If most new businesses fail within the first two years, how do those wacky organizations that don’t seek a profit turn out?
While it might sound easier just to break even than to get in the black, nonprofits face a smattering of challenges all their own. From lack of attention to dried up donations and vindictive rivalries, it isn’t always easy not to make a profit, especially when you’re getting involved in politics.
Roughly 50% of American nonprofits operate with less than a month’s worth of cash reserves, or at least so says a 2018 study by the nonprofit info service GuideStar. So it should come as no surprise that even a ton of once-successful organizations bite the dust each year, even if they don’t have to pay taxes.
Here are six of Blue Tent’s most notable nonprofit political groups (and a few stragglers) that are no longer with us — technically or effectively — and the lessons we can learn from their decisions to close shop.
ACORN
Purpose: The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now was founded with the simple but ambitious goal of empowering and advocating on behalf of low-income and middle-class Americans. Before its untimely demise, ACORN was active in over 100 cities.
Accomplishments: ACORN helped pass living wage ordinances, worked to protect people from predatory financial institutions, advocated for affordable housing, and registered millions of voters.
Cause of Death: In 2009, right-wing hoax provocateur James O’Keefe presented several damaging videos showing ACORN workers giving him and his undercover collaborators advice on how to operate a prostitution ring while avoiding police and tax payments. Journalists later discovered that many of O’Keefe’s videos were heavily doctored in order to incriminate the organization, wherein ACORN employees more often than not alerted police, alerted their superiors, or were simply led to believe that they were trying to help sex workers escape abusive pimps. But ACORN’s name was already tarnished, its donor money dried up, and Congress slashed federal funding to ACORN in a bipartisan vote — the organization officially closed shop in 2010.
The Lesson: Democrats shouldn’t react in knee-jerk ways to right-wing stings; working-class community organizations are important; O’Keefe has been busted for BS sting operations several times since then, while Democrats joining in to dismember a national group that registered low-income voters may have had some, well, unintended consequences in 2016.
ACT UP
Purpose: In 1987, AIDS had become an epidemic in America, but the federal response was incomprehensibly lethargic. Enter the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, a collection of highly disciplined, highly enraged LGBTQ+ direct action groups founded by playwright and activist Larry Kramer.
Accomplishments: ACT UP is arguably the most effective activist coalition since the civil rights movement; its targeted actions forced drug companies to slash prices for life-saving drugs, shortened the FDA approval process for new drug testing and led to increased patient diversity in federal HIV/AIDS drug trials. ACT UP united many divergent LGBTQ interests and organizers and helped make HIV/AIDS a national issue.
Cause of Death: Internal strife, splinter groups, philosophical disagreements, and well, victory: By 1995, scientists made a major breakthrough with the development of protease inhibitors. ACT UP’s remaining chapters were mostly broken up around two years earlier.
The Lesson: Radical groups may have a short shelf life, but that doesn’t mean they can’t get things done. Likewise, some organizations don’t need to last forever in exactly the same forms; ACT UP’s Data and Treatment committee split off and is still active today as a think tank, the Treatment Action Group.
The White House Project
Purpose: Marie C. Wilson founded the White House Project in 1998 to help more women get into elected office, and as the name implies, eventually to make a woman the president of the United States.
Accomplishments: Along with their annual EPIC Awards for those who helped create positive presentations of female leaders, the White House Project developed VoteRunLead, a program to train women across the country in the basics of running for office. Wilson’s group hoped to build the infrastructure and climate to get a woman elected to the presidency within a decade.
Cause of Death: The White House Project came close to its goal in 2008, but with a male Democratic president and a Republican Party increasingly hostile to female voters and candidates, their best bet at seeing a woman president wouldn’t come until 2016. But three years before Hillary Clinton’s second run, the White House Project ran out of funding and closed its doors, spinning off VoteRunLead into an independent organization.
The Lesson: Sometimes it pays to weather the storm, and sometimes projects are more effective than entire nonprofits. Had the White House Project found a way to survive through 2016, the organization undoubtedly would have had a windfall in anti-Trump, pro-women-in-politics-fueled donations. More women have run for office and won over the past four years than at any time in history, and by a wide margin. VoteRunLead has trained tens of thousands of women from diverse backgrounds to run and win campaigns, including Congresswoman and “Squad” member Ilhan Omar. In 2020, Wilson saw her dream come a little closer as America elected its first female Vice President.
