What does an Obama administration mean for the nonprofit sector?

What does an Obama administration mean for the nonprofit sector?

How will this new President work with this sector that now controls nearly 10% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)?

Will he build on the work of the Bush Administration's Office of Community and Faith-Based Initiatives? Or will he wipe the slate clean and start anew?

Will his proposal to provide college loans to students in return for community service be implemented -- and how will it be received by the nonprofit community?

Will his health care proposals pass -- and how will they affect nonprofits that provide medical care to the uninsured? Will universal health coverage be the ultimate game changer for the health segment of our sector?

How can we, as social entrepreneurs, prepare to engage the next President in our shared mission of making this the best country that it can be?

Elect a Candidate with a Plan for Nonprofits

From the good folks at the V3 Campaign:

WHAT'S THE PLAN, STAN???

Does your candidate have a plan to strengthen nonprofits in your community? If not, why?

Can you imagine electing a candidate that didn't have a plan to partner with the business sector to strengthen their community?

Having a hard time envisioning that? Today we made a video to show you what it might look like...

Vote FOR Parkland ... lives depend on it!

Vote FOR Parkland ... lives depend on it!

On Nov. 4, Dallas County voters will find a proposition at the end of their ballots that needs your support. Voters are being asked to approve a $747 million bond program to build newer and more modern facilities for the Dallas County Hospital District — known simply as Parkland.

I urge you to vote FOR Parkland.

More info here:
http://www.voteforparkland.com/

Thank you for your time.

Jeremy Gregg, CFRE
Jeremy@JeremyGregg.com

[where: 75223]

VIDEO: Destination Home (Remix)

Thanks to our friends at the Pursuant Group for quickly re-editing our Destination Home video for today's deadline for the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives' "Portraits of Compassion" video story contest.

I cannot praise their work enough. The original video was a very tight 4:36, but I had to cut it down to under 3:30 for this competition. I gave them 24 hours notice... and they still pulled it off. I hope that you enjoy their work, and consider contacting them. Let them know that you saw their work for CDM!




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Dallas mayor urges businesses to fight homelessness

Thank you to Phil Cubeta for not only joining me at Central Dallas Ministries' recent Urban Ministries Prayer Breakfast, but for citing the event on his blog, Gift Hub: "Of Metrics and Prayers for the Poor".

The Dallas Morning News also covered the event in their article, "Dallas mayor urges businesses to fight homelessness." This article is cited below.

To grow physically and spiritually, Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert said Thursday the city must embrace the needs of its most vulnerable residents – particularly the homeless – and not leave them behind while those stronger thrive.

“To progress together, we need to understand the needs of others,” Mr. Leppert said during a keynote address before about 1,000 people at the Urban Ministries Prayer Breakfast at Dallas’ Hilton Anatole hotel.

Economic constraints, such as limited housing options and high gasoline prices, remain barriers to the homeless engaging in mainstream society, Mr. Leppert said.

But Dallas is poised to significantly improve homeless residents’ lives through the opening this spring of a new downtown homeless assistance center, the mayor explained. Mr. Leppert also said he envisions the creation of a $20 million housing trust fund that could be included in the city’s next public works bond package. Top city staffers project placing such a package before voters within three or four years.

The public sector, however, can only provide so much funding, Mr. Leppert said.

“The private sector must step up,” Mr. Leppert said. “Government can’t do everything and shouldn’t do everything. It should set a foundation, it should set priorities.”

To that point, the mayor called on area businesses to support, through word and checkbook, efforts combating homelessness and its root causes. General investments in Dallas will also create a stronger economic climate benefiting the entire community.

“Investments are, at their heart, a belief that we can create opportunities,” said Mr. Leppert, a career businessman and self-made millionaire who often crafts his political messages in economic terms.

But this morning, he stood before the crowd as part preacher and part politician.

Quoting Mother Teresa, Mr. Leppert said that the good one does today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway, he implored.

“In the end, it is between you and God,” he said.

Supporters hail Mr. Leppert’s ideas for reducing homelessness as at once compassionate and realistic.

But some homeless advocates have derided as callous one particular program Mr. Leppert strongly advocates: the Lend a Hand campaign, which calls on Dallasites to resist giving panhandlers money.

Instead, the campaign recommends, drop pocket change in any of several dozen lock boxes provided throughout the downtown area. Backers call it a vehicle for better supporting organizations dedicated to helping the homeless.

