Guest post by Danielle Hirsch, director of advocacy of The Chicago Bar Foundation

The topic of the first session for the 2011 Public Policy Action Institute was, as always, provocative and engaging.

The two speakers, Rob Reich, co-director for Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford University and Evelyn Brody, professor of Law at Chicago-Kent College of Law spoke to the many challenges facing the nonprofit sector. In particular, they talked about the shifting role of government at all levels—both in terms of budget appropriations and the tax code. With scare available resources, the local, state and federal government is cutting key programs at historic levels and looking to nonprofits for additional revenue—which squeeze the nonprofit sector in all directions.

Since this conference is taking place in Chicago, Professor Reich borrowed a quote often attributed to Mayor Rahm Emanuel, “never let a crisis go to waste.”  Both he and Professor Brody urged us, that in this time when all programs are seemingly at risk for cuts, the nonprofit sector must speak together and loudly to advocate, at all levels for government, to honor the social compact that provides for everyone. We need to hold government accountable for providing for core government responsibilities and not to view nonprofits and foundations as a revenue source.

Professor Reich gave a local example from Palo Alto to demonstrate the changing social compact. In his community, there is a new local education foundation that is a 501c3 that raises money from parents and community members to fund programs in their local k-12 schools. Traditionally, education has been a state and local government responsibility with the funding coming from property taxes and other state and local revenue streams. However, the introduction of local community education foundations challenges our pre-existing model of government leading in education. Now, in certain more affluent communities that have local community foundations, much of the responsibility and decision making power for schools has shifted from government to these private charities. This is, but, one example of where government has either deferred to or abdicated its traditional responsibility to either the philanthropic or private sector.

In the current political climate, there are many legislators that advocate government only funding the bare minimum of services, which provides an important opening for the nonprofit sector to advocate for many of the government functions we care about and to ensure that government continues to fund important social safety net programs. This opening program was a fitting start to the conference as it served as a call to action for us to engage in an important dialogue about the core responsibilities of government.