We have gathered here at an especially uncertain time, in the aftermath of one of the most intensely fought election campaigns in the history of the Republic, as the nation holds its breath while awaiting the next chapter in its political history. It is an in-between time, but whether it is a time just before sunset or just before sunrise we cannot yet say. For some of our citizens, it is a time of celebration, for others, of apprehension.

And for us, it is a time to take stock, to set our course for the days and weeks to come. For ours, as I need not remind you, is the independent sector. It is not polls or even elections that establish our priorities; we speak in our own name, no more than that but no less. Our actions are not fixed solely by officials appointed or elected; it is our own wisdom and our own conscience and experience that guide us. And how rich the stream of benefits that has flowed to our nation and to the world from the investments we have made, the directions we have chosen. While the public and the media focus mainly these days on the policies and workings of government, we are not merely a footnote to the history of our times; the nearly one and a half million organizations that comprise the independent sector, the 12 million people who work for nonprofit organizations, the two trillion dollars in assets of our public charities and private foundations—these, from the most global of our foundations to the most modest of our nonprofit agencies, are where as much as anywhere the history of our times is written. From the concert hall to the soup kitchen, from the church pulpit to the public square, it is our choices and our initiatives that shape our nation’s culture, help inform its aspirations, transform the promise of freedom and opportunity into a way of life for our nation, for its people.

So: Gathered as we are in this great city, at this anxious and in some ways fearful time, what can we say of the work that awaits us?

I want to talk with you today about three related matters. The first is the role of government; the second the role of the nonprofit sector relative to government and the people; and the third is the ethical imperative that underlies and overrides—or should—everything we do and the great opportunity that is before us, if only we seize it.

“Government,” Adlai Stevenson said back in 1948, “is more than the sum of all the interests; it is the paramount interest, the public interest. It must be the efficient, effective agent of a responsible citizenry, not the shelter of the incompetent and corrupt.”

Stevenson, in his own time, was widely criticized for what many saw as his naiveté. There were those who thought him too much the idealist, Eleanor Roosevelt in pants. Yet what he said about government was both wise and challenging. Government “is the paramount interest, the public interest.” But how, in the end, do we determine the public interest? How, do we define the public good? And where do we find, how do we encourage, what Stevenson called “a responsible citizenry?” Is it not in the rough and tumble of political debate that the working definition is made manifest? Is it, can it be, anywhere but in the grand chambers of our Congress, in the state capitols, in our city halls, where fallible women and men, informed by the perspectives and preferences of their constituents, battle their way towards the policies that assert what is, for the moment, their best approximation of the public interest?

But: this description of how in fact the public interest is defined—not as the expression of some top-down Platonic ideal but as the result of a bottom-up clash of competing interests—leaves far too much unsaid. For even if there is no revealed definition of the public interest to which we all assent, and even if such noble phrases as “by the people” and “for the people” are not self-defining, free and democratic government does rest on some bedrock assumptions. It requires a reasonably informed and a reasonably engaged citizenry. It depends on high-minded representatives, women and men of real probity. In a red-state and blue-state America, consensus may be very nearly impossible, but compromise—thoughtful compromise, not the kind of compromise that rests on you getting your share and me getting mine, not on log-rolling and pork-barrels, but on mutual respect, on a passion for inclusiveness, on a recognition that democratic government is defined even more by its process than by its product—compromise must be possible.

Our distance from these bedrock assumptions has brought us to this unsettled time. Ask America’s citizens today whether they trust the nation’s government to define the public interest, and I dare say the response will be overwhelmingly in the negative. Madison and Jefferson understood that “factions,” as they called them, were unavoidable. In their inclination to prevent a few powerful individuals and groups from using government to promote their own interests, the Founding Fathers created a framework for widespread citizen participation, viewing that as the best way to protect the public interest. But most Americans, it seems to me, do not perceive government to be functioning in this manner, even though they hope for a public sector less subject to the corruptions of ambition, of money, of partisan loyalties, of insiderism, of arrogance, of “K Street” lobbyists, of all the other pitfalls that mark the work of government as they know it today.

