Week Three Readings

I found the chapter Religion from the book Nonprofit Nation to be interesting and highly readable yet I’ve chosen to dedicate only a small part of my blog to this topic as I felt that we covered it so extensively in class. I think it’s a sticky situation how religion directly touches far more people than any other part of the U.S. nonprofit sector yet with the separation of church and state religious institutions don’t have to register or file reports with the IRS. While I understand that this agreement keeps the state from having power over churches I would personally appreciate more financial transparency within the largest subsection of nonprofits.

The post titled “Estate Tax and Charitable Giving” off of the blog Philantopic was originally not my favorite but in my second read through I realized how important the authors questions are. Estate Taxes are not something that most people think about daily (maybe I’m just speaking for myself here) and I suppose that is part of how they were lowered so substantially with such little publicity. Though on the surface estate taxes only affect about one half of one percent of Americans, these are the wealthiest people in America and in many cases probably the world. Therefore these taxes affect all of us. The IRS website explains that people paying estate taxes are able to deduct from their gross estate by giving money to “qualified charities”. By lowering the percentage these people have to pay and raising the individual exemption I believe it gives the high upper class less of an incentive to donate to nonprofits. This seems like an odd choice for congress to make in these rough economic times but maybe there’s a master plan that I’m missing here?

Here is a link to the IRS’ definition of an estate tax, which I found to be highly helpful in understanding this reading.

http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=164871,00.html

I found the reading titled “Charitable Deductions Under Scrutiny” to initially be incredibly frustrating. Immediately after reading about how congress and the white house lowered Estate Taxes I got to read about Washington’s new ideas to fix our budget deficit; which involve limiting the mortgage-interest deduction, raising the amount of wages that are subject to social security tax and reducing the tax breaks that charitable donors receive. All actions that I believed would directly negatively affect nonprofits and therefore the economic lower class. However, as I went through the entire readying I found myself questioning how fair the current system is and wondering if a better one was possible.

There is an interesting quote half way through the reading where Tim Delaney states, “we shouldn’t be asking whether nonprofits will be hurt by some of these proposals but whether the people we as nonprofits serve would benefit or suffer”. And I really did ask. And my answer? I’m still not sure. As we’ve said in class, people who start nonprofits tend to think with their hearts instead of their heads and it seems to me that hurting nonprofits would eventually hurt the American people in general.

Dan Palotta’s post, “Our Ineffectiveness at Measuring Effectiveness” was probably my favorite reading for this week. I strongly agreed with his point that the measuring and rating of nonprofits is flawed though I must admit that his proposed alternative seems a little unrealistic. People want immediate results and spending hundreds of millions on a nonprofit social network wouldn’t make much sense to a lot of people, probably even to a lot of nonprofits. Something does need to change within this system but in our imperfect word there is always something else that needs funding and in my opinion, individuals who want to donate a lot of money to a cause want a cause that sounds flashier and meets a more widely recognized need.

Tim Harford’s economic blog was also quite interesting. I found the details of John List’s experiments and the three motivations for social giving (altruism, warm-glow, and social pressure) to be fascinating yet it left me wondering what percentage of donators falls into each category. I attempted to do a little follow up research on this question but I'm pretty sure that such a number is currently unknown. Still it's interesting to speculate...

Till next time! 

Introduction

Hello! My Name is Asia Von Sonn and I’m a Pre-Planning, Public Policy, and Management major at the University of Oregon. I’m highly interested in activism especially for environmental and social justice issues. Last Spring I took an Intro to Public Law course where a guest speaker by the name of Lauren Reagan came and spoke to us about her nonprofit organization, The Civil Liberties Defense Center. This nonprofit focuses on utilizing education, and when necessary, the courts, to challenge governmental attacks on our liberties and rights. I am so impressed and intrigued by the work of this organization that I have decided that my long-term career goal is to be a civil rights attorney. Sadly, I do not yet have a whole lot of hands on experience with nonprofit work as I have been working full time at a local restaurant (Dough Co.) to put myself through school. My hope is that in taking this class I will learn more about other nonprofits that interest me as well as how the sector works as a whole.

At first I found Chapter 1 of Nonprofit Nation to be slightly bewildering as it paints a picture of such a complex system that no one even seems to know how many nonprofits truly are in existence. Classifying and categorizing has always seemed like a second step to me and I was amazed at how convoluted the third sector had managed to become, even without a solid number of organizations to work with. I was somewhat relieved and amused when I came to a quote from the U.S. Tax Court stating that “Trying to understand the various exempt organization provisions of the Internal Revenue Code is as difficult as capturing a drop of mercury under your thumb”. That's why it is interesting to me that the book later goes on to state that part of the reason that nonprofit organizations exist is because of their freedom from bureaucratic constraint. Though I don’t have much experience in the government sector to compare with (I did used to work in a public library) my dealings with the nonprofit sector so far, such as in Bob’s grant writing course, lead me to conclude that the sector has gradually become entangled with a bureaucracy of its own.

I found Chapter 2 of Nonprofit Nation to be much more readable and thought provoking, especially since one of my big questions has been why we as a society have pushed healthcare and education into the nonprofit sector. The government failure theory of nonprofit activity states that “nonprofits arise to meet the unsatisfied demand of a minority of citizens for certain public goods”, yet I feel like healthcare and education are two of the few things that the majority should agree upon to be necessary.

I liked how the book presented theories from different academic disciplines with varying explanations and points of view. Though clearly the nonprofit sector is a multifaceted system with no “grand unified theory”, laying out the separate building blocks of the sector was greatly illuminating. Especially since while I found the sociology section of the book to provide many assertions that mirror my own thoughts on the existence of the nonprofit sector, the anthropological and political science theories brought up explanations that I had never considered before.

So far I am intrigued by this course and look forward to diving deeper into the readings and broadening my understanding of the third sector.