Advocacy is a broad concept encompassing all the strategies and communications that advance a nonprofit’s mission. To help your nonprofit strengthen its advocacy, the Center is offering a three-part webinar series to equip nonprofit leaders with a better understanding of and concrete tools to be more effective advocates for your missions. Join us beginning August 16 to define your nonprofit’s goals, audiences, and resources as you develop your advocacy strategies and tactics; study proven narratives and practical storytelling tools; and identify and track the data that supports the need for your organization’s programs. Register for the full series or individual webinars. We especially encourage staff, board, volunteers, and leaders from lower-resourced, rural, BIPOC-led, and new (less than two years old) nonprofit organizations to attend. Learn more and register.

Earlier this year, the Center sent a candidate questionnaire on nonprofit issues to all North Carolina candidates for Congress and the NC General Assembly. The questionnaire is intended to help nonprofit leaders learn more about the candidates on their ballots in the 2022 election and also to help candidates have a better awareness of the work of nonprofits. This week, the Center posted a clickable 100-county map on its website to help you find the responses from candidates in your county (note: you may need to disable popups on your web browser to see candidates’ responses).

With early voting for the 2022 general election less than three months away, now is the time to encourage more candidates to complete the questionnaire. Your local candidates for office are more likely to respond to the questionnaire if they hear from you rather than from the Center. Please take a few minutes in the next week to reach out to your local candidates to ask them to complete the questionnaire.

 

We recommend that you reach out to candidates running for office in the county where your organization is based. Please make sure you reach out to all candidates running to serve the county or geographic area you serve. This both increases the chances we will hear back from everyone and demonstrates that you are not favoring any candidates or political parties. To make it easy for you, the Center has:

Over the past 19 months, the NC General Assembly has taken action on dozens of bills affecting the work of nonprofits. Now that the lawmakers are (mostly) done with their legislative work for the 2021-22 session, the Center has prepared a summary of legislation of interest to charitable nonprofits.

This summer, both the NC Senate (H.B. 149) and the NC House of Representatives (S.408) passed legislation to expand Medicaid coverage to adults with incomes up to 133% of the federal poverty level. Medicaid expansion would provide health coverage for about 600,000 North Carolinians whose incomes are too much to qualify for Medicaid currently but not enough to receive health care subsidies in the Affordable Care Act health marketplace. Unfortunately, North Carolina still hasn’t enacted Medicaid expansion because of disagreement between the House and Senate on whether the legislation should include other major health care policy provisions, including changes to the state’s certificate of need laws and a version the SAVE Act that would enable more nurses to provide services without supervision by a physician.

As we explained in a recent Care4Carolina blog post, the Center strongly supports Medicaid expansion because it would support the work of charitable nonprofits in three ways:

The Center continues to work with our partners to advocate for legislators to come to an agreement and pass Medicaid expansion this year.

On Wednesday, U.S. Senate Democrats released their plans for the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, a domestic spending bill intended to reduce the federal deficit, combat climate change, and decrease healthcare costs for people with Affordable Care Act health insurance subsidies. Because Congress plans to use the budget reconciliation process for the Inflation Reduction Act, it only needs a simple majority vote in both the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives, meaning it can pass with only Democrats in Congress voting for it. The bill could help nonprofits in three ways:

The new Senate bill does not include many of the provisions in the $1.7 billion Build Back Better legislation that the U.S. House of Representatives passed last November. That bill, which was the House’s plan for a budget reconciliation bill, also would have included other nonprofit priorities like continuing the expanded Child Tax Credit, investing significant federal support in child care and early childhood programs, providing more funding for national service programs, and supporting new and expanded affordable housing programs. It appears unlikely that Congress will fund these investments this year.

The Senate could vote on the Inflation Reduction Act as soon as next week, and President Joe Biden has already expressed his support for the bill.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Education published a formal notice of proposed rulemaking to address student loan forgiveness and affordability issues. The rules propose making permanent some, but not all, of the relaxed eligibility terms in the temporary Limited PSLF Waiver that is set to expire on October 31. Key provisions include:

To help you better understand the proposed rules and how they would affect nonprofits and nonprofit employees, the National Council of Nonprofits has prepared a helpful chart highlighting the key provisions in the proposed rules. The rules are open for public comment through August 12.

This fall, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) plans to release new proposed regulations on the salary threshold under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Currently, FLSA requires employers, including nonprofits, to pay their employees at least $7.25 per hour and to pay employees one-and-one-half times their regular rate of pay when they work more than 40 hours in a workweek. Employees are exempt from the FLSA overtime pay requirement if they:

It is important for nonprofits to regularly review their employees’ job descriptions to see whether they meet the criteria for one of these three duties tests. Unfortunately for nonprofits, the DOL guidance on the three duties tests often focuses on typical for-profit positions and doesn’t provide analysis of nonprofit positions (e.g., the guidance isn’t clear on whether certain fundraising/development jobs or volunteer management positions meet one of the duties tests). The new regulations are a chance to fix this issue and provide clearer guidance for nonprofits. The Center and our national partners have reached out to DOL to raise this issue, and we are seeking your help in identifying positions at your nonprofit that don’t fit clearly within the existing guidance for administrative, executive, or professional employees. Let us know some examples of positions at your nonprofit for which it would be helpful to have clarity from DOL about whether they meet the duties tests for FLSA exemption.

One of the easiest ways nonprofits can help promote elections is by giving your staff paid time off to vote during Early Voting or on Election Day. To help ensure that nonprofits show leadership when it comes to empowering the millions who work daily to create a more equitable society, Nonprofit VOTE, the National Council of Nonprofits, and several other national organizations have launched the Nonprofit Staff Vote campaign.

The Center has proudly signed on to the Nonprofit Staff Vote campaign, and we encourage your nonprofit to join also. To model best practices, the Center is sharing its policy (below) allowing staff to take time off to vote or to volunteer as nonpartisan poll workers. Feel free to borrow this language and adapt it to fit into your organization’s personnel policies.

The Center provides Nonprofit Policy Update each week as a benefit to its nonprofit members. However, to help all North Carolina nonprofits respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, we're temporarily providing this newsletter to non-member nonprofits. Don’t miss out – become a member to ensure you continue receiving these updates along with many other valuable benefits.