Is Obama Abandoning Smaller Nonprofits?

We all know President Obama talks a good game. His speaking skills are partly what got him elected (that and his devilish good looks, of course). Now that he's in office, we are discovering whether he'll put his money where his mouth is.

Yesterday he spoke glowingly about nonprofit organizations, emphasizing how important their good work is to our country. So my question is: where's the money? Does the support for the nonprofit sector in his 2010 budget match up with his supportive rhetoric?

According to analyst Rick Cohen, national correspondent for The Nonprofit Quarterly, "The Obama Administration budget contains several programs of crucial importance for nonprofits, but it’s not all peaches and cream."

The main thing that's not peachy, apparently, is Obama's apparent neglect of small- and medium-sized nonprofits, even though these organizations make up the vast majority of organizations that are out there every day working to help Americans in need.

One example of this, according to Cohen, is the disappearance of the Nonprofit Capacity Building Initiative (NCBI). On April 21st, Obama signed the SERVE America Act, legislation meant to increase the number of volunteer opportunities supported by the federal government. The ACT included the NCBI, which would provide $5 million each year from 2010 to 2014 for grants of over $200,000 each to train and improve the skills of small- and medium-sized nonprofits. But, as Cohen succinctly puts it, "there is no specific program line for this in the CNCS budget or elsewhere."

Despite this omission, the budget still contains a lot of love for nonprofits. In Cohen's accounting, there are several programs that are going to really matter to the sector:

• The Social Innovation Fund, which allocates $50 million to support — you guessed it — social innovation. This fund aims to seek out the best ideas and bring them to scale.
• The Strengthening Communities Fund, which replaces Bush's Compassion Capital Fund (faith-based program), a $50-million technical assistance program to help nonprofits work for economic recovery at the community level.
• A range of agency-specific programs in Housing and Urban Development, Education, Health and Human Services, Treasury and Agriculture "in which nonprofits should envision themselves as key players if not implementers."

So, while Obama might not be willing — or able — to give small nonprofits all the monumental support they deserve, he is definitely walking the walk when it comes to helping the sector as a whole.