Standing Up for Nonprofits: Advocacy on Federal, Sector-wide Issues (Elements in Public and Nonprofit Administration)

This Element examines the recent history of nonprofit sector-wide advocacy at the federal level, focusing on work done by national nonprofit infrastructure organizations and national charities, to advocate on issues, such as tax incentives for charitable giving, that affect a broad range of nonprofits. The Element draws on interviews with thirty-nine national and state nonprofit leaders and federal policymakers as well as published papers and journalistic accounts. It finds that many policymakers are only weakly supportive of the nonprofit sector. In the end, this Element points to an uneasy, shifting balance in nonprofit sector advocacy between informal, decentralized, issue-based coalitions focused on short-term, if vital, legislative victories, on one hand, and the public good mandate embraced by some sector-wide advocates, which attends to longer time horizons and a broad conception of the defense of civil society, on the other. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. Cover Title page Copyright page Standing Up for Nonprofits: Advocacy on Federal, Sector-Wide Issues Contents 1 Introduction 2 Major, Federal, Sector-Wide Advocacy Organizations 2.1 Independent Sector 2.2 National Council of Nonprofits 2.3 Council on Foundations 2.4 Philanthropy Roundtable 2.5 United Philanthropy Forum 2.6 Other Major, Sector-Wide Advocates 3 Sector-Wide Issues 3.1 Federal Issues 3.1.1 Taxes 3.1.2 Regulation 3.1.3 Government Institutions and Procedures 3.1.4 Government Spending 3.2 State and Local Issues 4 Sector-Wide Advocacy Resources and Tactics 4.1 Advocacy Resources 4.2 Advocacy Tactics 5 Effective Nonprofit Sector Advocacy: Grasstops Strategy 6 Two Conceptions of Sector-Wide Advocacy: Special versus Public Interest 7 Challenges: Cultivating Champions and Navigating Partisanship 8 The Fracturing of Advocacy Infrastructure and the Growth of Issue-Based Coalitions 9 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act: A Case Study 9.1 Challenges to Sector-Wide Advocacy during TCJA Negotiations 9.1.1 Republican Legislative Steamroller 9.1.2 Limits of Data and Research 9.1.3 Hyper-Partisanship 9.1.4 Disunity 9.2 What Sector-Wide Advocates Learned from the TCJA 10 Post-TCJA Revisions and Reassessments 11 Sector-Wide Advocacy in Response to the COVID-19 Crisis 12 Sector-Wide Advocacy and Philanthropic Reform 13 State- and Local-Level Advocacy on Sector-Wide Issues 14 Recommendations for Enhancing Sector-Wide Advocacy 14.1 Increase Resources for Federal-Level, Nonprofit Sector-Wide Advocacy 14.2 Mobilize Grasstops 14.3 Dedicate Funding Support for New, Sector-Wide Advocates 14.4 Codify Legislative Relationship Maps 14.5 Encourage Governmental Research to Increase Congressional Knowledge of the Value of the Nonprofit Sector 14.6 Identify the Next Challenge 14.7 Develop and Vet “PreFabricated” Legislative Asks 14.8 Ask Tough Questions about How to Accommodate Hyper-Partisanship 14.9 Develop a Legislative Vanguard 15 Conclusion References Acknowledgements