Race to November

Nonprofit groups and foundations hope to capitalize on strong voter enthusiasm in 2008

As the November 4 presidential election draws nearer, Maria Rodriguez, executive director of the Florida

Immigrant Coalition, has her eye on the calendar.

Her organization is conducting its first voter-mobilization project and hopes to sign up 4,300 new Haitian, Latino, and community-college student voters and get 9,000 members of those groups to the polls.

The coalition is one of many charities and foundations that are seeking to tap into unusually strong voter enthusiasm this year to recruit new foot soldiers in the fight for social causes both locally and nationally.

This year’s presidential primaries — with their historic competition between a woman, Sen. Hillary Clinton, and an African American, Sen. Barack Obama, for the Democratic nomination — drew record-high turnouts in a majority of states that held contests.

And experts predict a heavy turnout in November, when Senator Obama is expected to take on Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee. They cite factors like concerns over the economy; the absence of an incumbent on the ticket, which generally attracts more voters; and the Democratic party’s plan to set up campaign operations in all 50 states, even those that traditionally vote Republican.

“I see this year as a huge opportunity to translate the interest and excitement about what’s happening in the national political debate, translating that all the way down to the local level,” says Kafi Blumenfield, president of the Liberty Hill Foundation, in Santa Monica, Calif.

Goal to ‘Sustain’ Public Interest

But for Ms. Rodriguez and other charity leaders, Election Day itself is just a beginning. “A lot of people are mobilizing on November 4,” she says. “What we’re interested in is that whatever we do on November 4 we can sustain on November 5.”

Her organization, which unites more than 40 immigrant-rights groups, has drawn up a plan to keep at least 10 percent of the new voters involved in politics at the local, state, and federal levels.

Once the polls close, she says, “we still want to have players on that stage.”

The Florida group’s emphasis on the long term reflects a change in the way many charities and grant makers are approaching voting projects during this presidential-election cycle.

“It’s a shift from the narrower focus on registration and get-out-the-vote to a more integrated system, so the organizations doing this work are working with their communities on a range of different things,” says Nancy Youman, deputy director of U.S. programs for the Open Society Institute, in New York. The foundation is spending about $3-million on voter-mobilization and other civic-participation and election-related projects this year.

Open Society provided $250,000 this year to the Community Voting Project, which is spending about $4-million in 2008 to provide training and money to 36 groups in 26 states that meet a basic requirement: “They have to be very clear about the work making the organization stronger in order for them to be part of the program,” says Irma Palacios, director of the project.

Nonprofit organizations that mobilize voters have set up new networks for collaboration, are taking a more scientific approach to their tactics, and are trying to convince a variety of charities, not just those that have traditionally encouraged voting, to help get the people they serve to the polls.

They see this year as one in which such efforts could prove especially effective, given that social issues like poverty, jobs, and health care are high on the political agenda.

When Marc Wetherhorn, national advocacy director for the National Association of Community Health Centers, first proposed a project to encourage community health centers to sign up their patients to vote in 2000, he found little interest.

But in March, his association, in Bethesda, Md., got the Community Health Vote Campaign off the ground.

This time, Mr. Wetherhorn says, “the response I got is overwhelming” — a change he attributes to the current political environment, including economic insecurity, the rising number of people without health insurance, and the federal debate over how much money to spend on the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Mr. Wetherhorn says about 25 state associations have started setting up voting programs in community health centers, which receive federal money to provide services to low-income people. The programs provide packets to patients telling them how to register and giving them forms to turn back in.

He says his organization will also encourage patients to get involved in advocacy work.

“Our goal is not just to register people,” he says. “Our goal is to register people and try to help them connect the issues that affect their health center to the broad political context.”

The national association has provided $450,000 toward a $1.1-million three-year budget for the voting campaign — and has asked several foundations to provide the rest, Mr. Wetherhorn says.

‘One-Stop Shop’

While Mr. Wetherhorn focuses on health centers, another organization started a project this spring to encourage all social-service charities to get the people they serve to become more politically active.

The Nonprofit Voter Engagement Network, a project of the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits, was originally set up in 2005 to work with state groups that encouraged charities to get involved in voter-participation projects. But in April, it started a project to reach out to nonprofit groups nationwide.

It set up a Web site, Nonprofit Vote.org, to serve as a “one-stop shop” for information about nonprofit voter projects — offering news, online training sessions, tips on how to remain nonpartisan, and guides to voter-registration campaigns and candidate forums.

The organization has received recent grants from foundations, including the Carnegie Corporation ($300,000 for two years) and Open Society Institute ($200,000 for two years), both in New York, the Cedar Tree Foundation, in Boston ($400,000), and the George Gund Foundation ($100,000), in Cleveland.

The Nonprofit Voter Engagement Network calls charities “sleeping giants” that could have a big impact on voter participation because they are so numerous and have access to exactly the groups that have low rates of voting and other methods of civic participation.

Many charities fear incorrectly that they cannot do that because they must remain nonpartisan, says George Pillsbury, the group’s policy and development director. “Nonpartisan doesn’t mean you can’t care about the issues,” he says.

Ms. Blumenfield of Liberty Hill says she has noticed a big change in thinking since 2004, when her foundation started the LibertyVote project — which has provided more than $475,000 in small grants to help more than 20 social-service charities integrate get-out-the-vote activities into their work, targeting potential voters like homeless people, ex-prisoners, Hispanics, and new citizens.

