In a recent essay in The First Principle of Voluntary Action, Mark Rosenman, director of the Caring to Change project, writes that:
As government cuts back on direct service provision and transfers responsibility … to the nonprofit sector, questions of independence are implicated. If charities are forced to pick up the slack for proportional government cuts (e.g., the amount of direct healthcare subsidy/expenditure per growing number of patients with a particular medical condition; for affordable housing development or for feeding the homeless; for providing mental health treatment slots; etc.), it does affect their independence in programming. This effectively shifts nonprofits to a role in which they have to compensate for government failure, to augment its services and to do reactive caretaking rather than to attend to proactive development and change.
What’s the line between public and private responsibility when it comes to providing healthcare, education, and other services for the poor?
I’ll wager half my tax return that today, in some foundation in this country, you’ll hear an exchange like this one:
Program Officer: ‘The city has decided it’s going to discontinue funding transitional housing programs for the poor, so ABC, Inc. [a nonprofit organization] is requesting $100,000 to replace lost city funds.’
Foundation Executive: ‘Transitional housing programs for low-income people are a public responsibility and should be supported by tax dollars. If we make up the funding gap, we’ll only encourage city officials to stop funding other programs.’
There are several possible outcomes to this discussion. The foundation might decide to fill the gap for a year, to give the nonprofit time to find replacement dollars. Or, as so often happens, it might decide to hold the line. It’s then left as an exercise to the program officer to determine how best to communicate the bad news to the applicant, to explain a decision that begs a thousand questions.
I’ll leave it to historians to explain, for the cities in our region, why the lines of scrimmage between public and private responsibility fell where they did. The question then becomes, how and under what circumstances should these lines ever shift?
Here’s an example of how the game is played: Elected officials succumb to public pressure to cap or reduce taxes. Smaller tax revenues mean less public support for safety net programs for the poor. Some foundations yell “foul” and refuse to step into the funding breach, claiming that foundation dollars should be used not for funding basic services but for testing new ideas and supporting programs unpopular with donors, such as, for example, programs that help ex-convicts find jobs.
Foundations have a few plays of their own in this game. Some might support nonprofit advocacy efforts to shore up or increase public funding for safety net programs. It’s now elected officials who cry “foul” and threaten to strengthen legal strictures on advocacy programs.
It’s an old contest and the balance shifts this way or that with the blowing of political winds.
Is it the proper role of foundations to plug the gaps created by retreating public funds? In what domains should the government become your brother’s keeper? In public education? healthcare for the uninsured? food for the hungry?
Our Government IS my Brother’s Keeper!!! And our government should come to the support for each of these funding areas WHEN needed…… it should be natural. If he/she is educated to be strong, given healthcare to assure strength and feed the proper food for a healthy lifestyle…… IS THIS NOT where we want to be, time has given this type of lifestyle to us, and only time can remove it. With the help of a few STRONG voices and community leaders fired up and some of the MEs it can be done, expect MORE and REQUIRE more for our children, our communities and our health!! It is the role of our Governement to be the voice of it’s people, so YES my Governement is my Brother’s Keeper!!! Are we not our Governement? We are one of the same!!!! Let’s help each other, by any means necessary!!!! Shame on our government to place this on an individual, this is not the fault of an individual ….. a community forgot…..sponsored by a governement that lead.
Thanks for your very thoughtful comment, Laura. Even when a private citizen steps into the breach, does she attend entirely to current needs, or does she attempt to change the circumstances that create those needs in the first place — or both? Both kinds of action are clearly needed. Does one have more moral weight than the other?
Perhaps this very question is what makes helping in areas outside the US so necessary. I volunteer with a group that works in western Haiti and you know that you are providing all these services, food, water, education, health (Haiti Mission, Inc)for the last 10 years. The one thing that we can be certain of is that there is no shifting line in Haiti as the government can not/or does not provide any of the basic necessities of their population. Perhaps this will improve with the forgiving of some of their debt by the World Bank, et al. but we shall see. This is a population very close to the US which has absolutely no “safety net” provided by its own government. It makes being a private citizen who steps into that breach in Haiti very uncomplicated.