watch the beloved things we have collectively built to care for each other’s spirt, security, and humanity be dismantled in 100 days and counting, I am challenging each of us to set the record straight. To cut through the noise of myths and falsehoods or presumption and assumption.

I am asking you to move from telling stories of the big cuts to telling stories of the personal impacts of those cuts, not in ways that exploit or lessen the people we serve, but in ways that the people we don’t serve can connect them to their own lives.

We often say the shortest distance between two people is a story. Let’s sit with our teams and find our stories in the most tangible ways and let’s connect our stories to more people. These cuts are not just happening to you or the organization across the state, they are happening everywhere, to so many – let’s weave those stories together.

As you consider your messages, keep these points in mind:

• I know it is noisy out there. So be simple, clear, and full of truth to cut through the noise.
• Take a lesson from fund development that reminds us to focus on “stories not statistics, feelings not facts.” Of course, it isn’t that the statistics and facts don’t matter, but people don’t remember them – they create distance not connection. Lean into your stories. Lean into connection and have the facts and the statistics to back up your messages if you need them.
• Ask for what you want instead of focusing on what you don’t want or what you lost. Help people feel the consequences of their decisions regardless of how they voted or how they feel about the role of government in our lives.
• Focus on the people and the community not the work. This fight is not about saving every nonprofit – this is about saving the results of our missions on the people and places that depend on us for helping make their daily lives work.
• Give each message and each story an action step. People want to be part of a solution. Help them take a meaningful step.
• Stay abundant. This is all bigger than just your organization, so don’t make it just about you. Recognize others around you who are doing good work. They, too, are losing funding, working under stress, and worried about the future. Consider how you work together in your messages and within your community – not just now but for the future. If you don’t know what to say, start by listening. What are you hearing? How can you respond in a way that invites others to engage directly with your mission, to experience it physically or emotionally?

One last tip – recently, I heard an eloquent reminder about how we might view this effort when we look back at this time. This person said that we will know if we didn’t just help ourselves when instead we emerge stronger because we helped each other, we heard each other, and we saw each other. To me, this is what it means to build resilience while enduring hardship. So many generations before us and maybe we, too, know what it means to move through hard things.

That said, I recognize I am asking you to do more as sector leaders when doing more seems extra hard. I know because I am asking it of myself, too. I also recognize that I am asking you to do something you already know how to do because it comes from your heart.

We must stand together. We must combat misinformation. That is what it means to be stewards of our missions right now. We can do this together.

Laurie

PS. If you have not signed onto our letter to the delegation asking you to stand with us and stand with the truth of why nonprofits matter to Alaskans, you can do that here. The deadline to sign is May 16.

PSS. Brushing up on some common nonprofit myths might help you get into the right headspace for crafting your stories for new audiences. Check out these five myths of the sector.