Editor’s note: This post is part of an ongoing series of posts featuring NCRP nonprofit members.

Cities are congested places, packed with people, cars and, yes, philanthropy. If funders stepped out of the urban grind for some fresh air countryside, they’d find organizations like Family & Youth Counseling Agency in Southwest Louisiana are as professionally run and ready to scale as their allies in the concrete jungle.

Philanthropy needs to get up, stretch its legs and explore regions outside major cities to address its near invisibility in rural communities.

Family & Youth offers integrated counseling services for children and families in southwest Louisiana, while also advocating on their behalf in the state legislature and training nearby nonprofit staff in the basics of running an organization. 

The organization’s work runs from counseling and support services for children with autism to children who were sexually or severely abused to couples and families to local businesses. Housing all of these under one roof makes for a streamlined, holistic case management process that saves a not inconsequential amount of money.

And yet, like so many other rural-serving nonprofits, Family & Youth manages to pack even more programming into its $2 million budget.

It operates a Court Appointed Special Advocates program, which is comprised of volunteers who speak in court for a child’s best interests after they’ve been removed from homes where they’ve been abused or neglected.

Family & Youth trains and supports these volunteers, providing 1,100 hours of training for 82 volunteers in 2016 alone.

The Human Services Response Institute (HSRI) supports people in crisis due to a natural disaster or emergency. From Hurricane Rita onward, HSRI has led the way for immediate disaster response and long-term recovery and resource coordination.

Family & Youth not only works on the front lines ensuring the wellbeing of the southwest Louisiana community, but at the systems level too.

The organization has built an advocacy network to ramp up civic engagement and participation among local nonprofits and volunteers.

Through the network, Family & Youth shares information on local, state and national issues related to children and families; trainings to help organizations build mission-based advocacy teams; networking opportunities; and tools necessary to shape public policy around child abuse prevention, education, coastal restoration and health care access.

A separate initiative works with 1,000 high schoolers every year on leadership development, career exploration and civic engagement opportunities.  

Nonprofits and funders alike know the importance of collaboration in driving public policy wins; Family & Youth is no different. What’s missing are allies with which they can collaborate.

The nonprofit sector in southwest Louisiana is small and not fully professionalized. Family & Youth, in addition to all its regular services, has to pull double duty as a network organizer and a trainer for its nonprofit neighbors, complete with lessons on basics like fund development and grant writing 101.

And neither local nor national foundations have any real presence in Family & Youth’s native Lake Charles.

Located in between Houston and New Orleans, the three-hour drive from either location sees philanthropic investment dry up faster than gas in the tank.

For every $1 per person philanthropy invests in southern Louisiana, it invests $58 in Orleans Parish.

It should thus come as little surprise that Family & Youth currently receives zero foundation funding, instead relying on individual and corporate donations and fee-for-service contract work.

That sounds sufficient, except individual and corporate donors want their dollars to go exclusively towards the families and children Family & Youth serves, leaving little room for critical back office infrastructure.

Foundations (purportedly) better understand the importance of supporting the administrative side, but none seem to be paying any attention.

They need to straighten up. Recent breakthroughs in oil and natural gas extraction have swelled economic investment and demands for labor in the region. Current estimates forecast more than $100 billion in construction projects within the next decade.

But we know the economic gains from fossil fuels will bring little benefit to anyone other than a powerful few, while extracting even more from the most vulnerable communities. Southwest Louisiana’s underdeveloped nonprofit sector will be strained to adequately serve them.

Funders, especially national ones, should see in Family & Youth a special opportunity to back an organization fighting for marginalized communities with an integrated, scalable model at a time when greater scale is essential.

Family & Youth has already begun forming a statewide network drawn from the five corners of Louisiana to meet and share best practices a few times a year. Imagine how many more childhood survivors of sexual assault or abuse could be taken care of, and how much better that care would be, if nonprofits across Louisiana adopted a model informed by Family & Youth’s experience. Philanthropy could accelerate getting there.

There’s no shortage of exemplary nonprofits outside of major U.S. cities. Philanthropy just has to put the work in to find and support them.

Troy Price is NCRP’s membership and fundraising intern. Follow @NCRP on Twitter.

Faith leaders across the country yearn to share their vision for a just and equitable America, but philanthropy has been reluctant to support them.

