Challenge and Opportunity for Michigan Nonprofits Part 5 of 5

Friday we were discussing the opportunity that exists for Michigan’s nonprofits to take a leadership role in the regional dialogue taking place in southeastern Michigan…

Here’s how this might work in practice:
1. If the mayors and managers are discussing legacy costs and cooperation among municipalities for service delivery, local youth agencies can help them see they need to also be discussing how to include youth and those who suffer from child neglect and abuse in their planning.

2. If several local units of government are discussing how to work across difficult barriers of legal and union origin to provide services less expensively, then local educational institutions need to help them see that they also need to be discussing how education of all kinds can be brought more to the center of our community life.

3. In the arenas where business leaders are discussing how to jointly stimulate the Michigan economy through knowledge-based industries, then a group of human service nonprofit leaders need to provide input so they also can be discussing strategies for dealing with the homeless – how not to make people homeless in the first place, and how to reclaim the lives of those families who find themselves without homes.

4. If healthcare institutions are talking about teamwork in delivering patient care, then a consortium of nonprofits needs to exert leadership so that part of that healthcare discussion includes avenues through which cultural and artistic values can be delivered as well.

The nonprofits of our area have a tremendous opportunity for leadership of the regional revitalization discussion. They could have, and, in my view, should have, a hand in setting the regional agenda. They should be interjecting their concerns and issues into the dialogue and bringing their “best practices” to the discussion table. They should be advocates for achieving new social understandings of how we care for people, educate them, and provide all sorts of life continuity and quality of life services and opportunities to them. The nonprofits should be leading the discussion of how we will achieve new social and cultural as well as political, economic and governance objectives in the revitalization process.

We are not limited to presently conceived alternatives. If current wisdom says “either government does it or nonprofits do it,” then perhaps our nonprofits might have a better idea about how to effect what John D. Rockefeller III envisioned back in the 1970s when he argued for a public-private partnership.

If our present experience is that when government does it then taxes must automatically go up but that’s not desirable because we can’t get re-elected, while if nonprofits do it they must do it “for free,” and rely only on charitable gifts for their resources, well, the voluntary sector might just come up with a different model of providing the human and financial resources necessary to achieve higher social aims.

The assumptions that current social “problems” will just continue in the newly revitalized region in the same way they do now is not appropriate. But we need the nonprofits to come out of their silos and begin to cooperate, collaborate and even consolidate, so that they can fulfill their natural role by having a significant impact on the re-engineering of our revitalized region going forward.

However, the nonprofits cannot have and exercise such a voice as individual charities. They must be able to speak as groups, or with a single voice. To command respect and be heard, the voluntary sector needs to come together and express a corporate quality of leadership; and to do that will require the tearing down of silos and the putting aside of individual organization agendas in order to collaborate and cooperate in the building of leadership potential for the voluntary sector.

Summing up, it’s not only that we’re being forced by economic circumstances to work together more intensely and perhaps uncomfortably than we’ve ever done in order to survive and keep going financially. There’s also the very attractive possibility out there that nonprofits can take a leadership role in the revitalization of the society of the whole southeast Michigan area. There’s a stick, yes, but also a very attractive carrot out there. Certainly an opportunity not to be missed, wouldn’t you say?