Non-profit agencies that receive funding from St. Mary’s County are continuing to press their case for respect. The 26 agencies last year formed an organization called Vital Community Connectors (VCC) and held several public meetings in advance of the commissioners’ budget decision. The organization renewed their appeal at a meeting Thursday at the Southern Maryland Higher Education Center in California.
The organizations that receive county funding are called “Non-County” in the budget, a fact that bristles some of the members. Dr. Kathy O’Brien, executive director of Walden-Sierra, said, “We are not non-county. Our contention is that we are The County.”
Joe Anderson of Greenwell Foundation said, “The community is a cloth and it is woven of a lot of different threads,” adding that the non-profit organizations do what they do in harmony and that “harmony has many parts.”
Noting that the organizations in VCC provide a myriad of community services, Anderson said, “You have the whole landscape covered with your vision.”
Last year the majority of the county commissioners voted to keep funding for the “non-county agencies” at the same level as the previous year. That was a 3-2 vote, with commissioners Cynthia Jones (R: 1st) and Lawrence Jarboe (R: 3rd) opposing, to fund the 26 non-profit agencies at $1.34 million and to not fund several agencies that had requested to be added to the list.
One of the requirements for continuing funding was participation of the agencies in the newly formed Non-Profit Institute at the College of Southern Maryland. At Thursday’s meeting Tammy Vitale, who runs the Leonardtown campus site, explained to the audience the number of workshops that the institute will be conducting. There is a heavy emphasis grant writing essentials. The 4th Annual Non-Profit Conference will be held March 28th at the La Plata campus. For more information on the institute go to their website: http://www.csmd.edu/NonProfitInstitute/index.html
A detailed presentation about the impact of the non-profit agencies was given at Thursday’s meeting by George Hurlburt of the Patuxent River Naval Air Museum Association. He noted that government funding, in the form of grants, loans, subsidies, etc., makes up almost a third of non-profit agency funding.
He said that the non-profits not only provide services that are perceived as “core government responsibility,” they also solve public government problems. He said of the latter that they “generally succeed when significant pressures exist on government as a result of a fiscal or media crisis.”
But Hurlburt said there was also a “Beneficiary Broker model” in the relationship between government and the non-profits in which “individual beneficiaries decide how to spend the government benefit.” Non-profits, he said, maximize benefits to clients and maximize income for investors/stakeholders.
O’Brien mentioned later in the meeting that often state and federal grant sources look at the level of local commitment to a non-profit in making their grant decisions. Hurlburt noted that the average Maryland state fu