It is difficult in the extreme to connect the dots that lie scattered between the grand themes of justice and equity, of opportunity and creativity on the one hand and, on the other, the distortions of policy and legislation that derive, as do ours increasingly, from private interest lobbying and personal profit and gain. These jarring realities render the noble idea of “the consent of the governed” a feel-good slogan rather than an operational imperative; they make a mockery of “government of, by, and for the people.”

And the questions of how legislation is crafted and how, thereby, the public interest is asserted, interesting though they may be, are not by any means the most urgent ones that are these days raised when we speak of government and its role. The most urgent questions have to do with the very purposes of democratic government, with the scope and the responsibilities of government.
One of the unanticipated and dangerous aspects of the contemporary conception of government and its role is that very many of us, citizens and leaders alike, have come to see government and the people as if they were in an adversarial relationship. There is the government, and here are the people, and the challenge to the people is to keep government and its deadening hand at a distance. That is a very far cry from government as the agent of “we, the people.” As a consequence, we now hear far too many candidates for public office running against the government they seek to manage or setting out to “starve the beast.” Not long ago, and not in a clandestine, subversive gathering but in broad daylight, on NPR, Grover Norquist, leader of Americans for Tax Reform, put it this way: “I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” And the plan? Four years ago this influential leader said, “Cutting the government in half in one generation is both an ambitious and reasonable goal. If we work hard we will accomplish this and more by 2025. Then…. I have a recommendation: To cut government in half again by 2050.”

But even far away from the anti-government extreme, too many have come to see government and its functions as a burden on the rest of us. So they speak of the “tax burden,” a rather curious way to describe the system through which we build our highways and our schools, defend the nation, inspect our food and medicines, support exploration of our solar system, and so on and so forth. We never speak of the highway burden, or the public safety burden, yet we speak quite casually of the “tax burden” that enables us to build and repair highways and to protect our communities.

All of which is not to suggest that government is a pleasant carousel, a day in the park. Government is mostly not nimble, not always efficient, and seldom innovative. Indeed, that is in a sense how we want it, a system of checks and balances and Inspectors General to ensure that government is honest and fair, that it is not about deal-making, not about the private interests of the governors but about the public interest they are sworn to defend and protect. So the bureaucracy is typically slow and even cumbersome. Yes, there is too much paperwork, yes there is inadequate coordination among often balkanized departments and, yes, the bureaucracy is sometimes high-handed.

But I trust that many of you know, as I assuredly do, public servants of genuine distinction, men and women who are devoted to the public interest, whose efficiency and effectiveness easily match the efficiency and effectiveness of their counterparts in the private sector and whose honesty and empathy are exemplary. Recall the heroic work of New York City’s firefighters in her darkest hours after the attack on the Twin Towers, the Coast Guard who rescue those daring to reach for the American dream, and teachers in our public schools who work with our most disadvantaged children, all this for salaries that are or ought to be a public embarrassment. There is not a corner of our lives, of our corridors and fields that is not affected by the extraordinary work of government, every day, every week, every year.

The notion we hear from some quarters, that solutions to society’s challenges can best be handled by the private sector particularly where the public has failed is without foundation. Fifty or a hundred years ago—some tens of thousands of MBAs ago—Americans thought of the corporate world, in part, as a world of greed, of robber barons and polluters. Government was seen as the necessary corrective to corporate excess. Citizens wanted change and the government installed welcome limits, though some say the job is not yet done. Nevertheless, the tables have been turned, and those who preferred the invisible hand of the private sector to the sometimes all-too-visible hand of government have advanced the doctrine of privatization. Their response to government’s flaws, government’s systems in-need-of-repair has not been to scrutinize and improve, but to privatize. Privatize our prisons? Our schools? Our security services and even our intelligence services? No matter that the bottom line of the marketplace is a distribution of cash dividends for its shareholders and not to provide for society’s needs. No matter that the marketplace seeks efficiencies to maximize profits for individuals rather than serving the common welfare. Why else do we face a severe shortage of flu vaccinations if not for a marketplace that does not see enough profit in producing what America needs to prevent an epidemic?