Editor’s note: This post is part of an ongoing series of posts featuring NCRP nonprofit members.

What if funders focused specifically on empowering faith leaders?

Faith in Public Life (FPL) has spent the past 10 years training, mobilizing and empowering faith leaders across the country to change the narrative around faith’s role in politics while taking strategic moral action to shape policy locally and nationally.

Through these efforts, FPL has built a growing network of almost 50,000 clergy and faith leaders united in the fight for social justice.

This includes helping individual leaders develop hard skills like media messaging. FPL members learn how to do an interview, how to write op-eds and letters to the editor, and which messaging platforms to use, among other skills.

They even do simulation trainings and practice podcasts – whatever it takes to empower faith leaders to lead with their moral and values-based message.

Certain coverage of religion’s role in our modern society would have us believe that fear of progress has overtaken our country’s houses of worship. Faith in Public Life’s work proves that this is not the case.  

Staring down the White House’s travel ban on people from predominantly Muslim countries in early 2017, FPL’s Ohio branch organized a press conference with more than 200 faith leaders in Columbus to denounce the ban and call for a welcoming of their Muslim neighbors. This included clergy from the prominent Vineyard evangelical mega-churches in Columbus.

One could also point to the 500 faith leaders who decried the federal tax bill last fall or the 400 who flooded the public comment on the citizenship question in the 2020 Census.    

FPL is showing that faith leaders can use their leadership and values to drive progressive change. Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, Jews and others are putting their privilege on the line to not sow division between them, but instead sew together the fabric of shared values uniting them.

Funders should be prepared to take that risk with them.

There is no strategic reason to cede ground on faith in public life to what some have defined as Christian nationalism, especially because there is already legitimate infrastructure in place.

Houses of worship are central to civic life everywhere, whether in communities of color, the suburbs or rural America.

Tapping into their leadership to propel civic engagement could be an effective tool in bringing the country together in the pursuit of what is just, good and equitable.

We know there are some who will continue to use religion to exclude. Those groups are heavily funded. Three major faith groups on the right, Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council and the American Family Association, pull in over $100 million per year combined.

FPL has already demonstrated an ability to build and illuminate relationships among varying faith leaders around social justice causes with comparatively modest resources.

Imagine what they and their allies could do with funding even remotely approaching the amounts flowing to their regressive counterparts.

Secular funders may bristle at directing more money to faith-based advocacy groups. The incorrect weaponization of faith throughout history has left us with examples that should never be replicated.

Beyond that, one is hard-pressed to find faith-focused portfolios to model after in progressive spaces – aside from direct service work.

It may be a new road to traverse, but the payoff could be huge. The necessary infrastructure already exists. Supporting groups with talented and well-placed messengers who can reach reluctant ears is a worthy investment.

In 2018, it’s not about what makes us different, it’s about what makes us the same. The moral power that these faith leaders have to influence public debates and build just and equitable societies is a severely untapped resource. 

Troy Price is NCRP’s membership and fundraising intern. Follow @NCRP on Twitter.

Recent headlines have been filled with stories of families that are separated at the border and asylum-seekers who are treated like criminals.

For weeks, organizations have been in rapid-response mode, sending people to the border to capture real stories, provide legal counsel and rally in support of the countless lives that hang in an uncertain balance.

Our movement’s leaders are tired, but more committed than ever.

This moment has been critical for the public to understand the plight of immigrant families who come here seeking nothing more than safety, hoping the American dream is still alive.

The national attention has opened people’s eyes and stirred new empathy. However, for those of us who have been working in this space for years, none of this is new.

The current administration’s “zero tolerance” policy gave rise to a level of cruelty that we hoped was just a painful part of our history that we had learned from.

The truth is anti-immigrant sentiment did not begin with Trump. All he has done is fan the flames and exploit an existing undercurrent of fear and blame that has long percolated below our country’s surface.

Some argue that the solution to all of this is simply to elect new leaders, or perhaps to pass new policies.

Traditionally, in our movement, these strategies are what we look to for a long-term fix. But, in this moment of reckoning, it’s time for us to fully embrace that they haven’t led to the transformative shifts that we’ve needed.

So here we are.

The world is looking to the southern border, watching children abducted from their parents.

Everybody is rushing to take action. Everybody is scrambling in this urgent moment to stop the bleeding and make sure that we end the practice of family separation and child detention.

