Nonprofits: voice of the public conscience - nonprofit organizations

American Forests, Sept-Oct, 1993 by Daphne White

Not-for-profit environmental groups are an effective mouthpiece for society's changing values--and they are changing.

Gone are the days when a person wishing to donate to an environmental charity had just a few well-known choices to pick from. Today more than 30,000 of the nation's one million nonprofit organizations focus on environmental issues, and although you can't know them all, it's a pretty safe bet their efforts affect your life each day.

"I think nonprofits often function as the conscience of our society," says Jack Chin, a Fellow in the environmental program of the San Francisco Foundation. "There are some very basic social values that don't always seem to be reflected in the decision-making of either business or government. It is the role of nonprofits to articulate and express those values."

And as the environmental movement grows and changes, its face is changing as well. It has both the blush of youth and the wisdom of age. And it's becoming more broad-based--numbering minority and grassroots organizations among its ranks.

"Volunteers of today are not the 'little old ladies in tennis shoes' any more," says Brian McGuire, the national partnership coordinator for urban forestry within the U.S. Forest Service. "We literally have rocket scientists and brain surgeons and welfare mothers. It's a great melting pot, a place for people in the community to meet and work together on the social issues that are important to them. People are wanting to find a sense of community, and they are reaching to the third sector to do that."

Nonprofits "promote altruism, in a society that reinforces self-interest; community, in a society that rewards individual achievement; and pluralism, in a society sometimes threatened with divisiveness. They provoke, challenge, and question. They also teach, mediate, and heal," according to a publication of the nonprofit group Independent Sector called Why Tax Exemption? The Public Service Role of America's Independent Sector. "In a world where choices by both business and government frequently are driven by short-term considerations--reelection to office or bottom-line profits--environmental groups speak for future generations."

Maybe this is why nonprofits have a higher credibility with the public than does either government or business, according to a 1992 Gallup poll.

And that credibility is backed up by financial figures: Independent Sector reports that nonprofits received nearly $123 billion in financial contributions and volunteer time in 1990, and spent an estimated $389 billion in providing services that same year. But the independent sector is much smaller than the government and commercial sectors, with expenditures that total only about 10 percent of the combined spending of the three levels of government.

"Nonprofit organizations are one of the means through which we speak as communities," adds Jim Browne, director of the Washington, DC, office of the Tides Foundation. In addition to being a philanthropic organization, Tides serves as an administrative "incubator" for dozens of fledgling environmental groups. "One of the things nonprofits are able to do is to take positions that are not so popular, around which there is not yet a consensus. Government has a hard time dealing with issues that are unpopular with 50-percent-plus-one of the population."

Most environmental groups direct their efforts at the grassroots level, but many work at the municipal, state, national, or international level. Some, such as AMERICAN FORESTS, work at the national level while directing resources to build the organizational strength of local-level groups.

It is nonprofit conservation groups such as the Sierra Club and AMERICAN FORESTS that pushed the federal government to establish many of the national forests and parks that we take for granted today. AMERICAN FORESTS, the nation's oldest citizen conservation group, was instrumental in the formation of the National Forest System and the establishment of the U.S. Forest Service.

Today AMERICAN FORESTS is working with the Forest Service and local tree-planting groups to spread the word that trees in the city can clean the air and lower energy bills. Legal groups press class-action suits to compel industry and government to reduce environmental toxins. And groups formed around minority issues--groups such as the NAACP and the Urban League--are starting to focus on environmental issues--in part, McGuire says, because minority communities have suffered disproportionately from environmental pollutants and the resultant health problems.

In many cases, nonprofits serve as bellwethers for government and industry: After they work to build a consensus around an issue such as energy conservation or recycling or tree planting, government and business follow with regulations and products that address what have become mainstream concerns.

"Fifteen years ago, everyone agreed that recycling would never happen in New York," says Nancy Wolf, special projects director at Environmental Action Coalition. "We held the line for 15 years when nobody else thought it was sexy, nobody else thought it would work, and no national groups wanted to get involved." But times change: EAC's long-term efforts were effective, and this fall there will be curbside recycling on every block in New York City.