This transfer of public responsibility continues still—as if the very idea of government were simply wrong, as if there are no essential functions that belong in the public domain. But surely government is meant to be more than our communal letter of contracts, surely profit cannot be the only motive for assuming civic responsibility—not for a whole array of functions we deem essential to building strong communities.

In fact, is our own sector not evidence that profit is not the only motive that moves people to social responsibility? For two centuries now, we have ourselves performed, willingly and even eagerly, a variety of services that have served the public and complemented the work of government, services that have contributed in major ways to creating and sustaining what most would agree are core ingredients of a decent society.

My purpose in saying these things is not to beat the drum for big government, though it is hard to see how a government of nearly 300 million people can be anything but big. Nor is it to suggest that government ought to run every program and service communities want or need. My purpose, as quixotic as it may seem, is to affirm the essential value of government, regardless of who is in office, to help restore the dignity of government and, above all, to repair the partnership between the people and their government.

Whether one starts from Hobbes in 1651 and views government as the necessary antidote to our base instincts, or the individualism of which Locke wrote in 1690, of government as the means to protect life, liberty and property, or with Rousseau in 1762 and the idea of government as the necessary antidote to anarchy, as a contract between the people and their governors—or for that matter, with the man who reinvented America, with Abraham Lincoln who authored a new birth of freedom and declared the sacred purpose of this nation to be that all men are created equal, and that to advance this purpose the government must be of the people, by the people, and for the people. From whichever of these men, flaws notwithstanding, we choose to trace our roots, government is at the least necessary and at best an expression of high moral purpose.

Government so conceived, so conducted cannot be thought the enemy of the people. We can ill afford the prevailing cynicism that makes of government the people’s adversary rather than its advocate. Wherever we take our stand in the partisan divide—and we here are appropriately quite diverse in our politics—we all seek justice, and the path to justice leads inevitably to the halls of government. That is where this great community we call America, in its wisdom or in its folly, chooses the policies and programs that bring justice nearer or keep it at bay; that extend or constrict our freedoms; that ground our lofty aspirations in the mundane details of departments and agencies, of budgets and bureaus.

And who knows the challenge of such choices better than we, we who so often work in the corners of the fields that are government’s principal domain, testing, innovating, experimenting, acting sometimes as prod and sometimes as beacon, sometimes as a megaphone for the people’s voice and sometimes as a drum major for the people’s march? Surely our agendas derive from the purposes and passions of the people—and just as surely, we cannot do the people’s work alone. Even in times less stressful than these, even were the people’s needs not growing and our own resources not correspondingly declining, what we bring to the table is never more than a fraction—an absolutely critical fraction—of what people expect of their government.

Perhaps you will think it naive that I speak of restoring respect for government, the full measure of Abraham Lincoln’s plain intent. Respect, to a government that has so often deserved the contempt in which it is held? Respect, to a government that depends so heavily on hype and on sham, on spin and on bloat? Does not our natural skepticism dissolve into cynicism in the face of government’s own mistakes and misdeeds?

Yes, respect. From the GI Bill to Headstart, from the Marshall Plan to USAID, from Social Security to Medicare, from the National Institutes of Health to the National Endowment for the Humanities and more, the always imperfect efforts of an always imperfect government to enhance opportunity, to support creativity and encourage education, to enlarge freedom, to pursue justice, to improve our lives.

And now, the latest twist in our ever-changing views on government: After the events of September 11, Americans began to view government through a different lens. They expressed a trust in government not seen since the 1960s. Americans seemed to like the robust public response to our tragedy and were willing to encourage the initiatives of our local and national political leaders.

But is it also possible that this renewed trust allowed masses of Americans to support a war that under other circumstances would have required a much higher threshold of proof? And could it also be that one of the consequences of this war with Iraq is a renewed loss of confidence in government, at the least in America’s intelligence gathering and security apparatus? And now these many months later, with prospects of peace, freedom and homecoming still uncertain, do we encounter once again a renewal of cynicism in some quarters that rises out of the very logic of the war and extends to the early judgments of public officials on both sides of the aisle concerning the danger the world faced from Iraq and its dictator?

