We are all for raising the visibility of the nonprofit sector (although do you really think nonprofits don't have visibility?) and making the case for their impact and importance (which you would think would be easy). But sometimes you have to wonder about our drive in the nonprofit sector to think strategically. Here is a great example of some wonderful intentions to rally the troops and show how strong the human services sector is and its tremendous impact. But, a press release about a brief? Is this the call the action the sector needs? How about some grassroots nonprofit warfare? With great fanfare, we role out political machines and canvas neighborhoods across the US. Maybe its time for the nonprofit sector to take a page from the playbook of the very politicians that claim to represent the people, while touting drastic cuts to social and human services without hesitation. How about a nonprofit door knocking day across America? What could be more powerful than knocking on the doors of your community and telling them how your organizaton helps them. You can even leave them a copy of the brief to read at their leisure.
For Immediate Release
The National Human Services Assembly (www.nationalassembly.org) has released a brief entitled, Putting Human Needs on the National Radar Screen, a brief on messaging and collaborative action for nonprofit human service and community development organizations. The National Assembly is an association of more than eighty of the nation’s leading national nonprofit human service and community development organizations.
The impetus for the brief came from the board of the National Assembly and the National Collaboration for Youth, which is a part of the Assembly. Both groups saw that human services were among the first programs to be cut at both state and federal levels and that the public and public officials are not aware of the importance of these programs to vulnerable people.
The brief suggests language but also establishing new narratives about the collective contributions of related human service and community development programs.
“We either suffer death by a thousand cuts,” said Irv Katz, President of the National Assembly, “or we get more sophisticated about telling our story and more collaborative in demonstrating our collective impact.” “This is not about programs,” he added, “it is about human needs. Those needs are not on the nation’s radar screen currently and won’t be unless service providers and their allies take action to change that.”
Read the brief on messaging»
