Egger tells nonprofits to unify, speak up and take action

“What is the face of hunger in America today?” Robert Egger, president of the DC Central Kitchen, asked the 120 HANO members and guests at the 2006 Member Meeting.

The face of hunger is not a child on welfare or an elderly person, he said. “It’s a single, working mother with two kids.” By the end of the month, her money has run out and, if her car broke down or anything else went wrong, she’ll need our help, he said.

“But the answer isn’t more efficient soup kitchens. At some point we need to talk about this as a society. Why,” he asked, “as people who care, have we allowed this to become the routine?”

Egger was HANO’s keynote speaker on Wednesday, Nov. 1, at the Radisson Prince Kuhio Resort. He challenged the gathering of nonprofit leaders with questions such as: “Where is your nonprofit section of the newspaper? Where is your place in the state budget process?”

As co-convener of the national Nonprofit Congress last month, Egger said “I’ve been to 40 meetings like this across the country, but only two where there was a panel of young people like the one you had this morning.”

Egger said he foresees a transition in nonprofit leadership – “but it’s not about age; it’s about ideas.” There are also 80 million Baby Boomers reaching retirement age, he said. “They’ve got to come work with us – we can’t afford to have 80 million people retire. We need to march out and pull them in. They will come with new ideas – are we, as leaders, open to new ideas?”

As a student of independence movements, Egger says he is fascinated by the moments in history when things break “and insurmountable enemies are no longer in power.”

He said he once learned that during the British colonial rule in India from 1858 until 1947 a total of only 3,000 British army officers ruled the second largest population in the world and he visited India to find out how.

The plan was to spend two weeks in Delhi studying at the home of former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. “It took 20 minutes,” Egger said. The British colonial rule simply kept India divided by race, caste, faith, gender and economic status.

“That’s the nonprofit sector,” he said.

“We fight each other for scraps and yet we have riches to work with – we’re one-tenth of the entire economy of this country.” If the American nonprofit sector, with its $1.76 trillion in assets, was compared to the economies of entire countries, it would rank sixth in the world – larger  than Brazil, Russia, Canada, Mexico or South Korea.

And yet, “we have a lot in common. Number one, we have Senator Charles Grassley,” Egger said. “He will regulate our industry whether we like it or not. … If any other industry was threatened the way nonprofits are, they’d be running ads in newspapers in Iowa telling people to get Senator Grassley on the phone.”

The second commonality is our need for people to understand what we do. “The Washington Post has three people writing restaurant reviews, but nobody covering nonprofits,” Egger said. “As a result, we are defined by scandal despite the fact that nonprofits are what hold this country up. Try to run a business or raise a family in a town that has no nonprofits.

“There should be a regular section about nonprofits in the business pages of every newspaper. People need to be educated. They need to know how to invest in our communities,” Egger said. “People don’t know what a ‘good nonprofit’ is – their best guess is that it is the one with the lowest administrative overhead. Try running an efficient business without overhead.”

He noted that 30 or more states require students to do community service in high school. With that experience, given a choice, “many young people would choose to work at a nonprofit – they want to make a difference, they want an integrated, not a segmented life.”

But, when they look at nonprofits, what do they see? “They see underpaid, overworked, harried people running nonprofits.”

What’s more, they can’t afford low-paying nonprofit jobs. They have student loans and credit card debt. “They are never going to donate the dollar amounts that our generation did. For them, philanthropy is giving their time and they just can’t see a full-time career in nonprofits.”

The point, Egger said, “is what you do today is profoundly important. Today, you’ll form a new organization. You need to decide what you want HANO to do. We represent almost 10 percent of the total economy – are you going to be satisfied not being part of the state budget process? Do you want HANO to speak for you?

“It’s not going to magically change for us,” he said. “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. A lot of the Baby Boomers are going to end up in our shelters. Don’t we want to be involved in the discussion?”

“It’s going to have to be political. The idea that nonprofits can’t be political is a huge urban myth.” The next presidential election, he noted, is the first in decades without an incumbent president or vice president running for the top office. “I say, let’s get involved in a big way,” Egger said.

The New Hampshire state nonprofit association will host the first presidential candidate forum in the country, he said. “We have a lot to offer a candidacy,” Egger said. “There are almost 2 million nonprofits out there, 80 million retirees, a generation of young people pouring out of the universities. They are going to say ‘I want to be their candidate.’ ”

“We can’t fix everything, but nonprofits can guide the country,” he said. “This is our destiny, to figure out our differences and come together.”