That said, it is entirely obvious that if the cynicism is to be rectified, if the contempt is to be erased, and if the dignity of government is to be restored, more than a public relations campaign is required. The issues at stake go to substance, not merely image. And here, it seems to me, the independent sector will necessarily play an essential role: it falls to us, working with both government and community members, to guard the guardians, to make sure that public officials fulfill their obligations and their promises; to see to it that the people’s welfare is always at the forefront of public considerations and investments, and thereby to help restore the trust that a healthy democracy requires, to replace the demoralizing cynicism with robust skepticism. This must be our task not only at the time of campaigns and elections, but in the days and months following, when the nuts and bolts of policy formulation and legislation begin in earnest. That work cannot be the exclusive domain of public interest groups. It is the collective responsibility of every nonprofit organization, public charity and private foundation, regardless of mission, to help forge new, more transparent, more responsible, fundamentally more democratic modes of connection between the government at all levels and the governed, to renew and refresh the driving dream that has been this nation’s ambition since the time of the Founding Fathers.

Call me a dreamer. In my view, there is no better, perhaps even no other way to restore the true greatness of America.

And so I see in the coming months and years a set of major undertakings by INDEPENDENT SECTOR, in partnership with many other charities and philanthropies, to help clear a new path of engagements between the people and their government, to set new standards for effectiveness and efficiency and above all for transparency and probity. I do not delude myself. No such thing will happen of its own accord. For without an informed and concerned citizenry, and, where appropriate, an indignant—not cynical but indignant—citizenry, government will lumber on, for better and for worse, unreformed and disconnected.

There is, of course, much—very much—talk these days of civic participation. And I want here to add some observations to that ongoing conversation.

When we ask of our fellow Americans that they take part in the process of governing we also expect that they will carefully attend to the multiple issues of our time. Witness the past six months and the demands placed on all of us to understand the issues on the public agenda, the candidates’ positions, and ballot initiatives, and so on. I wonder if this is not to impose an entirely unrealistic burden on ordinary men and women. The great American jurist, Learned Hand, pondered this problem. He wrote of the “incapacity to understand and deal with the multitude of questions that increasingly call for answer in a desperately complicated world.” He added, “I do not know how it is with you, but for myself I generally give up at the outset. The simplest problems which come up from day to day seem to me quite unanswerable as soon as I try to get below the surface. Each side, when I hear it, seems to me right till I hear the other. I have neither the time nor the ability to learn the facts, or to estimate their importance if I knew them.” And that was Learned Hand in 1932, a man whose wisdom earned him the informal title of 10th Justice of the Supreme Court.

More still: Our aroused citizens will presumably express their opinions, their interests. But what exactly does that mean? How can one discern one’s interests in a politics that is increasingly devoted to spin in place of truth, where advertising poses as educating, where sound bites have replaced arguments, where hype and sham threaten to become the coin of the realm, where K Street has become so much more important than Main Street?

So: How can we overcome the disincentives to participation, to engagement? The lesson of all this seems to me quite plain. It is a lesson again and again articulated by social and political scientists. A vigorous democracy depends on the organizations that mediate and moderate between the individual and the government. Our rich associational network is the utterly necessary ingredient that enables genuine democracy. Government and business may be the muscle and bone, the citizens may be the limbs, also the brain—but it is we who are the nerves and the sinews that connect the one to the other, rendering each intelligible to the other.

I cannot say that too strongly. Our sector is not an accidental postscript to American life and the American polity; move us to the side, and I tremble for the America that would remain. And the reason for that is not only our shared commitment to the social good; it is that, and also something far less abstract than that. It is the functions we perform.

