Ask Rockridge: Valuing the Non-Profit Community

"What role could non-profit (social service, environmental, arts, etc.) organizations and their fundraisers play in the creation or promulgation of progressive frames? Could Rockridge find a powerful connection or relationship there?"

Non-profit organizations stand for values and ideas. This is how they frame themselves. The symphony advances the importance of music and culture to society. The food bank appeals to the importance of lending a hand to the least fortunate among us. The voter registration group speaks to the importance of protecting our democracy. The environmental organization promotes the idea that our environment sustains us. And so on.

Fundraising is an extension of this self-framing. Non-profits must persuade prospective donors of the critical importance of the organization's existential values. It is not enough for Save the Tiger to say, "Hundreds of wild tigers are poached every year. Unless we do something, they will be extinct in 10 years." That message must be coupled with an understanding of why we should care. This understanding must be at the level of values, something that communicates the symbolic importance of wild tigers and how working to avoid their extinction connects us to the nobility of these animals.

What links so many non-profits, including the examples mentioned above, is the fundamentally progressive notion that we are all in this together, that we have a shared responsibility to care for those in need and to strengthen the bonds of our community. When non-profits use language that activates these ideas and values, they are more effective in their self-promotion and they simultaneously advance the core values of progressivism.

Unfortunately, too many non-profits and too many advocacy groups fail to see the values-level relationship between what they stand for and the larger themes of progressivism. So they don't observe the connections between themselves and other non-profits. Encouraged by narrowly focused funders, especially large foundations, they retreat into their issue-specific silos. When they communicate from within their silos, they miss a valuable opportunity to promote a progressive world view and the broad set of shared values that connect them to other like-minded organizations and to their stakeholders.

In Thinking Points and in various articles and blog posts, Rockridge has called for a greater appreciation of our shared values. We have identified these values (in Chapter 6 of Thinking Points), offered practical suggestions on how to communicate them (in Chapters 3 and 8 of Thinking Points), and explained why such communication resonates with wide swaths of people (in Chapter 2).

Rockridge has a symbiotic relationship with the non-profit community. Non-profits and other advocates educate us about intricacies of their issues, enabling us to do our work more effectively. In turn, we develop the cognitive policy — the unstated values, frames, and ideas behind material policy — that must be understood and advanced in order to pass material policy.

Our health care campaign is instructive. We have worked with various organizations in connection with our health care campaign. They have helped refine our understanding of the issues and we have helped them understand the cognitive dimension behind the debate. For example, we have highlighted the ways in which the private health insurance industry betrays free market principles because it earns profits not from selling as many goods and services as possible but from rationing them. We have explained the fundamental tension between the idea that government has a moral obligation to provide basic health care to its people and the delegation of that responsibility to profit-first private insurers.

The non-profit community is an essential Rockridge stakeholder. We work every day to help other non-profits articulate their ideas and values more effectively. We welcome comments and suggestions on how we can do our job better.

Bruce Budner
Executive Director
The Rockridge Institute

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