President Donald Trump’s attempts to halt federal funding flows — which are the subjects of ongoing court battles — have affected governments, companies and nonprofit agencies. Peggy Outon ran Pittsburgh’s Bayer Center for Nonprofit Management, part of Robert Morris University, from 1999 until 2023, during which time she helped more than 1,000 tax-exempt organizations. She continues to work with nonprofits as principal of Excelsior Consulting.
Outon has served personally on 35 agency boards, and helped small and mid-sized nonprofits weather the financial effects of the Sept. 11 attacks, the Great Recession, COVID-19, late state budgets and federal government shutdowns. We asked how all that compares to today’s realities — and what the sector can do to communicate its circumstances.
Questions and answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: How did you come to love nonprofits?
I began working in Austin, Texas, in 1980 at Laguna Gloria art museum, where we had 4,000 volunteers. What has been interesting to me is engagement, is ownership, is buy-in, is involvement by the whole community. While volunteerism as a percentage is going down a little bit, still about half of the people in this country report volunteering over the course of the year in a variety of different kinds of ways.
Both in Austin and in New Orleans. I started centers for nonprofit management, which are support centers for nonprofits. That brought me to Pittsburgh 25 years ago to start the Bayer Center for Nonprofit Management at Robert Morris University. And there my love and belief in volunteers was married to the need for nonprofits to have access to more expertise and knowledge. I have also been consistently passionate that we need to be really good at what we do, that this nonprofit thing is about doing it well and doing it right. I have really been a blessed and fortunate woman because I have lived my life with people who did not avert their eyes from things that were wrong in our community.
Q: You’ve seen some history. Is there anything particularly different about the moment we’re in?
Well, it’s a very scary moment, but we’ve been scared before. In those days after 9/11, I wrote an open letter about the fact I knew so many people in Pittsburgh who were dedicated to making things better, and who made us safer. Then there was 2008, which was pretty damn terrible because many foundations lost 30% of their assets.
This time, change has been very abrupt and very sudden and that has been shocking and disorienting for people. I’ve had a number of people say to me, “I can’t focus right now. I can’t. I’m having a hard time getting my work done because I can’t settle down and just move on.”
Q: Locally, we’re now seeing ripple effects from the transition from President Joe Biden to President Trump. How is that playing out or being talked about in the nonprofit sector?
Human service agencies are mostly on a reimbursement schedule, so they’ve already spent the money. They just need to get it back. The money has to go out before it can come in. Cash reserves in nonprofits are in many cases very slim — in many cases less than a month of operations in reserve. You’ve got very little money in the bank and all of a sudden you’re being told that your pledged grant amount is frozen.
My good friend was talking about having a Housing and Urban Development grant. HUD grants are reimbursable grants like most government money is. She is working to renovate housing for kids who have, in many cases, asthma. They go in and spend about $17,000 ripping up carpeting and reworking the place so that the kid with asthma has a better place to live, a better chance to not be sick. She went online to seek reimbursement and the wheel just turned.
Some of that money, of course, is people’s salaries. The best estimate I have is that nearly 200,000 people work in around 8,000 nonprofits in the 10-county Southwestern Pennsylvania region. They also have a family and a refrigerator to fill.
The uncertainty about not only your programs, but your literal employment makes it hard to move with confidence and know what you want to do.
Uncertainty is like crack cocaine. Uncertainty absorbs your brain and makes you less effective.
Q: Is there something about the nonprofit sector that makes it difficult for it to get this message out there?
There has been reluctance on the parts of boards of directors — understandably so — that if they if they advocate too strongly, they’ll lose their government contract or they’ll alienate the biggest employer in town, or they will in some ways impede their ability to raise funds by having too much of an opinion. And nonprofits can’t be partisan. We cannot espouse a political party. We cannot support a candidate. That is healthy because we work together on projects with a heart and it doesn’t matter how you voted.
The other piece that is our strength, but hampers us, is the fact that board governance slows decision making down. We are not nimble often because it’s not time to have a board meeting yet or we need to take it through committee and then to the board. When you get in a crisis moment, then all of a sudden, here we are and we’re supposed to decide on an advocacy message that doesn’t get me in trouble at work and that I agree with, by the way?
Q: If the sector was going to say something short and powerful to the world right now, what would you wish it was?
The message needs to be that we have this sleeping giant. If we have 8,000 nonprofits and you assume a board size of 12, which is fairly normal, that’s about 100,000 people in our region. Plus we’ve got 200,000 working for nonprofits. A million volunteering. We’ve got this sleeping giant of people whose lives are directly connected to the work. Not to mention the people that are served. I go swimming at the YMCA. I love it. It’s a nonprofit. I go there for the great instructor, not its tax status.
What would the world look like if it all went away? And do I want to live in that place? Do I want my kids to grow up in that place? Do I want to cede the future to a place where the generosity, the friendliness, the optimism, the the hope that is inherent in most nonprofit missions is extinguished?
The message needs to be: Hey, let us do our job.
Q: Is there some reason to think that this message, coming from Pittsburgh, could be heard in Washington?
Pittsburgh is really fortunate in the depth and the robustness of its nonprofit sector. And that is because it has had generous people who have made nonprofits possible here, whether they work at a foundation or are simply sympathetic to a cause. We are among the wealthiest communities in the nation in terms of foundation assets.
As a result, we have more ability to develop pilot programs and experiment. A lot of our leaders here serve on national boards and speak at national conferences.
We also have pit-bull tenacity. We’re going to do this because it needs to be done, and also because we want to do it. That’s our song and our strength.
Rich Lord is PublicSource’s managing editor and can be reached at rich@publicsource.org or 412-812-2529.
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