A Hidden Government

by Tony West

It’s not part of the government. However, it runs for the most part on government money as it pursues important public missions. Yet its workers aren’t civil servants.

It’s a major employer, with 450 full-time employees. Scarcely a neighborhood in the city doesn’t see some of its activity. Yet you rarely encounter its name on the street.

That’s because the Greater Philadelphia Urban Affairs Coalition usually doesn’t act under its own name. You may know it instead as “Blueprint for a Safer Philadelphia”, “Gay & Lesbian Latino AIDS Education Initiative”, “Men United for a Better Philadelphia”, “West Philadelphia Tool Lending Library” – or any other of the 90-odd community action groups that take shelter under the GPUAC umbrella.

Collectively, GPUAC’s $41 million budget is as big as many a small suburban borough’s. But its entire mission is to sustain grass-roots activists.

This is based partly on philosophy. GPUAC stems from a merger between two groups, the Urban AffaIrs Coalition and the Greater Philadelphia Partnership that came into being during the civil-rights era from a belief many communities, particularly minorities were not well served by official government programs. Those communities wanted to develop their own structures for addressing urgent problems. Poverty and related issues such as health, education and employment were then, as they are today, central concerns of GPUAC.

It is also based on a reality of public services in the 21st century. The age of infinite expansion of government programs is over. Public goods and services are increasingly pursued by private nonprofit bodies. The public-private “partnership” model is how many new initiatives are launched these days.

Small is beautiful for these grass-roots groups – except when it hurts to be small. That’s where GPUAC comes in.

“We provide a robust fiscal and human resources arm for our partners,” explains Sharmain Matlock Turner, GPUAC’s president. Small groups can have trouble staying alive until government grant money rolls in, often months after their work has started. It can be hard for them to provide office space and salaries reliably – not to mention provide health coverage for their workers. “That can be tough for them,” notes Matlock Turner.

When the money does come in, that can create more problems. The average budget for a GPUAC program is $450,000. That’s a lot of money for a community group to handle and its members may not have the skill set to park the money safely and comply with the accounting that grantors impose on recipients. Here again, GPUAC can help.

So while you may know these community groups by a host of other names, it may well turn out their employees paychecks are cut by GPUAC; their rent checks may be cut by GPUAC; or perhaps their office space is in GPUAC’s building at 1207 Chestnut Street.

There’s a name for these services: “fiscal sponsorship”. This role, says GPUAC Vice President Lucy Kerman, “is the future of the nonprofit sector.”

The bulk of GPUAC expenditures, $26.5 million in 2007, underwrote community intervention and support. Economic development took another $3.2 million and employment training absorbed $2.6 million.

GPUAC is channeling a lot of funds into AIDS services these days, $2.5 million. Other health-care programs were allotted $800,000 in 2007.

Educational programming took up $2.6 million. Homelessness received $200,000.

GPUAC has established a solid track record of prudent fiscal management; that’s why it has been given so many grants to juggle. Its overall administrative and fundraising costs are only about 7% of its total budget, well within reason.

This is a simple outline of a fiscal sponsor’s work. GPUAC’s role in Philadelphia-area nonprofit planning actually goes far beyond merely cutting checks. Next week we shall take a look at some kinds of large public initiative GPUAC has tackled in recent years.