Tommy Washbush / Freepik
It’s been rumored that Madison has the most nonprofits per capita of any city in the country. That, it turns out, is not true. But Madison does have a lot, likely for a “whole host of reasons,” says Andy Davey, director of research and advocacy for the Madison Community Foundation, itself a 501(c)(3) that, among other things, pools donations and provides grants for community projects.
Davey suggests nonprofits could be plentiful here because Madison is in the state Capitol, where advocacy flourishes. Madison is also the seat of government for the city and Dane County, and some nonprofits are directly funded by and work in concert with such government agencies as the Dane County Department of Health and Human Services. “In the last few decades,” adds Davey, “there has also been dwindling public investment in services, so nonprofits are picking up the slack.”
There are also the intangibles, including “the civic pride of Madisonians wanting to give back — to make their neighborhood or city great.” In addition, the city is home to “left-leaning people who might feel more comfortable in the nonprofit sector than private sector.”
Renee Moe, president and CEO of United Way of Dane County, says it makes sense that Madison is home to a large number of nonprofits because “we have a lot of people who want to roll up their sleeves and make things better.” Plus, she adds, “There is a strong history of philanthropy” in Madison. United Way, Downtown Madison Inc. and the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce are all groups that were “fostered by business groups who wanted to give back,” notes Moe.
There are currently 3,463 501(c)(3) nonprofits in the Dane County area, according to the Madison Community Foundation’s nonprofit directory. These are the kind of nonprofits most people are familiar with — churches, food pantries, youth organizations, animal shelters and educational groups. That number does not include other types of 501(c) organizations like political action leagues, labor unions and chambers of commerce.
A lot of the local growth in nonprofits occurred between 1995 and 2017, according to a 2018 report by Davey, “Sifting Through Abundance: Outlining the Nonprofit Sector in Dane County.” During that time the number of 501(c)(3)s more than doubled from 1,420 to 3,086.
Davey says when he arrived at the Madison Community Foundation in 2017 questions swirled about whether there were too many nonprofits in the area. He was also hearing from donors who felt a bit overwhelmed by all of the activity in the sector and from nonprofit leaders who said that they couldn’t find affordable resources locally to improve their organizations.
Davey started interviewing people from the United Way of Dane County, Community Shares of Wisconsin and UW-Madison to see what kind of support they offered to nonprofits. They all provided some services, but there were gaps: there was no place in Madison for nonprofits to come together; no place for nonprofit staffers to get affordable, professional workplace development opportunities; and no place to make the work of nonprofits more visible to donors in the community.
As Davey continued to investigate further, he bumped into Sharon Lezberg.
Lezberg, community development educator for UW-Madison Extension Dane County, says she, like Davey, was wrestling with questions about nonprofit capacity building. With only anecdotal evidence about the challenges, Davey and Lezberg decided to design a research project to obtain some good data. “It was just a logical collaboration,” says Lezberg.
They started holding focus groups with the leaders and board members from about 80 local nonprofits, asking such questions as: “Where do you go to strengthen your organization? Where do you go to get support for fundraising? For human resources?” They also did some survey work.
Beth Skogen
Andy Davey: ‘Nonprofits are picking up the slack.’
Davey and Lezberg published their report, “Toward a Stronger Nonprofit Sector: Addressing Capacity Building Needs in Dane County,” in late 2021.
“The aim of our research was to identify the most important needs and determine how funders, educational institutions and other organizations serving nonprofits could better contribute to stronger organizations and a stronger nonprofit sector,” the authors write in their executive summary.
Among the report’s suggestions: fund and support organizations led by people of color working on equity; develop and sustain peer cohort learning; fund and support collaborations and evaluations; and establish a local nonprofit center.
Early in Davey’s tenure at Madison Community Foundation, a former staffer, Brennan Nardi, had told him about the nonprofit center her sister was running in Charlottesville, Virginia, and connected the two. He also learned that Wisconsin was an outlier when it came to nonprofit hubs.
“Wisconsin is one of only three states that doesn’t have a statewide nonprofit association,” says Davey.
“Not only did we not have a statewide group, we didn’t have a local one,” he adds. “So there’s just this huge gap in infrastructure.”
In May, the Madison Community Foundation announced that the Irwin A. and Robert D. Goodman Foundation had donated $5 million for MCF to develop a center for the greater Madison area. That gift was followed up by a $1 million gift from the Roots & Wings Foundation in September.
The center, says Davey, “isn’t something you can support through tuition and dues alone. It has to be underwritten by philanthropy.”
The Goodman Nonprofit Center will not exist in brick and mortar. Instead funding will be used to “invest in the people and the instructors,” with classes and workshops held around town. The center will connect nonprofit leaders and volunteers to such local organizations as Collaboration for Good, Center for Community and Nonprofit Studies at UW-Madison, Community Shares of Wisconsin, UW Extension, Center for Community Stewardship and the Madison chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals.
Mary Beth Collins, the executive director of the Center for Community and Nonprofit Studies, says the timing is good for a nonprofit hub.
“We at the center, along with various other partners across Wisconsin, for years have had discussions around capacity building for the nonprofit sector.” Collins says other communities have tried different things and come up with creative new strategies during COVID when things needed to move online.
“This new localized hub I think will be somewhat informed by those experiences of other communities in Wisconsin,” she says.
Programming plans for the Goodman Nonprofit Center for 2025 and beyond include a year-long leadership development training program, an online resource library, calendar of local workshops, and directory of consultants. Also in the works is the creation of a forum where nonprofit organizations can come together to collaborate.
Do already stretched-thin nonprofit leaders have the time to break from their day-to-day duties to participate in such activities?
Lezberg acknowledges that might be easier at larger nonprofits, where staffers specialize in such areas as fundraising or human resources, and “harder to do at a startup,” where staffers wear many hats. But she encourages taking the long view: “Time put in in advance to learn and develop systems pays off in the end with time saved down the road.”
This article is part of The Nonprofit Issue, the special November 2024 print edition of Isthmus. See the other stories here.