With the eyes of the world focused on immigrants, these media moments are critical. They are the moments that make people care.

But the truth is: We cannot subsist in perpetuity under a rapid response mindset. There has to be a larger aim.

When we scramble to stop the bleeding, it has to be with the knowing that there is something more coming: a real cure; a healing that will make it so that we will not have to keep scrambling forever.

At Define American, we believe that cure is to fundamentally improve our cultural attitudes towards the movement of human beings from one place to another.

We do this by harnessing the power of stories and embedding those narratives strategically into forms of media, primarily news and entertainment media.

A recent poll found that the TV news station someone watches is a stronger predictor of their feelings about immigrants than their partisan political affiliation.

Entertainment media is a largely untapped resource that has the power to touch millions of hearts and minds through a single television show or film.

Entertainment and pop culture often create the lens through which we see the world. We unconsciously watch the ways that people act or treat others, and they provide us with a social script for how we engage with people around us.

A 2016 study published by Josh Katz of the New York Times suggested:

“If you had to guess how strongly a place supported Donald J. Trump in the election, would you rather know how popular ‘Duck Dynasty’ is there, or how George W. Bush did there in 2000? It turns out the relationship with the TV show is stronger. That’s how closely connected politics and culture can be.”

This is what the anti-immigrant establishment has understood for so long: Shifting the culture through media is the key to changing our policies and our identity as Americans.

For decades, they have embedded a toxic and dehumanizing narrative about immigrants into our culture, because they know we can only treat people inhumanely if we don’t recognize them as fully human – as fully American.

We need funders who support immigrant freedom to understand this, too; we cannot improve the politics of immigration until we improve the cultural lens through which immigrants are seen.

Some funders see culture change as something they can invest in “eventually” once the urgent moments have passed. But the urgent moments will keep coming over and over again if we don’t start to invest in a real, transformative shift now.

As a leader of an organization that has been working to improve the cultural conversation about immigrants since 2011, I can tell you that this work is hard, and it takes a lot of time and resources, but it is critical to our movement’s ultimate success.

Rev. Ryan M. Eller is executive director of Define American. Follow @EllerRyan and @DefineAmerican on Twitter.

Photo by C Slack. Used under Creative Commons license.

Editor’s note: This post is part of an ongoing series of posts featuring NCRP nonprofit members.

Grantmaking in this new era calls for funders who trust their grantees with general operating support and who acknowledge and support leaders of color.

The Center for Popular Democracy (CPD)’s successes and structure present a testament to these two needs.  

Founded in 2012, CPD has skyrocketed into a leading voice for equity, opportunity and a dynamic democracy with 50 affiliates whose work impacts people in 126 cities, 34 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. Two-thirds of their affiliates are Black- or Latinx-led.

The organization builds power among communities of color, immigrants, working families and LGBTQ individuals to tear down the structural barriers that restrict their full inclusion into American society.

CPD trains and supports an organization’s leaders, staff and members to be the owners and drivers of their organizations, while pursuing a broader collective movement for a just, healthy and joyful world.

Since the 2016 election, affiliates of the CPD network have helped organize more than 860 resistance events that were attended by more than half a million people. The network also hosted 15 major civil disobedience actions on issues ranging from immigration to taxation to health care. 

These are the results:

  • Twelve million workers now enjoy a higher minimum wage in Arizona, Colorado, Washington, California, New York, Vermont, Oregon, Minneapolis and Washington, D.C., thanks in part to CPD’s tireless work.
  • Their Fair Workweek Initiative has moved policy wins for another one million workers across the country.
  • Their network registered 40,000 re-entering citizens in Maryland and moved 25,000 formerly incarcerated Virginians to the polls in 2017.
  • CPD and its affiliates expanded, defended or won new local- and state-level sanctuary policies everywhere from Denver to Illinois to Bridgeport, Connecticut.
  • Their Hurricane Maria Community Recovery Fund in raised in two months more than $4 million to support immediate relief, recovery and equitable rebuilding in the territory. A Puerto Rican advisory team ensured the funds went to the grassroots organizations and individuals guiding the recovery and rebuild.

Despite how it may look on the outside, the organization sees its fair share of hurdles. One is the lack of flexible funding that’s available.

