Nonprofit Groups Must Meet the Challenges of a World in Tumult

In the wake of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, donations of time, sweat, courage, and cash should do more than just make us proud of Americans' capacity for caring. They should ultimately prod us to fashion a new way of thinking about the relationship between public and private action, one that escapes the rigid ideological positions that have taken root over the years.

For much of the past two decades, we have been beholden to two concepts of the relationship between nonprofit and voluntary action and government priorities. The first vision has been grounded in the mainstream liberal idea of a nonprofit world that dutifully works to achieve broad public purposes, sublimating its private values and commitments in an effort to work with government to provide secular services. Many have seen the growing dependence of nonprofit human-service organizations on government money as a clear sign that the agendas of nonprofit groups and government can never be separated. Over time, this vision of a dependent nonprofit world has been closely aligned with advocacy efforts aimed at bringing ever-more government support into the nonprofit world.

The other concept of nonprofit and voluntary action, trumpeted by conservatives, has celebrated the private and idiosyncratic values that allow nonprofit organizations to innovate and experiment at a distance from government. For conservatives, the real value of private charitable activity was thought to lie precisely in its nongovernmental character. Rather than see the financial support and oversight of nonprofit groups by government as a potential tool for the achievement of greater accountability and effectiveness, conservatives have worried about the erosion of the independence of nonprofit activity.

The answer, they have argued, lay in the shielding of nonprofit and voluntary efforts from the embrace of government. These arguments became associated in the 1980's with calls for reductions in public support of nonprofit social-service groups and greater levels of private charitable giving.

The scenes from New York highlight the overly simplified assumptions and limitations of both those longstanding visions. In place of outmoded and ossified arguments aimed alternatively at drawing or erasing a line in the sand separating the nonprofit world and government, what we need is an appreciation of the power of autonomous private action in the interest of important public purposes. At the heart of the images we have seen from New York is the idea that private voluntary efforts can indeed be brought to bear on public problems in a way that reinforces and supplements public action.

It is noteworthy that the early work of nonprofit groups and volunteers in the attacks was not governed by narrow service contracts or carried out in complete separation from government. Rather it was animated by something far more powerful, namely personal commitments to helping in the name of powerful public need. From this we need to take a lesson.

The picture that has emerged is one that neither conservatives nor liberals can really explain adequately using standard nonprofit sobriquets. It is a picture of public and private actors working side by side in an effort that simultaneously gives voice to the powerful private commitments of individuals while affirming the need for coordinated work focused on a critical public purpose.

When the tenon of private action is fitted tightly into the mortise of public needs, a joint is created that withstands great pressure. The challenge that has been set for all of us is to find ways to construct this strong joint when circumstances are less dire and desperate, but when the needs are nevertheless important.

Perhaps the events in New York and Washington will help us find a way that recognizes both the power of unleashing the needs of individuals to express their personal values and the necessity of channeling those impulses toward society's most pressing public needs.

Even modest success at this task might allow something positive to emerge from a situation that otherwise is so desperately tragic.