This fall, after Hurricane Maria struck, the Washington chef and restaurateur José Andrés began feeding the needy in Puerto Rico.
Hours after the storm devastated the island, Mr. Andrés and the World Central Kitchen began to activate a network of local chefs and volunteers to feed people across the island. Since then, he helped distribute over 3 million meals, while giving fellow citizens there a sense of purpose and solace that the United States hadn’t forgotten them.
And in California, where I lead the L.A. Kitchen, we too jumped into action as one of the biggest fires in the state’s history ravaged Los Angeles, Ventura, and Santa Barbara counties. We quickly organized volunteers, chefs, food donors, and fellow nonprofits to produce and deliver 25,000 meals in less than a week, ensuring that firefighters and displaced families throughout the region got something nourishing while they continued to fight the fire or take stock of their losses.
But in doing so, both Mr. Andrés and I broke just about every rule in the nonprofit handbook. Neither of us had board approval for our actions (I know, I’m on the board of World Central Kitchen). Neither of us had budgeted funds — or any inkling of how we’d pay for the staff, meals, gas, and equipment we’d need to get the job done. We just knew something had to be done.
The disasters that required us to break the rules were born of nature, but nonprofits face unprecedented disasters every day because of the unrelenting political attacks from Washington. Now is not the time for routine but for resistance, rebellion, and, if required, rule breaking. And that’s why people like me want to break with the ranks of many nonprofit leaders and would have welcomed congressional repeal of the 63-year-old ban on charities engaging in partisan politics.
Right up to the last days of the tax debate, lawmakers seemed certain to end the prohibition, often called the Johnson Amendment. The big nonprofit associations and many scholars fought hard to keep the ban in place, and many of them had good reasons for doing so. But when so many of the rights and resources that represent the very fabric of modern American life are under threat, we need to ask ourselves what nonprofit political neutrality has actually achieved.
I would say it has done very little, given that national monuments, waterways, and Arctic preserves are under attack. So too are reproductive rights, net neutrality, funding for the arts, a free press, an unbiased judiciary, food-safety guidelines, Social Security, and Medicare.
The Risks
To be sure, lifting the ban on politics comes with risks.
Backers of the repeal pitched it as a way to free the voices of conservative churches, which understandably draws concern from many people about the separation of church and state. Moreover, there’s good reason to fear that an influx of dark money — undisclosed political contributions — would cause the public to lose trust in charities.
That said, it’s important to recognize that the Johnson Amendment was passed a scant 45 days after the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education.
The case was brought by Oliver Brown, who was a pastor of a Topeka church, and the NAACP to fight the separate but equal provision of Plessy v. Ferguson, a 1896 decision that codified racist voting restrictions, among countless other indignities, for more than half a century.
Coupled with the decades-long political role that liberal churches and synagogues had played in promoting organized labor, and then FDR’s New Deal — with its codified wage laws, Social Security provisions, and generous safety-net policies — it’s not hard to see why Lyndon Johnson, the majority leader of the then-conservative-leaning Democratic Party, wanted to silence a vocal, active, and proven ally for progressive policies. And for the Southern Dixiecrats who all but controlled Capitol Hill, that meant cracking down on black churches, the one place where African-Americans could gather to organize ways to protest voter disenfranchisement, strengthen their political clout, and run for office themselves.
Now the hard-won polices that civil-rights groups, labor unions, religious groups, and nonprofits found ways to fight for, both before and after the Johnson Amendment was put in place, could be dismantled by the Trump Administration and its Republican allies in Congress.
A Principled Stand
Given the inability of nonprofits to fend off the provisions in the new tax law that will hurt many of the people we serve, it’s time to ask whether we need some of the tools that helped business lobbyists push back many provisions they felt would hurt corporate America, so that we can fight with equal vigor and determination for our communities and causes.
The nonprofit world is far from homogenous, but it has many members, volunteers, and donors who bristle at draconian policies being passed or signed into law through executive orders that cripple communities for the benefit of a favored few.
Many people who work in front-line nonprofits across the country, often serving the most vulnerable, want to be able to speak out politically without worrying that their statements might be viewed as partisan — and jeopardize the tax status of their nonprofit organizations. This issue isn’t about taking dark money; it’s about taking a principled stand.
So let us fight in 2018 to repeal the limits on partisan politics and then get out and campaign for our causes and for candidates that will back us.
Some of us would use that newly obtained power to talk to our volunteers about the dangers we see on the horizon and ask them to build and lead political alliances that help elect new federal leaders.
Others might encourage their boards and donors to use their money, power, and influence to take a stand. Yet others might join with fellow nonprofits to hold candidate forums in which they compel people running for office to articulate detailed plans for how they would collaborate with charities to create jobs, attract resources, and bind communities together.
And for some, the newly legal freedom to speak out might allow us to muster the resources to actively campaign for candidates who respect the will of the people.
“There comes a time when silence is betrayal,” Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us.
All evidence suggests that nonprofits’ silence on partisan politics has indeed betrayed our sacred trust: to fight for our communities by any means necessary.
Some nonprofit leaders fight to “protect” us from politics. I want to fight against those who would roll back the hard-fought-for rights that we now see are all too easily taken away. I don’t begrudge them their fear of the unknown, but I cannot turn my eye from the reality that stares us in the face. Give me my rights; I can protect my own integrity.
Robert Egger is president of L.A. Kitchen.