I am a social worker, not an economist, and what I know is this: The stock market is in free fall, financial organizations are being bailed out and the Detroit automakers may yet get financial help from Washington. But what about those of us in the nonprofit world? Where's our bailout?
Nonprofits depend on government funding and the generosity of business and individual giving, and those of us in the healthcare field are facing the bleakest of landscapes. Where is the storm of media coverage, the persuasive rhetoric, the public outcry to save critically needed services, such as child care, assisted living, home healthcare and hospital services? Who is documenting our agony? Where are the desperately needed cash infusions to help us restructure in this troubled economy?
My child-care agency, supported largely by government contracts -- federal and state dollars partially matched by county funds -- went nine years without an increase in the rate of funding it receives. During those years, the cost of a child-care worker rose from $23,000 a year to $29,000 a year. Multiply that figure by our 100 child-care workers, and we are facing a $600,000 shortfall in just one job category. No industry in the public or private sector could have survived nine years of flat funding.
How will we make up that shortfall? Fundraising? Unlikely, in this economy. And investment losses have had a profoundly negative effect on endowed organizations. We need a bailout.
Furthermore, California is facing a projected $28-billion budget deficit by the middle of 2010. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger used his line-item veto power to cut more than $510 million in social service funds from the recently adopted state budget. Los Angeles County in-home workers had their already meager wages cut by 30% in the latest budget. A hugely successful program for homeless adults who suffer from persistent mental illness -- which had already cut back on psychiatric hospitalizations -- also fell to the veto pen. No group was spared in the budget slashing, including children, the homeless, the elderly, the blind and the disabled.
The tsunami of recession churned by a state unemployment rate of 8.2% (and probably headed higher) threatens to swamp nonprofits that care for the most vulnerable among us.