Larry James, chief executive officer of the Central Dallas Ministries, rejects such criticism of Mr. Leppert. He says the mayor’s efforts will only help the plight of Dallas’ homeless residents.

“This mayor is the real deal,” Mr. James said. “Tom Leppert cares about every street, every corner and every person in this city … He’s refreshing in every respect.”

Thank you also to the sponsors of the event:

Providing Hope
The John and Dorothy Castle Advised Fund of The Dallas Foundation

Providing Housing
Baron and Blue Foundation
Clay Cooley Automotive Group
Jon and Linda Halbert Family Foundation
Morning Star Family Foundation
Mr. and Mrs. J. McDonald Williams

Providing Health
Anonymous
Champion Partners, LTD
Church of the Incarnation
Texas Instruments
Thompson & Knight Foundation

Providing Hunger Relief
Abilene Christian University
Anonymous
Argent Property Company
Bank of America
Baylor Health Care System
Beaird Commercial Realty
The Beck Group
Don J. Clevenger
Scott Collier/The Staubach Company
Cornerstone Christian Church
Wesley and Teresa Crawford
East Dallas Christian Church
Embrey Interests LTD
Holmes Murphy & Associates
Dan and Sue Hopkins
Willie and Gigi Hornberger
Sam and Patricia Ligon
Sarah Losinger
Schuyler and Lila Marshall
Leadership Network
North Texas Food Bank
Glenn and Gabriella Owen
The Rees-Jones Foundation
Riverside Church of Christ
Dave and Cathy Shipley
Blake and Erynn Shipley
Kay and Kevin Thomason
Jim and Rhonda Walton
Walton’s Garden Center

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$3.5M donated to fight homelessness in Dallas

I had the great pleasure of attending this press conference in place of my dear boss and friend, Larry James. I knew about the County's commitment of $1 million in funding per year to support the operations of the new Homeless Assistance Center (HAC), but the additional commitments were refreshing news to me:

• $1.5 million from The Meadows Foundation,
  
  
• $1 million from the Rees-Jones Foundation,
  
  
• $500,000 from the Mike and Mary Terry Foundation and
  
  
• $500,000 from Pam and Gary Patsley.

I also encourage you to get involved in the Homeless Walk this Saturday, November 17:
http://www.helpthehomelessdallas.org/

Since Belo's pop-ups and pop-unders are gettting worse every day, let me post the full text:

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$3.5M donated to fight homelessness in Dallas
03:12 PM CST on Monday, November 12, 2007
By KIM HORNER / The Dallas Morning News
khorner@dallasnews.com

Dallas’ fund-raising campaign to help the homeless got off to a $3.5 million start on Monday.

Officials announced four major donations, considered the largest given locally to address homelessness, as part of Help the Homeless Week.

The contributions launched a $20 million campaign by the Metro Dallas Homeless Alliance to raise private funds to help cover operating costs at the assistance center set to open downtown in April.

“I’m excited, because what you’re seeing is a city coming together,” Mayor Tom Leppert said at a news conference. “I am proud of what’s happening in this city.”

The donations include $1.5 million from The Meadows Foundation, $1 million from the Rees-Jones Foundation, $500,000 from the Mike and Mary Terry Foundation and $500,000 from Pam and Gary Patsley.

The money will help the city reach its goal of ending chronic homelessness by 2014, the city’s appointed homeless czar, Mike Rawlings, said.

According to a 2007 count, Dallas has more than 5,000 homeless people, with nearly 600 considered chronic homeless, the most visible population that has been on the streets long-term and suffers from mental illness or addictions.

Officials estimate the new center will cost $6.4 million a year to operate. The city has committed to paying half of that, and the county will chip in another $1 million.

“It’s the right thing to do, and it’s a great investment,” Dallas County commissioner Kenneth Mayfield said. He added that other cities in the county should step up to help the homeless.

“They gravitate here, and it’s in everybody’s best interest that it [the center] succeed,” he said.

Fundraisers need to take a stance: Tomorrow's important vote in Dallas

For those who might ask what this has to do with fundraising for social service organizations, let me respond by saying that I do not think that such fundraising should be strictly focused on bringing in revenues for one organization.

In our jobs as fundraisers, we should primarily be focused on advocating for an allocation of the community's resources in a way that supports our non-profit's mission.

