Grant Makers Should Step In to Defend
Citizens in Danger of Losing Their Vote
pression laws when they took
over in 2011. And they are not
done yet. According to the Brennan Center, dozens of proposals
have yet to be acted upon.
Altogether, the rules present
new obstacles for an electorate
that is already prone to skip the
polls.
Even in 2008, an election that
attracted the highest share of
voters in 40 years, turnout was
less than 60 percent of the eligible voting-age population.
The bad economy is likely to
depress voter participation even
further.
Nonprofits have come under
direct threat in their voter-registration drives through the
new law.
In Florida, a new election
law requires voter-registration
groups to file their forms within
48 hours of collecting the documents or face stiff penalties for
late filing.
The new rules are so draconian that even the League of
Women Voters has stopped its
voter-registration efforts.
Nonprofit organizations
should not back down, and in
fact they should aggressively
step up their efforts to register
people to vote.
They should decry the attack
Continued from Page 31
upon the integrity of nonprofit civic-engagement efforts in
the State of Florida. And they
should redouble their efforts to
support the voting rights of individuals throughout the country.
To get advice, many of them
can turn to NonprofitVOTE, an
effort that since 2005 has provided training and guidance to
thousands of nonprofits to show
them how to register clients,
employees, volunteers, and others.
Likewise, more foundations
should step up and join nonprofits in aggressively defending citizens and democracy.
Too many foundations have
steered clear of policy and advocacy efforts that seek to
strengthen the practice of democracy.
That should change.
None of the most pressing issues facing society can be resolved if our democracy is broken.
Protecting our elections is everybody’s responsibility.
One of the great ironies of
the new push to limit voting
rights in the United States is
the fact that we have just ex-
perienced a decade of wars that
have claimed thousands of dead
and wounded American mili-
tary personnel, ostensibly to
plant the seeds of democracy in
the arid deserts of Iraq and Af-
ghanistan.
Vincent Stehle is a regular columnist for The Chronicle of Philanthropy.
THE CHRONI C
LE OF PHILAN
T
HRO
P
Y
MARK LI TZLER
Serious Feedback Can Help Nonpro;ts Succeed
ported back in a timely fashion,
teachers, district leaders, and
grant makers can make immediate changes to help students
improve academically.
Nonprofits and grant makers often wait for years to understand whether they have
achieved their desired level of
success.
Those data are important, but
real-time data that are linked to
long-term change let you make
better decisions to help people
in the present.
Signs of promise abound.
Charity Navigator, one of the
most prominent watchdog orga-
Continued from Page 32
nizations, historically provided
ratings for charities based solely on overhead and other financial data. While financial data
are important, they are woefully inadequate to examine effectiveness or results. That’s why
Charity Navigator is revamping
its scoring system to include reviews from the people a nonprofit serves as a key part of its rating criteria.
Getting advice and thoughts
from the people a nonprofit pro-
gram is supposed to serve will
not solve every social challenge.
But we are beginning to see the
power of serious and systemat-
ic feedback from those intended
to benefit—not as advocacy or
as academic research but as a
unique source of timely infor-
mation and insight.
Fay Twersky is a senior fellow at the William and Flora
Hewlett Foundation. She previously worked at the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation on
efforts to make its grant making
more effective.
Q: “HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO RAISE MONEY
IN THIS ‘NO-ONE-IS-GIVING’ ECONOMY?”
A: JULY 28, 2011:
“An Education Charity’s Fresh Idea
Builds from a $500,000 Request
to a $7.5 Million Award”
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