A Community's Nightmare Scenario
Losing Government Grants and Dismantling American Civil Society
A dear friend confesses to disliking scenario planning. She finds worst case imaginings disheartening. Maybe necessary, but nonetheless disheartening.
No matter how difficult, it falls to we happy few to imagine what our communities might look like if the DOGE rumblings we hear far and wide play out in real life. No doubt, a world without government investment in our people and our communities is someone’s nirvana, but for most of us . . . well, let’s just say we’ve done no community level scenario planning so we have no idea, no pictures in our heads of what might result from wholesale disinvestment.
We’re talking about civil society’s decades long partnership with government, a marriage made in heaven currently on the verge of divorce. We need us some marriage counseling, a come-to-Jesus chat, a lesson in community realities as it were.
America’s Civil Society
Brian O’Connell’s 1999 Civil Society explains that our country’s network of charitable, nonprofit organizations—the independent sector—is absolutely vital to our sustaining healthy community life and American democracy.
In O’Connell’s telling, civil society occupies that space between commerce and government, and is populated by citizens engaging in volunteer community-based activities organized by the not-for-profit sector. It’s not only a place where folks come together to provide the services all healthy communities must have—food banks, homeless shelters, early child and senior care services, after-school programming, health clinics, mental health and substance abuse counseling, affordable housing development, positive youth activities, symphonies, art museums—it’s a place where folks learn how to practice self-government.
O’Connell cleverly chose The Underpinnings of American Democracy as his subtitle. Underpinnings, say our friends Merriam and Webster, means foundation, a structure that supports something else.
To put a fine point on it, healthy communities and healthy democracy are inextricably intertwined. They go together, like love and marriage, or a horse and carriage. Can’t have one without the other.
Essential and Essentially Ignored
We read a great deal about the guardrails of American democracy—the rule of law, an independent press, a representative Congress and an independent judiciary designed as co-equal branches of government—withering in the face of presidential overreach.
We hear little if anything about O’Connell’s essential underpinnings. Political leaders at every governmental level, O’Connell explains, ignore and misunderstand the independent sector, and this despite its decades-long partnership with government at all levels, a partnership expressed through the provision of public goods and services paid for in part by government grants and in part by private, charitable donations from individuals, foundations, and corporations.
This failing, this essential ignorance, will not only serve to further erode American democracy, it will render unto ruins healthy communities as politicians pursue what they consider efficiency—as if they or anyone else knows what they’re talking about.
Ironically, not so long ago, elected policy-makers held that this financial partnership between government funders and nonprofit service provider grantees is the efficient method for delivering community-level public goods and services. Now it seems efficient means . . . what exactly?
Losing Government Contracts
Research by The Urban Institute provides a beginning understanding of how deep the financial relationship runs. Their report, What Is the Financial Risk of Nonprofits Losing Government Grants?, is based on 2021 tax return data, the last full year such data is available. It reveals that nonprofits located in Duval county’s 4th and 5th congressional districts received roughly $868 million in government grants in 2021.
Although this government grant funding does not cover 100% of the cost to provide community services, if it is lost, 75% of the estimated 212 local organizations that received it will “experience fiscal distress,” meaning they will be forced to reduce the level of essential community services.
We are talking about vital community-level organizations committed to solving long-standing challenges while simultaneously meeting basic needs—our homeless and affordable housing challenges, challenges delivering basic medical services, caring for children and our elderly among them.
No one imagined that government would break this long-standing partnership, take a hike as it were, not even with a kiss goodbye. Just a slap in the face and a walk out the door.
How quickly will services erode?
Within six months.
According to Candid’s analysis, roughly 39% of Florida’s nonprofits receiving government grants will experience extreme financial distress within six months of funding cuts, meaning they will not be able to cover expenses. Though Candid’s analysis does not reach down to the county level, we have no reason to think that what’s true for the nation and Florida does not apply to Duval county as well.
The Urban Institute emphasizes that its data “understates total government funding, as it excludes . . . contracts, fees, vouchers, reimbursements, and other forms of revenue derived from services that are supported through government programs.”
The Nonprofit Center of Northeast Florida also tracks government grants to nonprofits located in our five county region, and shows $1.2 Billion annually from government grants in its most recent State of the Sector report. Don’t be fooled. Private giving will not fill these gaps, and certainly not in six months time.
After we’ve bludgeoned the American so-called welfare state—you know, food, housing, medical care—to death, and along with it civil society and its public-serving nonprofits, what follows?
Dystopia
Oxford Languages describes dystopia as “an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic.” Seems about right, a fair description of what the collapse of American civil society might look like.
Little do we hear about this, this willful dismantling of civil society and the resulting condition of our communities, all the while we get news of executive cuts to federal funding previously approved by Congress and a federal budget framework that disinvests in pretty much everything except defense and tax cuts—in the name of efficiency, of course.
Maybe dystopia is a scenario too horrifying to imagine. But imagine we must.
Be a Hero
“Heroes,” Studs Terkel tells us, “are people who say, ‘This is my community, and it is my responsibility to make it better’.”
He’s right. The only way we are going to meet the daunting myriad challenges facing us at any level—the family, neighborhood, town, city, state, nation, planet—is to do everything within our power to build and strengthen community rooted in local places.
That means investing in civil society, and insisting that government at all levels continues its partnership with local nonprofits. Government grants to nonprofit organizations, after all, is exactly how we return taxpayer money to communities across our country for public purposes, that is to say, to promote our common welfare.
We’ve long been lectured to by elected officials at all levels that government alone cannot meet our most enduring challenges, that solving human problems requires smart policy and sustained investment in a network of nonprofit organizations, investments that include federal, state, and local government grants.
When exactly did these folks sworn to advance our common interest decide to set us adrift, not even with a decent goodbye? Just a slap in the face.
When the hits start coming in what promises to be unprecedented disinvestment in our community, step up, raise your little hands, and ask them that control the public’s purse: how will you make our community a better place?
Or better yet, ask them now.
What’s your plan?
So well articulated Sherry. This public-private partnership has in fact been what has ‘made America great’, filling many gaps of need both here and abroad. The isolationism is already resulting in other powers filling the aid role for under-developed countries. Little did we guess that the same weapon of defunding would be directed at those most in need right here at home!
Hard to know where to begin. The powers that be seem so excited about going backwards to the 1890s where we have child labor and pollution and slum conditions and few rights and a much lower life expectancy. But the gilded age was good for those at the top.