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?