As new problems arise faster than ever before, CPD and its affiliates, like many organizations operating in our time, need the flexibility to change course at any given moment.

The organization’s minimum wage win in Minneapolis was a moment of celebration. It felt to the CPD network like the most important thing going on in the state of Minnesota at the time – until a police officer shot and killed Philando Castille.

Suddenly, in order to be responsive to the needs of that community, they had to pivot from the campaign to a crisis response. In perfect conditions that’s hard to do – a lack of general operating support made it even harder.

General operating support allows nonprofits to nimbly move from one issue to another. This is a critical step toward building power in disadvantaged communities.

If they were freed from project-specific grants, CPD and its affiliates could use their expertise to address issues when they arise instead of having to wait for the next fiscal year.

As the list of wins above shows, these are organizations worth trusting with this responsibility.

Another issue is the discrepancy between funding for white-led versus people of color-led organizations. The sector’s underinvestment in leadership for nonprofits of color has been well documented.

According to Network President and Co-Executive Director Jennifer Epps-Addison, CPD’s Black and Latinx-led affiliates rarely have asset reserves, forcing them to live paycheck to paycheck on grants.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation reported that 60 percent of people served by nonprofits hail from communities of color; CPD and its affiliates are no exception.

If philanthropy wants to sufficiently move the entire country together in the direction towards equity, justice and progress, it has to support leaders of color in the same way the sector has supported the sector’s white leadership.

A survey of the sector done by the Building Movement Project found a “lack of difference” in qualifications and backgrounds for white respondents and respondents of color. That leaders of color have a harder time fundraising reflects not any failure of their own, but instead the racial bias of people at foundations.

In this new era, bringing about an equitable world requires both general operating support and a specific dedication to adequately resourcing leaders of color. Anything less is no longer acceptable.

Troy Price is NCRP’s membership and fundraising intern. Follow @NCRP on Twitter.

Image by Fibonacci Blue. Used under Creative Commons license.

Editor’s note: This post is part of an ongoing series of posts featuring NCRP nonprofit members.

Open Door Legal logoA risk-taking funder is a change-making funder. Those who help fledgling, but inventive, nonprofits get off the ground and into the air can markedly increase their social impact. Legal services in particular can be a strategic force multiplier for existing grantmaking programs.

The upstart Open Door Legal is one such example. Founded five years ago, this southeast San Francisco organization has seen its annual budget increase from $33,000 to $1.2 million thanks to its innovative, results-oriented work on legal representation.

What makes them so remarkable? Open Door Legal is pioneering universal access to civil representation, whereby every person who needs a lawyer can have one – regardless of ability to pay. Why? Because they’re out to show that when everyone has access to the law, poverty can be dramatically reduced.

That’s a big claim. But Open Door Legal has the receipts. The organization has won $1.9 million in direct financial returns via court awards, canceled debt and settlements – 78 percent of which benefitted individuals earning less than $15,000 per year. More than 140 evictions have been prevented, clients have been transferred to new housing and barriers to housing have been removed. All the while, Open Door Legal has lost only 2.5 percent of its cases.

There are hundreds of other heroic organizations working on legal aid across the United States. Three things distinguish Open Door Legal from the rest.

  • Universal access – They take on any kind of case: eviction, divorce, immigration or anything else, regardless of an individual’s ability to pay. In its short history, Open Door Legal has handled over 1,250 cases spread across 35 different areas of law.
  • Comprehensive services – An integrated intake process lets clients simultaneously get legal representation and access to social services through data sharing and joint case management (with a client’s permission).
  • Built to scale – A custom-built technology platform on Salesforce meticulously tracks all activities within the organization, allows for easy managing and onboarding of volunteers, and opens up a wealth of analytics to unearth ways to improve its work. This has been so successful, Salesforce invited Open Door Legal to present at its annual conference.

All told, according to their analysis, for every one dollar invested in Open Door Legal, the organization generates $21 in social returns.

There is a huge need for the services Open Door Legal provides. Nationally, 63 million Americans qualify for free civil legal assistance through federal government programs or grantees, but most Americans don’t perceive things like their wrongful eviction, domestic violence or severe debt as something a lawyer could help with, though study after study shows what a difference legal representation can make. As such, it’s distressing to see that more than half of those who do seek civil aid are turned away due to a lack of resources.  