Directly raising funds for our organization is obviously the clearest way to do that. However, taking actions that result in increased funds for organizations that complement our organizations' mission is also a worthy pursuit -- particularly when such actions "increase the pie," rather than simply reslice it.

But we also must not neglect the importance of supporting large, public initiatives that also complement our organizations' various missions. We must acknowledge that the government has a capacity to address the needs of society at a scale that dwarfs even the largest charitable efforts.

That being said, I realize that a 501(c)(3) cannot ask people to vote in a particular way. This limitation on "institutional communications" from your organization, however, should not limit your personal voice.

In addition to supporting initiatives that allocate resources in a way that supports their organizations' missions, fundraisers should also take actions to prevent the allocation of resources that stand against their missions.

In my case, I work for Central Dallas Ministries. Our mission is to share the love of God by building genuine community in the neighborhoods where we live and work.

We live and work in Downtown Dallas.

Downtown Dallas needs people to call it home, not just a place to work. Only then will it begin to provide "genuine community" to those who live and work there.

For that reason, I am going to ask all the Dallasites who read this blog to vote FOR PROPOSITION ONE tomorrow (November 6).

(This is not a request on behalf of Central Dallas Ministries, which takes no organizational stance on this or any other vote. This is my personal request, which comes out of my personal understanding of what is best for our community.)

Tollroads will not bring people to live Downtown. They will efficiently carry them in and out of it.

For this reason, I am going to ask you to consider voting FOR PROPOSITION ONE on tomorrow's ballot. This proposition's passage will help ensure that a tollroad is not built through the land where Dallas was supposed to receive a park.

For more information, please visit:
TrinityVote - A Community Movement to Reclaim the Trinity River Project

More importantly, please read this blog from the Dallas Observer's Jim Schutze:
At Least One Developer Thinks a Toll Road Taking People Away from the City's a Bad Idea

If the city wants to fill up downtown with the kind of energetic young people who might want to live there, he said, the city needs to get the rents downtown way down from the $1,400 level. He gave me a theoretical example of a project downtown where the owner needs to get $850 a month per unit to make money. What the city should do, he said, is subsidize those units so the rent will be $600 a month.

The key, he said, is not poverty-level housing or rich-people housing. It’s affordable housing. If the city were willing to spend its money making downtown affordable, then the city could develop the kind of occupancies downtown that would support retail, entertainment and neighborhood service industries.

Please consider reading the full blog
here.

Since philanthropy cannot compete with public funding....

Since philanthropy cannot compete with public funding in terms of scale or efficiency, and since this blog is dedicated not simply to philanthropy but to all forms of directing (and redirecting) funding towards causes of worth . . . I encourage any of you who believe in promoting children's health and well-being to visit this site:

Children's Defense Fund

And to consider taking action on behalf of the millions of uninsured children who struggle to get the healthcare that they desperately need.

Charity is not the Solution

The Dallas Observer recently quoted me in their article on the Dallas Street Church, "The Gut-bucket Gospel."

Jeremy Gregg, director of development at Central Dallas Ministries, believes the most important thing a city can do to deal with homelessness is to provide affordable housing, particularly single-room-occupancy units, or SROs. He says the Street Church and other small nonprofits like it are best at addressing the immediate needs of the homeless, such as food, clothing and shelter. But Gregg says ending homelessness in Dallas will require more than any one organization can accomplish on its own.

Within the issue of homelessness in Dallas, there is such an emphasis on charity and transitional efforts -- but what we truly need is a systemic/public approach to develop permanent pathways off the streets. Churches and NPOs cannot do this alone. They can make the path easier for folks to follow, and perhaps direct more people towards it, but they cannot make the path without massive public support.

DISCUSSION: What do you think is the role of charity within this issue?

Supreme Court Hears Taxpayer Challenge to Faith-Based Initiative

A very interesting article from The Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy on a very important topic:

Supreme Court Hears Taxpayer Challenge to Faith-Based Initiative

"In a spirited debate this morning before the U.S. Supreme Court, lawyers argued whether taxpayers have the right to sue the federal government for activities of the White House and federal agencies undertaken through general funding to promote the involvement of faith-based groups in government social services."

Texas Dept. of State Health Services, Funding Alert

The Texas Department of State Health Services regularly publishes a very good list of public and private funding opportunities:

Funding Alert

The emails provide very clear descriptions of the opportunities available, and make it easy to determine if there's anything worse pursuing. A very valuable resource in a world full of opportunities!