What are those functions, the special tasks of the associational network that dwells somewhere between the state and the individual and connects the one to the other? We provide a forum for community members to understand the issues. We offer them a way to become involved, to engage with the issues. We are the collective reservoir of decades-old experience that helps inform the popular understanding. Each organization’s first concern naturally will be about a particular sphere of interest that defines its engagement, but it should not stop there. For the work of building a strong democracy of active community members and leaders is our collective responsibility. And we must not be intimidated by efforts to muzzle our voice or by charges that our work takes us down a partisan road. This is not about partisanship; it is about the urgent and necessary work that lies at the intersection of the people and their government.

And what is our collective work? Is it not at least about innovative policy development? And is that not, quintessentially, the work of our foundations, those institutions that can invest the years of research that are often necessary to develop new alternatives?

And then comes the work of translating, of rendering the esoteric accessible, beginning with the journalists and the members of the informed public, moving out to the wider public. That cannot be and never has been the work of government alone. It is and has been our work, too, and it is work that should be vastly expanded by the organizations and agencies here represented. We ourselves need to devise more effective methods for seeing to it that research enters the public square, and that the needs championed by our organizations enter the public debate not as special pleadings but as the respected and unspun perspectives of what I have called America’s rich associational life, of, to put it bluntly, the independent sector.

Some of that happens already. After each of the debates and in response to political advertising in our recent election, various media groups published checklists of accuracy, identifying where the candidates and their parties exaggerated or where they relied on partial truths. Must we await the drama of presidential debates before we develop mechanisms for restoring truth to our citizens? Ought such mechanisms not be part of our civic routine? Can we not promote and proliferate the various incarnations of deliberative democracy that help communities learn and then engage more productively? Can we not find better ways to hold journalists to their responsibility, more energetic ways to link to the academic community? Can we not propose new and more distinctive uses of the Internet, with all its revolutionary possibilities? If our political sector suffers from distemper, if our citizens are left to themselves to discern the truth behind the sleight-of-hand, if our democracy is less robust than we might wish and our debates are less informed than they must be—who is there to right these things, to heal the polity?

There is the independent sector.

I do not say that in a spirit of self-aggrandizement or self-congratulation. I say it based not only on what I have learned of the extraordinary work so many in this room have done but also on the many conversations I have had this past year with people in government, leaders of our cultural and civic and political life. To a person, they have said to me and through me to you: We have work to do, and there is a nation whose health depends on our doing our work and doing it well.

So there we have it—the people, their government, and the independent sector on which the other two in fact depend, on which democracy itself depends. The whole rich network that every student of America has noticed and noted that is in fact the most distinctive aspect of our national character—and, on a good day, the most praiseworthy.

All that, and one more issue: Rebuilding the public’s trust in government will be a slow process. And it will happen only if and as government earns that trust. But if we seek to be agents of that rebuilding, then we had best look not only through the window but also in the mirror: We, too, have a problem of trust. Gone are the old days when we marched mostly to the beat of our own drummers, with every confidence that no one else was looking over our shoulders. We are now, have been for some time, for better or for worse, objects of intense public scrutiny. And though we might wish it were otherwise, and though we surely wish that our own scandals had not been the occasion for this burst of interest in how we manage our own affairs, I hasten to say that it is not, on the whole, a bad thing and it is surely not an inappropriate thing that we are now called to turn our attention inward, that we must now be able to assert, accurately, that our own operations are above reproach.

We are part and parcel of American society, of American culture, and it stands to reason that, even as the vast majority of our organizations have played by the rules, we have not been immune from the ethical lapses that have afflicted both government and corporate America. But if we are to play our rightful role in this, our nation, if we are to fulfill our mission and our mandate, if the democracy we cherish is to thrive, then there is no room, none at all, for ethical shortcuts, not even by a few. Our high moral purpose, our obligation to serve society well and our privileged position recognized by government through our tax-exempt status exacts nothing less. We do that not only to satisfy those who would judge us and who might seek to constrain us; we do that to satisfy ourselves, to unfurl a flag of rectitude for all to see and for those who would to rally ‘round. We do that to sustain and support one another, for the conduct of each affects the perception of all.

