LA Philanthropy Watch

A November 2009 report, “Beyond California: States in Peril,” by the Pew Center on the States concludes, “California’s financial problems are in a league of their own. But the same pressures that drove the Golden State toward fiscal disaster are wreaking havoc in a number of states, with potentially damaging consequences for the entire country.”

Such fiscal crises have huge spill-over effects.  Peter Manzo, in a post at the Stanford Social Innovation Review blog,”The High Cost of Playing It Safe,” considers children’s health coverage, which is threatened by the State of California’s fiscal meltdown.  In this dire environment, Manzo suggests that foundations and nonprofits should become more engaged in public policy debates – seeking to influence legislative decisions and to alter the broader structural and political context within which legislatures act.

“Foundations and nonprofit cause organizations need to carefully consider the relationship between their focused strategies and the merits of pushing for long-term change in the broader policy environment. Concerns about dry issues like governance reform or the mechanics of budgeting and accounting can seem far afield from a strategic program focus on, for example, reducing childhood obesity or improving early childhood development.  But the current California budget debacle shows that even the best designed and executed privately-funded initiatives can be washed away quickly by steep cuts to public programs.”

Manzo cites five California foundations – three from the Bay Area (the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund) and two from Los Angeles (the James Irvine Foundation and the California Endowment) – that have jumped into the fray to fund California Forward.

“California Forward’s mission is to improve the quality of life for all Californians by creating more responsive, representative and cost-effective government.” Four civic organizations – California Common Cause, Center for Governmental Studies, New California Network and the Commonwealth Club of California’s Voices of Reform Project – have been enlisted to “make our government work again.”

Whatever the prospects for achieving fundamental reform (in a season when hope and change may be endangered concepts), these civic groups and their funders are certainly not standing on the sidelines.

Peter Manzo, President and CEO of United Ways of California, is co-author of the 2005 report, Southern California’s Nonprofit Sector, which is featured on LA Philanthropy Watch’s Nonprofit Sector – National resources page.

Click on the image – which poses the question, “How does your state compare with California?” – for a full-size view.

Give & Take alerted me to the post at Stanford Social Innovation Review last week; Kevin Drum, to the Pew report last fall.