Featuring Innovative Thinking in the Nonprofit Sector
Rick Cohen of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy has been
banging this drum for the last three months. "I think a lot of people don't
really look carefully at what they sign ... but they better start!" NCRP with a
lot of other organizations is protesting a requirement of the Combined Federal
Campaign that participants agree that they will not "knowingly" employ people
whose names appeared on a government anti-terrorism list. Rick writes "Although
there are hosts of government lists to check, the Office of Personnel Management
had promised that only three would be required, and despite the lists' mercurial
inconsistencies from day to day, also promised that it would give advance
warning of changes in the list contents." One of the required lists is 143 pages
long with thousands of names and aliases to check.
The ACLU first signed the agreement and then withdrew entirely from the campaign and is now considering its next steps, but many other leaders of organizations also signed the agreement without really thinking about what they were agreeing to. Some of them, embarrassingly, are also outspoken advocates against such government abrogations of civil liberties.
Cohen asks, "Is it that nonprofits have to sign and certify so god-awful
much that they assume that no one in government or elsewhere could possibly be
concerned, much less motivated to check on whether groups are actually doing as
they are told? That could be a fairly dangerous position."In any case, I have
attached a few articles from our upcoming issue on the changing relationship
between government and nonprofits that address this and related topics.
http://www.nonprofitquarterly.org/section/541.html
http://www.nonprofitquarterly.org/section/540.html
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