There are no public defenders for civil cases, so the United States relies almost exclusively on private attorneys to deliver justice. In Open Door Legal’s native California, the state spends only .01 percent of gross domestic product on legal aid.

Like nearly everything else in the private sector, the presence or absence of big payouts drives decision-making. In civil cases, damages are usually calculated based on lost income potential or value of property that’s destroyed. In practice, this means the poorer the client, the better their case has to be for someone to help them; for the wealthy, the quality of their case isn’t an issue as long as the check clears.

It is imperative that an Open Door Legal is available for every community. The organization wants to open five centers around San Francisco within the next three years to increase universal access to civil aid.

Funders interested in wealth inequality, immigration, women and children, or health should give Open Door Legal a strong look. Its impact is sizeable, measurable and inspirational. With innovative information technology and a broad range of service, the path to its expansion is relatively clear.

Legal services are not commonly considered a solution for these issue areas, and for some of Open Door Legal’s backers, the organization is the only one of its kind in their portfolios. Yet these grantmakers realize, or are coming to realize, how civil legal aid can improve outcomes and more efficiently deliver results.

There are new centers to build and people to help. Funders should consider providing general operating support for Open Door Legal, and clear out any internal roadblocks preventing legal services funding. In the fight for justice, philanthropy would be hard pressed to find a better ally.

Troy Price is NCRP’s membership and fundraising intern. Follow @NCRP on Twitter.

Editor’s note: This post is part of an ongoing series of posts featuring NCRP nonprofit members.

Seeing is believing­ – a nice proverb, but also an often unsaid maxim for philanthropic giving. After all, if a would-be funder can’t see a problem or isn’t aware of its impact, how can she be expected to buy into potential solutions?

So what’s a willing advocate to do when a community faces systemic adversity that could benefit from philanthropic investment, but is too new and too dispersed to speak at a volume funders can hear?

This is the predicament Asian Pacific Community in Action (APCA) finds itself in. Founded in 2002, APCA seeks to foster greater health and empowerment for the two fastest growing populations in Arizona: Asian-Americans and Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders (AANHPI). It does so through a combination of services, advocacy and education.

APCA has enrolled community members in health insurance plans and educated them about preventative care. It has championed language access in the health insurance marketplace, resulting in some translations of various insurance notices. APCA staff and volunteers occupy key leadership positions in the governing councils of county health clinics and hospitals, city commissions and chambers of commerce.

Yet there is still a long way to go.

Nearly every one in 20 persons in Arizona is a member of an AANHPI community. But, because most of them arrived only in the 1990s or 2000s and settled into areas sequestered from the rest of the population, they remain invisible to the public eye.

There is no Chinatown or Little Korea to help center these disparate locations. Other standard community infrastructure, like legal and housing services, are not yet developed. The Arizona Department of Health doesn’t even collect Asian-American data, instead cramming it into an ill-defined “other” category.

The needs of a Chinese-American whose family has been here for four generations are plainly different than those of a recently arrived Myanmar refugee, but if the health department doesn’t disentangle the responses of the former from the latter, how are health care providers to know who needs what?

Problems like this pushed APCA to progress from a strictly outreach and health access portfolio to a broader emphasis on community organizing. APCA now registers people to vote and educates community members on how issues affect them, how a bill becomes law and how to connect with lawmakers to ensure they are meeting the AANHPI community’s needs.

In 2016, APCA launched the first Asian-American Pacific Islander Advocacy Day. At the state capitol in Phoenix, about 20 community members were directly connected with their elected officials. The following year, the organization helped introduce a data disaggregation bill that would have collected and separated out Asian-American data. It wasn’t passed, but APCA did get a resolution read on the Senate floor, introducing the issue to many legislators for the first time.

APCA has committed to building out space for a coalition of community health workers, faith leaders and health professionals to work together around shared issues in the AANHPI community.

Take oral health, for instance. APCA has designed a community organizing and advocacy training program that brings in oral health providers serving communities of color to talk about social determinants in health and what’s happening in the state legislature around the issue.

APCA is not an organization that wants to exist in perpetuity. As more and more members of the AANHPI communities see the value in civic engagement and seize the collective power available to them, APCA would victoriously grow obsolete.

