Nonprofits Dealing with the Corona Virus
I saw a tweet the other day from Al Cantor:
“The COVID-19 pandemic is likely to expose one of the myths of 21st-c. America: that the nonprofit sector adequately provides services in an emergency. No. Nonprofits are a web of underfunded, independent orgs. We need gov’t coordination, funding, + leadership. We don’t have that.”
Having lived in Louisiana many years and lived through many hurricanes I can attest strongly to this statement. When Katrina hit New Orleans, nonprofits played important roles, but the government was critical to handling the immediate crisis and providing the long range services to allow people to recover from that traumatic event.
Thought I would take a look in this blog post at what the media is reporting about the nonprofit situation at this moment in the crisis.
This Washington Post story considers the confusion and distress that the Washington DC nonprofit sector is experiencing as it tries to figure out how it might help, but also how the nonprofits and their employees will make it through the crisis and not go bankrupt. As it notes, these nonprofits are typically making it on a “razor-thin margin.” A brief shutdown of operations can cause them to miss a rent payment, or miss payroll for staff. But they also are involved in feeding hungry people. Thus these nonprofits are facing both need from the community, need to maintain operations, but also a need to shut down so that they don’t participate in spreading the virus.
This Boston story describes how the crisis is already harming the fundraising of nonprofits. ““This situation is unprecedented,” said Paul Medeiros, the president and CEO of Easter Seals Massachusetts. He’s concerned about the organization’s bottom line. That’s because they’ve had to cancel the Evening of Empowerment, Easter Seals’ biggest fundraiser. “That event can bring in as much as $250,000 to the organization, which is over a quarter of our fundraising in a year,” he explained.”
New York City is offering loans to some businesses including nonprofits to weather the storm. “The city is offering small businesses with fewer than 5 employees a grant to cover 40 percent of payroll costs for two months (an average of $6,000) to help retain employees. Businesses with fewer than 100 employers who have seen their sales decrease by 25 percent or more will also be eligible for zero-interest loans of up to $75,000 to help mitigate profit losses.”
This story contains some helpful information for nonprofits as they consider how to manage the crisis. Like many universities, also large number of which are nonprofits, around the country, including now mine at University of Pittsburgh, nonprofits ought to be considering closing down in person meetings. Anyone who can work from home ought to be doing so to slow the spread of the virus. This story in Medium does the best job I have found of explaining the problem of the virus’s exponential growth and the intense stress that will put on any country’s health care system.
As we go forward in this crisis, lets remember that nonprofits like hospitals and universities and food banks will be working hard to alleviate the deep challenges we will face, those nonprofits are going to be facing deep challenges themselves. They really need the full force of federal state and local government backing their efforts and supporting them when they begin to fall.
Philip Hackney