Charities and foundations were then “terrified” that they would jeopardize their tax-exempt status by getting involved in voting and civic-engagement projects. Today, she says, about twice as many of the groups that get Liberty Hill grants are working on election projects as four years ago.

New Coalitions

Advocacy groups that are used to conducting get-out-the-vote campaigns are also creating new networks to work more effectively and build long-term plans.

A new organization, State Voices, in Detroit, which is scheduled to start work this month, will coordinate and help 15 state coalitions of nonpartisan charities — such as antipoverty, environmental, and civil-liberties groups — that are working to mobilize voters.

The group is a successor to National Voice, a coalition of almost 100 groups that coordinated their get-out-the-vote efforts for the 2004 presidential contest. But while that group closed after the election, State Voices is “built to last,” says Ryan Friedrichs, the executive director.

Building on the work of an interim group that was set up after National Voice closed, the Center for Civic Participation, State Voices hopes in the long run to increase the political involvement of citizens who are underrepresented in the political system. This includes such groups as poor people, minorities, or people with disabilities, Mr. Friedrichs says. “How do we collectively engage these communities, build power in these communities?,” he asks.

The group will serve as a national hub for 15 state networks of charities that have coalesced in recent years to work together on voting and civic-engagement projects so they can avoid duplication of effort and find economies of scale. With names like Engage Maine, Pennsylvania Voice, and the Wisconsin Civic Engagement Project, the networks represent more than 350 groups.

State Voices hopes to help them operate even more efficiently — for example, by providing centralized purchases of polling projects, scientific testing of voter-mobilization tactics, and voting files — commercial lists of data about voter behavior and interests.

The organization has received about $1.5-million in grants this year from foundations including the Beldon Fund, in New York ($350,000), the Cedar Tree Foundation ($250,000), and the Open Society Institute ($200,000).

Grant makers are showing increasing interest in supporting projects that, like State Voices, keep people politically involved between presidential elections.

“That is really a good trend,” says Geri Mannion, director of the U.S. democracy program at the Carnegie Corporation, one of the major donors to voting projects.

She points to Carnegie’s support for the Pushback Network, a new group that is working to overcome the cyclical nature of traditional election projects.

Pushback — which links state coalitions of grass-roots groups in Alabama, California, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Mexico, New York, and Nevada — was set up after the 2004 elections specifically to “push back” against “short-sighted, tactical” approaches to voting work.

About 80 percent of its $1.3-million budget comes from grant makers including Carnegie; the Ford Foundation, in New York; the Open Society Institute; the Public Welfare Foundation, in Washington; and the Solidago Foundation, in Northampton, Mass.

Rodney McKenzie, Pushback’s coordinating director, says grass-roots groups were upset that the millions of dollars that organizations spent to get voters to the polls in 2004 did not translate into any kind of permanent structure for organizing people to fight for social change.

“These paratroopers kind of flew into their state and flew out right after the election,” he says. “If we had even half a percent of the funds that poured into our state, we could have built to scale our programs.”

Mr. McKenzie says the groups want to ensure that does not happen again in 2008. They will work to get people to vote, but also ask, “How do we then immediately link every person who turns out to vote to our existing programs?”

In putting together its network, Pushback worked to get a geographic mix, with representation from both rural and urban states and from states that generally vote Republican and states that generally vote Democratic — but hopes to continue expanding to new states, Mr. McKenzie says.

Better Coordination

Just as charities are working more closely on voting projects, grant makers are strengthening their own collaboration through the Funders’ Group on Civic Participation, in Portland, Ore., which unites more than 80 grant makers that give money to projects to boost voting and other democratic involvement. The committee was established in 1983 but operated on a voluntary basis until late 2006, when it hired an executive director, Deb Ross. (It now has three staff members.)

With voter turnout in the United States much lower than in many other democracies, the members “wanted to increase coordination, increase joint learning opportunities, look at expanding the field,” Ms. Ross says.

The group does not yet compile figures on how much grant makers are spending on election projects, but it plans to start tracking such grants after this election cycle, she says.

The Carnegie Corporation has increased its spending on voter registration, education, and get-out-the-vote projects from about $3-million in multiyear grants in 2003 and 2004 to about $5.5-million in 2007 and 2008, with a new emphasis on young people and immigrants, Ms. Mannion says.

The Cedar Tree Foundation, which gave its first grants to voter-mobilization projects in 2004, is also spending more in 2008 — about $3-million, up from about $1.1-million four years ago. The grant maker gave an additional $1-million to the Election Administration Project, a new fund to support projects to improve the country’s election system. (See article on Page 8.)

Cedar Tree primarily supports environmental projects but decided it was important to strengthen the political system and get underrepresented voters to the polls, as part of its effort to push for changes in environmental policies, says Martin Teitel, the executive director.

Among the groups that got bigger grants this time around was Women’s Voices, Women Vote, a charity in Washington that works to get more unmarried women to vote. Because it was able to show scientifically that it had increased voting rates — “These folks sent me literally pounds of numbers,” Mr. Teitel says — the foundation increased its grant from $250,000 in 2004 to $750,000 this year.

“It’s the cliché of the century, but funders want to make a difference,” Mr. Teitel says.