Thursday, December 4 - Nonprofits are too timid when it comes to being involved with Advocacy

Advocacy and the nonprofit sector is a much-misunderstood area, and when it comes to the subject of climate change, it's important anyone involved in the field be more aware of what nonprofits can and cannot do.

In the States, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation has a good section on its website "Effective Advocacy at all Levels of Government" http://www.wkkf.org/advocacyhandbook/index.html
and explains how "nonprofits can legally and ethically influence public policy".

As well, in August a survey was conducted byJohns Hopkins University's Institute for Public Policy which shows while some nonprofit organizations spend time and money on policy development, few spend any time or resources on the activity itself, hindering deeper policy involvement.

• 90% of survey respondents said they should be more active and involved in policy advocacy.
  
• only 11% of the organizations surveyed devote more than 2 percent of their budget to lobbying.

“Even among large organizations, policy advocacy and lobbying remain largely solo operations of already over-worked agency executives,” said the report authors. “Nonprofit organizations are thus entering the policy realm with one hand tied behind their backs.”

The study, Nonprofit America: A Force for Democracy? , was done by the Center for Civil Society Studies at Johns Hopkins University’s Institute for Policy Studies. Read an article on the AFP website here:
http://www.afpnet.org/ka/ka-3.cfm?folder_id=2545&content_item_id=24612