The Permanent Government of New York

I spent about 15 years in city government and about two decades in nonprofit management. The intersection of government and the nonprofit sector is a space I know well. I have seen how the two can work together to achieve great things. I’ve also seen how the relationship can lead to tension and misunderstanding, and how the built-in power imbalance between the sectors can have a negative impact on the ability of the nonprofit and public sectors to partner successfully.

To me, there are two big differences between government and the nonprofit sector: the perception of time and the perception of money.

In shorthand, the difference between how nonprofits and the government think about money is the number of zeros. Large municipal governments, like the one in New York City, tend to think in terms of millions, and even billions, of dollars. Nonprofits, by necessity, often think in hundreds of thousands. As a result, nonprofits appreciate the value of a few thousand dollars in ways city government, because of its scale, simply cannot.

Nonprofits often teeter on a razor’s edge financially. The typical nonprofit has to spend a great deal of energy just trying to stay in place. When I was the leader of the Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO), a national nonprofit that works to provide jobs for the formerly incarcerated, it often felt like I was flapping as fast as I could but struggling to move forward. I call this the “hummingbird syndrome.”

From talking to other nonprofit colleagues, I know I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. So much of our energy was spent trying to get paid for work performed under government contracts, courting private donors or strategizing about how to make up for shortfalls, including the never-ending quest to cover indirect costs. By contrast, when I was in government, I had 99 problems on any given day, but staying afloat wasn’t one of them.

On the other hand, nonprofits have a luxury of time that government often doesn’t have. Nonprofits don’t necessarily appreciate the crush of daily pressures on government officials; in government, the “long term” is often measured in weeks, not months or years.

Unless you’ve experienced it firsthand, it is hard to grasp the pressure that high-level government officials are under. It can be a relentless existence. A typical day brings a full schedule of meetings with little or no room in between to take a breath. And then something happens that’s unexpected: It could be black ice that’s causing a large number of simultaneous accidents and jamming up the 911 system, a freak snowstorm that is challenging garbage collection or a health problem that requires the mobilization of hundreds of building inspections. These are just some of the things that might (in fact, actually did) happen that can turn a typical day into a 24/7, all-hands-on-deck situation. Layer on top of that external forces like the economy and its impact on the budget process and tensions between city and state, and you start to get a feel for what a “normal” day looks like.

This does not mean that government doesn’t have the time to think big, or to be innovative — some of the most creative people I have ever worked with have been government officials, and many government officials are deeply committed to changing systems. Still, it is fair to say that government officials must prioritize what’s happening in the present moment and often don’t have the luxury of time to flesh ideas out or back up their assertions with research and evidence.

This is where outside partners can really help. Nonprofits, including academic institutions, can work in partnership with government to help advance good policymaking. The data and arguments that nonprofit think tanks and policy shops offer can provide government officials with the ammunition they need to make the case for specific interventions.

Of course, providing research and ideas is but one of the many ways that nonprofits interact with government. When I was at CEO, my organization acted as a direct service provider to state and city government. This role positioned us to work almost as a community-based extension of government. Put another way, we drove on what some would call an “inside lane.” If you can demonstrate to government partners that you are responsive to their needs and can carry out a shared mission — in my case, getting jobs for people reentering communities after prison — you can build trust that allows you to influence policy and shape how the work gets done.

A nonprofit’s relationship with government is often defined by the role that it plays in the ecosystem. Those working the inside lane can’t be publicly adversarial. Those who choose to be adversarial don’t get the same kind of access. Life is full of trade-offs. The truth is that both approaches, inside and outside, are valid and necessary. In a perfect world, they can even work together in mutually reinforcing ways, with external advocates pushing government to do more and inside players helping government to figure out how to operationalize this demand.

When I was at CEO, we were part of a semiformal coalition of different nonprofit groups that sought to advance alternatives to incarceration. The organizations in this long-standing partnership often competed for the same pot of resources, but we also understood the power of working together to grow the “whole pie.” We saw ourselves as a portfolio of complementary partners with varying strengths, including both direct service and advocacy.

As a direct service provider that relied heavily on government funding and partnership to do my work, I was not well positioned to publicly advocate against government policy proposals, but other members of the coalition could. And, in exchange, when it came to meeting with executive agencies, I often moved to the front given my background and relationships. In other situations, a direct service provider could supply voices from their pool of program participants that could support an advocate’s work on behalf of a specific piece of policy or legislation. I can’t overstate the value of different kinds of nonprofits finding ways to complement each other. If I were advising a nonprofit leader (or my younger self!), I’d tell them to concentrate more on working with others to expand the whole pie as opposed to fighting just for your narrow slice.

There have been criticisms of the role nonprofits play in our society. For example, the phrase “permanent government” is often used in a pejorative way to describe the role that organizations like CEO perform in the life of New York and other cities. I understand why this moniker might be used — I’ve used it myself — but I actually think this dynamic can be framed as a positive. A stable community-based infrastructure of reliable nonprofits with strong leadership can smooth transitions (local nonprofit leaders are often on mayoral transition teams, for example) and maintain continuity of critical programs and community services during disruptions in political leadership.

There are, of course, critics of what some call the “nonprofit industrial complex,” who often point to the game of musical chairs in which leaders leave government to join the nonprofit sector and vice versa, as evidence of a nefarious relationship between the sectors.

Here again, it is just as easy to view this dynamic as a positive, not a negative. It is incredibly valuable for government to understand how nonprofits work if they are to maximize their value. Having agency commissioners with direct experience in nonprofit management is a good thing if we hope to drive excellent performance. (The reverse is true too: When nonprofit administrators have spent time within government, they are better able to anticipate problems and figure out how to navigate the bureaucracy.)

As quick examples, in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in New York, CEO and other nonprofits who managed work crews reached out to government leaders and quickly mobilized to help, no questions asked, because we knew we were needed and there was no time for bureaucracy to get in the way. On the flip side, after I returned to government as head of the Mayor’s Office of Operations and was part of the team rolling out the municipal ID program (IDNYC), we engaged local nonprofits along with City agencies to offer access to the program, which greatly improved uptake as residents could go to a nonprofit in their neighborhood.

The bottom line is that, at least in New York City, nonprofits and government agencies are all part of the same infrastructure. This infrastructure is essential to the day-to-day business of keeping the city moving forward. Indeed, this diverse and vibrant nonprofit sector is part of what makes New York stronger and more resilient than many other cities.