In the meantime, APCA could use some help. General operating support would jumpstart its efforts to connect with the growing number of AANHPI individuals in the state and help as it recruits leaders from each set of the 60-plus different languages and cultures therein to guide its approach until the communities united are ready to stand on their own.

Beyond funding general operation, there are specific programmatic areas awaiting support too. APCA would like to resurrect a dormant interpreter service to help its constituents navigate a language and culture in which they’re not yet proficient. Alternatively, the organization has collected a trove of data and stories from the Arizonan AANHPI communities; it could use additional funding to hire a staffer to sift through all of this information.

The Asian-American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities in Arizona are no longer hidden. Their individual experiences may vary, but their expertise in their communities does not. Funding in the long-run should capitalize on this insider knowledge and let it guide future research and community action. In the end, seeing isn’t just believing; it’s doing.

Troy Price is NCRP’s membership and fundraising intern. Follow @NCRP on Twitter.

Image by Rob Young. Used under Creative Commons license.

Editor’s note: This post is part of an ongoing series of posts featuring NCRP nonprofit members.

Prosperity Now logoThe classic American dream comes with a lot of promises. Things like going to college, owning a home and saving for retirement. All this and more is available to those who buckle down, work hard and save as they go.

Most of us know this “dream” is really a fantasy for millions of people in America. The unequal distribution of wealth in this country keeps those with the most access to financial resources on top, and those shut off doomed to barely get by. The top one percent of Americans holds 39 percent of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 90 percent only holds 23 percent.

Prosperity Now has been shouting about this injustice for almost 40 years. The organization, formerly known as the Corporation for Enterprise Development, has been picking up steam as wealth inequality has exploded into an issue of national importance. Between its 2017 rebrand and a host of tried-and-true wealth-building projects targeting low income Americans and people of color, Prosperity Now is a full-blown economic justice powerhouse.

But the power lies in using many of the same tools and strategies that have worked for decades, which isn’t something philanthropy seems too keen on funding. Instead of parceling out grants for new projects every few years, what if foundations supported projects that not only have a long track record of success but also continue to work today?

They might not be new and sexy, but things like the coordination and support of a 1,600-member community tax preparation network can transform the financial security of a household. Located in community centers, schools and libraries across the country, this network of volunteers helps low income families file their taxes and apply for money-savers like the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit, all for free.

Prosperity Now mobilized this group of preparers to restore funding for the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program in the most recent Congress – a significant feat. Americans earning under $54,000, disabled Americans and limited English speakers all benefit from the service. To ensure volunteers are maximizing their time with these groups, Prosperity Now has a host of toolkits and guides advising preparers on everything from broaching the savings conversation to navigating software changes.

That’s not to say there aren’t new ventures too. Just this month, Prosperity Now released its latest Scorecard, a comprehensive look at American financial wellbeing across the country that’s easily sortable by topic. Two recent publications, The Ever Growing Gap and The Road to Zero Wealth, demonstrated how it would take centuries to equalize wealth disparities between white Americans and Americans of color without concerted policy actions. The Racial Wealth Divide project invests in the expansion of policies to reduce this divide and in the capacity-building of organizations of color to lead this effort.

Partnering with other nonprofits has always been an area of particular focus. Whether in health care, affordable housing, education or social services, Prosperity Now has made inroads to integrate financial services into the work these groups are already doing as a means to increase impact and financial security.

One large housing organization adopted a children’s savings account program after serving one generation of families, only to have a second and then a third eventually appear at their door no more financially stable than their grandparents. Aside from children’s savings accounts, Prosperity Now also has highly interactive guidebooks on integrating financial capability and one-on-one financial coaching.

When you believe the main thing distinguishing the wealthy from the poor is not ability but opportunity, you find ways to meet people where they are. That’s why Prosperity Now is also trying to build relationships with corporate social responsibility leaders – to work with institutions that serve significant portions of low income Americans, particularly those of color.

The case for doing so is relatively simple: Building the financial security of low income workers is good for business. Henry Ford famously paid his employees competitive wages not because of altruism, but because he wanted someone to buy his cars. The argument remains the same today.

That said, philanthropy still comprises roughly two-thirds of Prosperity Now’s funding. The rest is government contracts with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Health and Human Services and the Treasury Department, but contract renewal isn’t guaranteed. Foundations and individual donors are the ones who drive the resources for Prosperity Now’s work.

