Proud to Be in Good Company

In the April 2019 edition of its magazine, Nonprofit Quarterly takes the unusual and unsolicited action of endorsing the nonprofit network to which the Maryland Nonprofits is a contributing member. The editors, expressing concern about the lack of resources devoted to nonprofit advocacy, identified those of us active in the National Council of Nonprofits as the high-performing solution to policy challenges at the local, state, and federal levels. Here is what they wrote:

“The nonprofit sector needs the one network that addresses nonprofit tax policy proposals as they appear across geographical boundaries: the National Council of Nonprofits, a network made up of nonprofits and nonprofit associations throughout the United States. CWe believe [the National Council of Nonprofits’] funding level to be well out of proportion – very low in relation – to its strategic importance, and we are taking a position, as longtime observers of the nonprofit infrastructure, that a pool of philanthropic money should be developed to build the organization to reasonable and even robust scale. (The same is true for the individual state associations involved in nonprofit tax policy).”

Maryland Nonprofits has been a proud state association member of the National Council of Nonprofits since our founding in 1992. Maryland Nonprofits serves as a link between nonprofits here at home and the nation’s largest network of charitable nonprofits – the more than 25,000 organizational members of the National Council of Nonprofits – providing us with access to timely information about public policy and operational trends on a breadth, depth, and scale that no other entity in Maryland can match or replicate. This has allowed us to contribute to more advocacy successes in the last year that even we could have hoped for. From banning gag rules that prevent pharmacists from advising patients on how they can purchase their prescriptions at a lower rate to raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour, many nonprofits across the state have seen progress in their respective mission areas. But Maryland Nonprofits does not just keep these resources for ourselves – we advise other state associations based on our experiences, curate programs that help nonprofits in our state rise to the highest standards of ethics and conduct, and lift the voice of Marylanders at the federal level when nonprofits across the country mobilize to speak to Congress, executive agencies, and even the U.S. Supreme Court.

To learn more about Maryland Nonprofits advocacy, click here.