Members of the nonprofit world are weighing how to ask for more federal money from the Democrat-controlled Congress and White House in 2009.

Specifically, Independent Sector has drafted a set of priorities for the next president and Congress that includes asking for higher taxes to maintain spending for nonprofit organizations and for social services, such as food stamps and health care for low-wage earners.

The extra money is necessary as the economic crisis increases demand for charitable services while at the same time current tax revenues are drying up, the group argues.

But the choice to ask for higher taxes remains controversial among nonprofit service providers and the individual donors and foundations that give them money.

“As essential as government revenues are to the work of so many in this community, taxation and fiscal policy are not something on which the nonprofit...

Ruby Wood has just died, leaving a very special bequest: $6-million for the six people who helped take care of her in her old age to give away to other people who care for others as well as other people in need of care.

That’s the basic story at the center of a new online game to be unveiled by United Cerebral Palsy later this month, the organization’s chief executive, Stephen Bennett, told participants at the Independent Sector meeting here today.

The game, tentatively called “Ruby’s Bequest,” is the latest example of how nonprofit groups are using online games and simulations to get people involved in, and thinking about, social issues.

“We thought, what if we could get people from multiple points of view to investigate the future of health care and of care giving, and look at the problems together, they could come up with some solutions,” Mr. Bennett said.

Players will...

Two key Internal Revenue Service officials today pledged that the agency will continue efforts to ensure that tax-exempt organizations are following federal laws.

“We are going to continue to insist that the sector is squeaky clean,” Douglas Shulman, the commissioner of Internal Revenue, told attendees at Independent Sector’s annual meeting, in Philadelphia.

Mr. Shulman said it was not the IRS’s job to determine how charities fulfill their individual roles, but explained his concern that the poor economic conditions could tempt tax-exempt organizations to bend the rules by, for instance, using money for capital expenses on operating needs.

At the same time, the agency is trying to use less onerous ways to encourage better compliance with the federal tax rules, Mr. Shulman said.

For example, the IRS is “checking up” on young nonprofit groups, instead of conducting a full-blown...

Independent Sector President Diana Aviv said today that the recent economic meltdown and the election of Barack Obama as President have challenged recent assumptions and have thrust nonprofit organizations and foundations into an unfamiliar role.

No longer are nonprofit organizations mere stewards of government grants and private-sector donations. Instead, they must become true advocates for change in the way government and the free market operate.

“If we stand, as I believe we do, at a moment of profound rethinking about the American social compact, then the values of mutual concern and shared responsibility that unite us must be central to that discussion,” Ms. Aviv said in a speech at Independent Sector’s annual meeting today in Philadelphia.

“We must use our voice — the organized expression of what we collectively call the independent sector, a voice founded on the values and ...

“Great fund raisers don’t whine about the economy,” Reynold Levy, president of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, told participants at the annual Independent Sector meeting here. “They believe in Noah’s principle: No more credit for predicting rain. Credit only for building arks.”

Among the types of arks Mr. Levy suggested charities build: a larger, more engaged governing board. Trustees, he said, want to do more than just see their name on a letterhead, and charity leaders ought to raise expectations for how much trustees should give and how much they ought to raise.

He also said that charities ought not be shy about how often they make solicitations – “fund raising is like baseball,” he said, where one hit for every two outs makes for a superstar — and should choose carefully who does the asking.

“Donors give to people they admire, not just to causes and organizations...

Nonprofit groups on Sunday got an optimistic view of how the historic 2008 presidential elections and the administration of Presdent-elect Barack Obama, a Democrat, will effect their organizations.

Independent Sector, a nationwide association of foundations, and corporate giving programs, kicked off its annual meeting in Philadelphia with speakers who analyzed election results.

The stature of the nonprofit world cannot help but improve under an Obama administration, said James Capehart, an editorial writer at The Washington Post. He added that that the best and brightest leaders of tax-exempt organizations may be tapped to work for the new president.

Judy Woodruff, political editor of PBS’s News Hour with Jim Lehrer, explained that Mr. Obama’s campaign broke new ground by operating as a 50-state grass-roots group and that he understands the power that kind of organization can...

With the whole world watching the indices that follow financial markets second-by-second, Alan J. Abramson, a scholar of the nonprofit world, wonders why there’s not a similar index tracking the nonprofit world.

At a meeting of the Independent Sector here, Mr. Abramson suggested that charity leaders consider building what he called a ”Dow Jones index for nonprofits.”

“With the nonprofit sector, we get analysis one, two, three years after the fact, looking at the 990s or waiting for some survey or another,” said Mr. Abramson, professor of public and international affairs at George Mason University and a senior fellow in the nonprofit sector and philanthropy program at the Aspen Institute. “We need the same solid, immediate information to track performance in the nonprofit sector as you get with the Dow in the financial markets.”

Mr. Abramson said that much of the data that...

Charity leaders at the Independent Sector’s annual meeting, which opened in Philadelphia today, turned what could have been a doom-and-gloom discussion about the financial challenges facing nonprofit groups into a feel-good look into what a new presidential administration might mean for nonprofit organizations.

Miles Rapoport, president of Demos, a think tank in New York, opened the session called “Making the Numbers Work during the Economic Squeeze,, saying that the country is “entering a period of time that is enormously creative, enormously uncertain, enormously new,” and that presents “tremendous organizational possibilities.”

Participants touched on some of the fine points of moving through a recession, such as whether it is prudent to start new programs to attract new sources of revenue when money is tight.

Garvester Kelley, vice president of the mid-Atlantic region.of the ...

Should Congress require foundations to disclose information about how much of their giving supports the poor and minorities?

During the Philanthropy Roundtable’s meeting, two nonprofit leaders clashed over this question.

Aaron Dorfman, executive director of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a foundation-watchdog group in Washington, argued that new regulations are needed to improve philanthropy.

Calling foundations “some of the most loosely regulated organizations” in the country, Mr. Dorfman said federal lawmakers should tighten rules to prevent foundations from financially benefiting their founders or their family members and improve oversight by the Internal Revenue Service.

In addition, he said charitable funds should be required to publicly say what their governance policies are and share demographic data about what populations their grants are...

During the Philanthropy Roundtable’s annual meeting, Thomas W. Luce, a former assistant secretary of education under President Bush, said that philanthropy too often starts new programs to benefit schools, but needs to instead focus on growing education efforts that have already been proven to work.

“We have lit enough pilots that we ought to have a furnace somewhere,” he said. But “everybody likes to seize upon a new idea.”

Mr. Luce is now chief executive of the National Math and Science Initiative, in Dallas, which is working with states and nonprofit groups to expand nationwide public education projects that have demonstrated success locally. The organization has received support from the ExxonMobil oil company, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation.

“We don’t want to be the innovator,” he said about his group, but instead generate “...