Currently, only one out of Prosperity Now’s 70-odd grants provides three years of flexible funding. As much effort as it has put into securing financial viability for those who need it most, Prosperity Now is owed long term security of its own. We know what they do works. We know what they advocate could transform. So, what are we waiting for?

Troy Price is NCRP’s membership and fundraising intern. Follow @NCRP on Twitter.

Editor’s note: This post is part of an ongoing series of posts featuring NCRP nonprofit members.

The Center for Medicare Advocacy logo.Glenda Jimmo, a blind woman confined to a wheelchair after diabetes took her right leg, required multiple weekly home health services for her condition.

A woman living with ALS who lost the user of her arms and hands required extensive care services in her home.

A World War II veteran stricken with Parkinson’s disease fell in his home and needed access to a skilled nursing facility for his recovery.

All three were denied Medicare coverage, the national health insurance program for which Social Security recipients who are over 65 or permanently disabled are eligible, because their conditions were “not improving” and thus not worthy of coverage.

Another woman was left helpless and alone after Medicare deemed her multiple sclerosis “not improving.” Bedridden and shut off from essential in-home nursing care, she went four days without food or water.

This “improvement standard” pervaded all of Medicare, informing the decisions of health care providers, contractors and even administrative law judges.

For decades, it was used to save money and deny coverage to the Americans who most direly needed care. But there was no regulation on the books that supported this practice. In fact, Medicare rules stipulate “the restoration potential of a patient is not the deciding factor in determining whether skilled services are needed.”

Put another way: The improvement standard was illegal. Medicare providers had conjured up a standard out of thin air, and to devastating effect.

The Center for Medicare Advocacy (CMA), a Connecticut-based organization that fights on behalf of older and disabled Americans to improve their access to and the quality of their health care, refused to abide this misguided practice.

Since its founding in 1986, CMA has taught Medicare administrators that the elderly and disabled need not show improvement to retain coverage if their current treatment is still the best way to care for them, e.g. if other options would lead to worse health outcomes.

This helped individual cases, but did little to stem the tide of wrongful coverage denials. Having exhausted all other advocacy options, CMA did what it had to do and took the federal government to court. They won.

This was literally a life-saving victory for people like Glenda Jimmo. And it’s not the first time CMA has used the courts to protect some of the most vulnerable among us.

The organization represents thousands of Americans in appeals of Medicare denials, and advocates on their behalf in administrative, executive and legal settings. Legal services have proven to be an effective arrow in the organization’s quiver.

But it’s only one arrow among many. Connecticut has contracted CMA to provide legal training and support for its health insurance and assistance program. CMA produces a host of educational materials and resources related to Medicare, and everyday Americans nationwide rely on CMA for expert Medicare information and insight.

In the National Medicare Advocates Alliance, CMA is joined by a network of attorneys, Medicare-related advocacy organizations and state health insurance providers for bimonthly conference calls on specific topics in Medicare, elders’ rights and elders’ health care.

The National Medicare Advocates Alliance began as a foundation-funded project more than a decade ago, but its national impact was so great that it felt compelled to continue the endeavor even after the original grants expired.

But the cost of managing CMA hasn’t gone away. Nor has the cost of fielding the hundreds of calls CMA receives each year from outside Connecticut when older or disabled Americans need expertise and counsel. Philanthropy has heretofore shown little interest in funding these services, and funders have been even more reticent to fund legal work, according to CMA.

The threats to Medicare access and quality continue to grow. CMA won an inspiring victory on the improvement standard, but that just pushed Medicare to enforce existing law correctly. Bigger, systemic perils like privatization of the program or a winding down of Medicare altogether endanger far more of our seniors and disabled.

Bigger, systemic problems require bigger, systemic solutions. Philanthropy needs to invest in long-term capacity so those working on this issue can build up the staffing necessary to hold the line on Medicare access and quality.

When they devise successful programs like the National Medicare Advocates Alliance, funders shouldn’t cut support after a year or two and ask for something new. Place the emphasis instead on enriching and broadening what has already proven to work.

Advocacy is a matter of using the best resources to tell the best stories in the best place possible. The Center for Medicare Advocacy has the stories and has the places. Imagine what they could do if they had the resources too.

Troy Price is NCRP’s membership and fundraising intern. Follow @NCRP on Twitter.