Getting Political Is Good for Everyone

 

America’s poorest children gained more access to nutritious food over the past 12 months than in the previous 20 years combined. Recent achievements include the California legislature passing a budget that provides grants for schools to serve breakfast during the regular school day so that more kids can eat; Oregon’s governor signing a bill to add half a million kids to school meals programs, with the state of Maine following suit; and the House of Representatives adopting a measure to increase spending on summer electronic benefit transfer (EBT), which provides monthly funds to low-income families to purchase food.

The reason for these wins? Robust nonprofit political activity—by a broad coalition of nonprofits—at the federal, state, and local levels. The lesson? Nonprofits need to do much more of exactly what most of them don’t think they can or should do: influence public policy and its execution.

Debunking a Myth

One of the great myths about nonprofit organizations is that they can’t and shouldn’t get political. Conventional wisdom holds that a nonprofit’s role is to manage private efforts to fill the gaps where government or the economy has failed—to provide food, housing, and health care; promote the arts; and protect the environment, all with private rather than public resources. It is an impossible and self-defeating notion. In fact, many successful nonprofits have proved that avoiding partisanship but embracing political activity to the full extent allowed by law (which is considerable) can bring about profound change.

There are many things nonprofits can do that government can’t. They can experiment and take more risks, and because they interact directly with those they serve, they can learn more about what works and what doesn’t. But once they’ve perfected an idea or program, the fastest and most powerful way to scale it is via public policy. Meaning government. Meaning politics. Politics today—with all of the divisiveness, polarization, and paralysis we’ve experienced—has many negative connotations. But in the best sense of the word, politics is still about persuasion and marshaling public will to advance ideas that serve the common good.

When I first started the anti-hunger organization Share Our Strength in 1984, I was working on Capitol Hill for US Senator Gary Hart, who was about to launch his second campaign for the presidency. I didn’t want anyone to think we were doing anything at Share Our Strength that might inappropriately benefit his campaign. I also didn’t want Hart’s political opponents to be our opponents, so we walled off our organization from any political activity. We focused on being a non-partisan and non-political grant maker to other local, anti-hunger organizations.

I was also under the misperception that we and other nonprofits were not permitted to engage in political activity. This misperception is widespread. Certain political activities are indeed out of bounds for tax-exempt, 501(c)(3) organizations, including working on campaigns, donating to candidates, and engaging in lobbying beyond certain generously defined limits. Nevertheless, a broad range of political work is permitted, appropriate, even essential. (There is also the option of establishing a 501(c)(4) that permits campaign engagement and support, which we haven’t done.)

The longer we worked on hunger at Share Our Strength, the more we understood that if we didn’t gain political support for our ideas and programs, we would fail in our ambition to end childhood hunger in the United States. Political support brought the scale, higher levels of investment, and executive leadership we needed to achieve our goal of long-term impact.

So we began meeting with governors and state legislators to remind them that federal programs existed to provide fully fund school breakfast, lunch, afterschool snacks, and summer meals, but that logistical and bureaucratic barriers were preventing as many as half of all eligible kids from participating. At stake were millions of dollars in federal reimbursement that would benefit their state’s economy. Together, we devised plans to knock down those barriers, such as moving breakfast from the cafeteria to the classroom so that kids could more easily access food. Sometimes a governor’s use of the bully pulpit was enough to get things moving.

Getting Political: Five Lessons

In our case, the results of political engagement have been swift. When Share Our Strength launched No Kid Hungry in 2010, our advocacy strategy was to respond to incoming calls from governors who heard about the campaign from news reports. This year, we had a role in creating the agenda for the National Governors Association’s annual meetings, and political engagement is a driving factor behind our impact. Five lessons have emerged over the course of that time.

1.  Getting political is often about educating, not necessarily lobbying or campaigning. Sometimes political education and technical assistance for implementation can drive more progress than new legislation or regulations. Share Our Strength has devoted a lot of energy to helping governors understand that enrolling families and children in under-utilized federal nutrition programs can feed hungry people and attract more funding to their states.
2. Nonprofits need to build their internal political capacity. Political activity requires a distinct set of skills and expertise, including the ability to build coalitions and analyze public policy. Until 10 years ago, Share Our Strength was largely comprised of fundraisers and grant makers. We had to supplement our team with individuals who had worked on Capitol Hill or in state government, or who had advocacy experience with other organizations.
3. Building capacity sometimes means buying it. Political strategy and advocacy firms at all levels of government can offer experienced teams with expertise, networks, and relationships nonprofits don’t have. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we’ve often contracted with political consulting firms that have roots in both major parties.
4. Political success requires that nonprofits take the long view. Educating and building political support takes time. Political dynamics are fluid and ever-changing. There are often conflicting pressures on political leaders that have nothing to do with the issue you care about but that impede their ability to act. When Congress let the 2015 Child Nutrition Reauthorization legislation die because of a legislative traffic jam involving unrelated bills, for example, we learned that success or failure isn’t always in our control.
5. Nonprofits are not alone. Nonprofits can build their own knowledge through finding and talking to other organizations that are advancing their goals via politics. By observing and comparing notes about the political activity of numerous other organizations including City Year, Teach For America, and Save the Children, for example, we’ve learned a lot about how to emphasize bipartisanship, build broad and diverse coalitions, and understand the kinds of information political leaders value most.

Nonprofit political activity is good for nonprofits, good for politics, and good for the people that both aim to serve. Nonprofits benefit by seeing their programs and services achieve greater scale and reach more people in need, in ways that only politics and public policy can guarantee. Political institutions in a democracy like ours always grow stronger when more sectors and more individuals participate. And the people whose lives and livelihoods are impacted by both nonprofits and politics benefit when each aligns with and leverages the assets of the other.

Read more stories by Bill Shore.