LA Philanthropy Watch

The first page of the LATExtra section of this morning’s Los Angeles Times reported the killings of two workers at medical marijuana dispensaries five miles apart on the same afternoon.  [“2 pot shop killings probed” by Joel Rubin and Paloma Esquivel, June 26, 2010]  The Higher Path Holistic Care Collective (see photo) is on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park; Hollywood Holistic 2 is below Hollywood Boulevard, just west of Gower.

“The killings rattled medical marijuana collective operators and patient advocates,” according to the story, which highlights the breadth of the nonprofit community in Los Angeles: California law permits nonprofit collectives to raise and distribute medical marijuana.  (Among the more than 400 illegally operating marijuana dispensaries in the City of Los Angeles, many are not nonprofit operations, while few are collectives that distribute marijuana to members who have grown it.  They are retail outlets in a marketplace that, until recently, has been saturated – much to the displeasure of many neighborhoods.)

The story illustrates, as well, special challenges faced by organizations within this nonprofit niche.  ‘Pot shops,’ as the Times’ article puts it, operate with large amounts of cash – making them an attractive target for robbery.  But Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca suggested an even scarier possibility.  Noting that armed robbery differs from “assassinating the person you’re robbing,” he said that the vicious nature of killings suggested that drug cartels could be involved in the violence.

Note: both these homicides occurred in the City of Los Angeles, which is outside the Sheriff’s jurisdiction.

(Photo of Higher Path Holistic Care Collective on Saturday morning.)

At just after 1:00 a.m. ET the U.S. Senate voted 60-40 to overcome a Republican filibuster of the health care reform package put together by Majority Leader Harry Reid, Igor Volsky reports at the Wonk Room of the Center for American Progress.

“This bill ‘acknowledges finally that health care is a fundamental right,’ Reid said before the vote. It’s ‘a human right, not just a privilege for the most fortunate.’ Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) insisted that ‘this is not the end of health care reform. It’s the beginning. But we must make this beginning in order to fulfill that dream and really make health care a right, not a privilege.’”

A fundamental right: that’s what this debate is about.  No one should have to rely on charity to get health care, or to forgo basic health care when in need – if we affirm health care as a right.

Government – federal, state, and local – has a role to play in providing health care.  Peter Manzo alluded to this central role in a discussion of California’s state-run Healthy Families Program, which received a multimillion dollar philanthropic contribution; 200,000 children were a risk of losing coverage as a result of the state budget crisis, until a private foundation stepped in.  Yet the state’s fiscal deficit continues to grow.  “This situation dramatically makes a point we’ve known about philanthropy all along – there is no way private philanthropy can pick up the slack when government, which was designed to be our common commitment, retreats.”

Peter Manzo’s essay, “Pounds of Cure,” appears in UCLA’s Center for Civil Society report, “Resilience & Vulnerabililty: the State of the Nonprofit Sector in Los Angeles 2009 Report.”

(Image of Hippocrates from Wikimedia Commons.)

Helmut Anheier, Founding Director of the Center for Civil Society, just left UCLA to become Dean of the Hertie School of Governance.  A professor of sociology, he is a well-known international scholar.  He flew back from Berlin to speak at the annual conference on the State of the Nonprofit Sector in Los Angeles (which I mentioned in a previous post).

Unfortunately, Mr. Anheier was scheduled to speak at the end of the program – by which point we had pretty much run out of time.  Although he rushed through his remarks, he did spend a few minutes considering the challenging environment nonprofits face, answering the question, ‘What do we know?’ and looking ahead to what we can anticipate.

Here is a summary of his remarks (which represent a reconstruction, not a transcript):

Every sector has been hit hard by the economy. Nonprofits have suffered because every potential source of nonprofit revenues is under stress.

Governments, especially state and local governments, are focused on ‘short-termism’- management of the current crisis; they lack capacity to come to the rescue.  The for-profit sector is cutting back on corporate social responsibility initiatives and lobbying government for handouts.  Foundations have seen assets drop precipitously, which has curtailed grantmaking.  Households are experiencing greater uncertainty, contributing fewer dollars, and reconsidering levels of engagement.

While we don’t know how this will play out, Professor Anheier suggested that we do know a number of things:

• As economic conditions unfold, the nonprofit business cycle will be delayed one to two years.  So, even if the economy continues to recover, nonprofits will experience difficulties well into 2010 and even 2011.
• Larger organizations, with greater capacity to weather the storm, will fare better than smaller organizations.
• Small nonprofits will go into ‘survival mode.’
• Board and staff members will try to compensate for the financial shortfalls at their organizations; their efforts will offer limited success at best and the risk of ‘burnout.’
• Nonprofits will have little say, as more powerful interests come to the fore.
• Few lessons – from the economic challenges of 1981 and 2002-03 – have been learned and remembered.

So going forward, what can we expect?  We will see:

• Muddling through, with nonprofits pretty much on their own.
• Mergers and rationalization for a number of years.
• Social costs shifted to families and individuals.
• Many innovations take place.  We should capture them, Mr. Anheier suggested; we can hardly afford to let them go unnoticed.
• Action Research Partnership.  UCLA’s Center for Civil Society and the Los Angeles nonprofit community are natural partners.

Just a final bracing word: Mr. Anheier noted that he is not optimistic over the short term.

(Photo courtesy of UCLA School of Public Affairs)

Update – Comment moved into post – Tweets that mention A Scholarly View on the State of the Nonprofit Sector Going Forward | LA Philanthropy Watch — Topsy.com
topsy.com/tb/ow.ly/xs6s – October 30, 2009