And what an extraordinary opportunity we have been given to do these things. In one of the more appealing examples of our government and our democracy working together the right way, we saw this year the Senate Finance Committee leaders electing not to introduce legislation before they held hearings or understood all that they needed to about the way this vast and varied nonprofit sector works. And having convened hearings before penning legislation, they invited further deliberation through a roundtable discussion that brought together a sampling of our sector to comment on various ideas set forth in a Senate staff discussion paper on governance and oversight. These formal gatherings, supplemented by numerous meetings with various experts and groups, created the time and space to share with lawmakers our deep concern regarding poor practices and possibly illegal activities. The men and women on Capitol Hill learned more about the voluntary sector, its structure and function, its size and scope, its purpose, programs and practices, and its varied systems of governance and management. Instead of rushing to action informed by half-truths and partial judgments, these lawmakers learned about the scores of efforts underway to adopt codes of ethical practice, guidelines for good governance, and changes initiated to improve sector practices and governance. They heard again and again the plea to provide adequate resources to national and state oversight bodies to make possible swift identification of abusers and swift enforcement of the law. They learned of many organizations on the east coast, middle of the country, and in the west, coming together to find remedies to these problems. And they paid attention to the efforts of nineteen state legislatures to consider legislative responses to the problems that have been the subject of public scrutiny.

And these leaders of the Senate Finance Committee made good on their promise to reign in practices they deemed excessive in two areas of taxpayer contributions to charities: they closed the gap between the size of deductions individuals may claim for donated automobiles and the actual benefit realized by the recipient charity, and they pursued a similar action regarding intellectual property. Some of our members protested the particular solution, asserting it may well have the effect of discouraging these kinds of charitable donations altogether.

The lesson that might be drawn from this small but potent action could not be clearer. The Senate Finance committee leaders are serious about eliminating what they consider to be wrongful sector practices. And their solutions may even end the wrongful practices. The danger, of course, is that where a scalpel is needed, a cleaver will be used instead.

That said, we were relieved that the leaders of the Senate Finance Committee decided not to introduce this year broad legislation focused on governance, fiduciary responsibility and so forth. It is the Committee’s intention, they say, to draft such legislation for consideration by the next Congress.

More still: just about six weeks ago, the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Finance Committee encouraged our organizations, through INDEPENDENT SECTOR, to convene “an independent national panel on the nonprofit sector to consider and recommend actions that will strengthen good governance, ethical conduct and effective practice of public charities and private foundations.” The Panel is to submit an initial report to the newly convened Senate Finance Committee in February, 2005, and then later in the spring, a final report. Even though facing great time pressures, the charge to the Panel affords our sector an opportunity to convene foundations and public charities, experts and practitioners, to formulate our recommendations on how we might improve transparency and ethical practice. And I am pleased to tell you that the process has begun: these past six weeks have been filled with organizing a framework and structure to gather the various voices and ideas and begin in earnest the work of reviewing and improving and recommending.

Just yesterday, the Panel convened at this conference formally for the first time. The next two months will be a time of great activity as the Panel and its five work groups do what must be done by February and the two advisory groups to the Panel add perspectives broad and deep in experience and expertise. And we will share our progress with you and look forward to hearing from you.

Some of the work will not be ripe for reporting in February. It may take until June or even September to offer sober suggestions concerning the governance and management of our sector. And in this rich field of ideas there are sure to be some who will disagree with the recommendations that are offered, even how we got there. But the Panel’s mandate is clear, the time short, and the expectations high. All that is wrong with the sector will not be solved through this initiative, but we will take the first steps to hoe this row, cultivating the good work that has already been done. I think there is room for decent confidence that we may, if we enter the process vigorously rather than reluctantly, manage here a genuine contribution to the nation, a contribution composed not only of the decisions that are taken but also of the process through which we, government and the independent sector, have arrived at those decisions.

So here we are with these many challenges before us: restoring confidence in a responsive government, encouraging an informed and engaged public, and promoting a vital independent sector. And if the challenges we have so proudly accepted sometimes seem endless, they are surely not without reward. And if we tire along the way, we will do well to bear in mind, always, the admonition that comes to us from the Ethics of the Fathers: Ours is not to complete the task—but neither are we free to desist from it.

Thank you.

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