Nonprofits and Advocacy: Engaging Community and Government in an Era of Retrenchment

9. Analyzing the Practice of Nonprofit Advocacy: Comparing Two Human Service Networks

chapter nine Analyzing the Practice of Nonprofit Advocacy Comparing Two Human Service Networks jodi sandfort Engaging in public policy is an important and well-established role for nonprofit organizations. Yet, as other contributors to this volume explain, initial research about nonprofit advocacy assessed public policy in relation to abstract frames from social science, considering nonprofit agencies as merely another form of interest groups, vehicles for social movement organizing, or civil society associations enabling democratic participation (Andrews and Edwards, 2004; Boris and Krehely, 2002; Mosley, 2010a; Warren, 2004). This volume and other more recent scholarship try to understand advocacy itself to center stage, or to consider, as Robert J. Pekkanen and Steven Rathgeb Smith articulate in their introduction, “How do nonprofits advocate?” Significant numbers of nonprofit agencies engage in civic engagement, policy advocacy, and lobbying. Many large and formalized nonprofit organizations deploy a range of tactics to share their knowledge and expertise in the public policy arena. Much of this research grows out of larger consideration of how public funding might influence nonprofit board governance, professionalization , formalization, and organizational effectiveness (Grønbjerg, 1993; Sandfort et al., 2008; Schmid et al., 2008; Smith and Lipksy, 1993; Stone, 1996). While scholars initially worried that nonprofits’ resource dependency on government created disincentives for policy advocacy, empirical research has found little support for this concern. In fact, there is growing evidence that organizations receiving government funding are more likely to engage in public policy engagement (Berry and Arons, 2003; Chaves et al., 2004; Child and Grønbjerg, 2007; Mosley, 2010b; Salamon and Geller, 2008). Beyond this question, scholars have not explored many other essential questions about capacity and result. National policy engagement is certainly differentiated from activities at the state and local levels (Berry and Arons, 2003; Child and Grønbjerg, 2007). National nonprofits engaged in policy Analyzing the Practice of Nonprofit Advocacy 223 advocacy are often sizable, able to mobilize their memberships, and pursue sophisticated tactics informed by political practices (Berry, 1999; DeVita and Mosher-Williams, 2001; Strolovitch, 2007). In contrast, nonprofits at the state and local levels engage in much more modest activities; researchers document that confusion about basic legal rules and regulations and lack of familiarity with simple tactics decreases policy advocacy engagement among the whole population of nonprofits (Bass et al., 2007; Berry and Arons, 2003; Reid, 2006). But more recent descriptive accounts of nonprofits public policy activity by Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies point to new topics for research. Their 2007 survey and subsequent roundtables of nonprofit leaders highlight the significant role of coalitions and networks for many organizations (Belzer, 2011; Geller and Salamon, 2009; Newhouse, 2010). While Jennifer E. Mosley (chap. 5, this volume) also highlights that collaboration with other organization is a common phenomenon, the mechanism of influence and capacity among networks is not well understood. In fact, this issue inspired the analysis I undertook for this chapter. Through investigating nonprofit advocacy in a unique study of nonprofit service delivery organizations in one state, I highlight what is not yet visible in most research about nonprofit advocacy—the way network participation influences how organizations develop, reinforce, and sustain advocacy practices. In this exploration, I examine the workings of two networks of human service organizations, both of whose members provide a safety net and social service programs to low-income individuals and families. The statewide Community Action Partnership (CAP) was formalized in 1971 and strengthened in the early 1980s after federal retrenchment and funding consolidation. As such, it emerged in response to government-initiated, top-down policy change. The other network, the Alliance for Connected Communities (hereafter the Alliance), was founded in 1999 by agencies in the state’s metro area with deep community roots as historic settlement houses and community centers. As such, it emerged from a bottom-up movement of agency directors who wanted to build power in light of growing environmental uncertainty. Each network is held together by a unique history and a similar struggle for stable and flexible revenue to support daily operations within service-based organizations. Important to our purposes here, while agencies in both networks focus on service provision, they also engage in local and state community building and policy advocacy like many other community-based human service organizations (Marwell, 2004; Mosley, 2011). 224 Organizational Politics, Strategy, and Tactics In this chapter, I draw upon multiple sources of data to better understand how advocacy capacity is built in such...