ThinkProgress
Purpose: Initially little more than a newsletter sent around by founder Judd Legum, ThinkProgress had a clear imperative: publish progressive journalism that digs up dirt on the right and glorifies liberal causes, so long as it remains in the interest of TP’s parent organization, the Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAP Action).
Accomplishments: Along with consistently spreading embarrassing information about Republicans and running cover for Democrats, TP’s greatest accomplishment may have been in training a network of progressive journalists, including liberals like Matt Yglesias (Vox) and Alyssa Rosenberg (the Washington Post) to far left rabble-rousers like Lee Fang (The Intercept) and Faiz Shakir, who managed Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign.
Cause of Death: CAP’s official reasoning for shuttering ThinkProgress, whose staff had unionized and obtained a contractual guarantee for editorial independence, was that TP was a money pit and CAP couldn’t find a buyer for the news site. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, seeing as ThinkProgress was a nonprofit publication, meaning it wasn’t supposed to make money (and therefore, was unable to appeal to a profit-minded buyer). As CAP fired TP’s staff and rebranded the site as a place for the think tank’s scholars to promote their research and other work, many began to suspect that the real decision to shutter TP was to break the union’s editorial independence.
The Lesson: Everyone should have a union, and establishment liberals don’t always practice what they preach. CAP initially planned to trash the ThinkProgress archive, which would have destroyed the valuable clips of dozens of TP writers and editors, but thanks to legal action by the ThinkProgress Union, CAP’s leadership chose to stop the site’s rebrand and keep the archive online.
CORE
Purpose: If you don’t remember your civil rights history, then shame on you, but here’s a refresher: Congress of Racial Equality was formed in 1942 but hit its stride during the civil rights movement in the ’60s, founding dozens of chapters across the country to advocate for integration and racial justice, led by such luminaries as James Farmer.
Accomplishments: Again, you should know this stuff: the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, Freedom Schools, fighting segregation in schools, transit and employment. CORE’s work was directly responsible for major civil rights legislation and desegregation.
Cause of Death: With the end of the 1960s came the end of the civil rights movement as most Americans remember it, moving the fight for racial justice in the ’70s and ’80s into courtrooms, often in the “liberal” north. These were ugly battles for busing, employment discrimination and affirmative action that white Americans rarely look back on with moral clarity, especially as Black activist energy was increasingly channeled into either radical groups like the Black Panthers or professionalized nonprofits like the NAACP and the ACLU. CORE and its peer groups, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), saw their membership and influence fade. SNCC more or less disappeared in 1968 after a failed merger with the Black Panthers; SCLC still exists at a marginal level, and CORE has been inactive for years. Their last notable news peg was being paid to endorse corporate and right-wing causes, including giving a civil rights award to Karl Rove.
The Lesson: Sometimes organizations outlive their use or grow stale faster than they realize, especially when new, more radical up-and-comers steal their thunder.
National Voting Rights Institute
Purpose: The National Voting Rights Institute (NVRI) was formed in 1994 by lawyer John Bonifaz to “make meaningful political participation available to all Americans.” What this translated to for Bonifaz and NVRI was challenging the legal and political implications of Buckley v. Valeo, a 1976 Supreme Court decision that struck down a plethora of campaign spending limits, opening the door for huge amounts of money in elections.
Accomplishments: NVRI represented numerous candidates and voters in litigation challenging illegal campaign activity, arduous filing fees for candidates for office, and the two-party domination of presidential debates. NVRI also advocated for political changes to campaign spending laws and supported public funding of campaigns.
Cause of Death: In 2006, NVRI signed an affiliation agreement with the think tank and advocacy organization Demos (Blue Tent Publisher David Callahan was one of the founders of Demos in 2000) and by 2007, chose to be absorbed entirely. Demos hired all of NVRI’s staff and moved them into the think tank’s Democracy Program. Other, no-longer-existing nonprofits have followed a similar path: The Center for Defense Information, an independent military reform project, and Center for Effective Government, a project focused on transparency, were both folded into the Project On Government Oversight.
The Lesson: In the nonprofit world, sometimes bigger really is better. Some organizations have too narrow a focus to attract the kind of donors and attention needed for long-term sustainability. For bigger and broader think tanks and advocacy organizations, it can be cheaper and much easier to simply absorb another smaller group rather than launch a competing project with the same focus.
