“Give us the dollars to do the work, and we will do the work”: Clark County nonprofits balance transparency with trust

Paul Burgess at times feels like he’s chasing his tail. When he became executive director of Fourth Plain Forward in 2022, he was the only employee. Since then, the nonprofit founded to energize the neighborhoods along Vancouver’s Fourth Plain corridor has grown to 11 full-time staff members.

With that expansion comes challenges: donor fatigue, budget restrictions and pressure to justify expenses essential to an organization’s operation but not directly connected to programs, also known as overhead.

Because they receive tax exemptions and rely on donations, nonprofit organizations such as Fourth Plain Forward must publicly report their finances, including salaries and expenses. As Fourth Plain Forward expands, Burgess has had to balance grants that come with restrictions with the organization’s overall stability. He believes transparency is important but so is trust.

“Give us the dollars to do the work, and we will do the work. We have the passion, the knowledge and understanding to do it,” Burgess said. “People see it (nonprofit work) as something you do out of the goodness of your heart, but … we’re as much a revenue-generating machine as a for-profit. It just so happens that that revenue goes into programmatic work that isn’t creating a profit. We’re always chasing our tail trying to find revenue.”

Fulfilling the mission

A big part of Fourth Plain Forward’s mission is to uplift Black, brown and Indigenous communities, as well as those with limited resources.

The organization, which formally registered as a nonprofit in 2018, was formed by six local agencies — the city of Vancouver, Clark County Public Health, Workforce Southwest Washington, Vancouver Public Schools, Vancouver Housing Authority and Evergreen Habitat for Humanity.

In 2021, the Community Foundation for Southwest Washington and the Cowlitz Tribe gave Fourth Plain Forward a three-year $450,000 grant.

The nonprofit is based at Fourth Plain Community Commons, which lies just east of Grand Boulevard. The mixed-use complex opened in September 2023. It’s owned by the city of Vancouver, which collaborated with the Vancouver Housing Authority on the project. The complex includes a commercial kitchen, office space and a common area, where Fourth Plain Forward hosts community events.

The organization also offers grant-writing services for other nonprofits, business and cooking incubators, as well as a program to train doulas, those who help mothers before, during and just after childbirth.

Since Burgess took over, he’s worked side by side with donors, community partners and state agencies to triple the size of the organization. Fourth Plain Forward’s 990 form filed with the IRS for 2022 shows annual revenue of $358,841 for that year, and reports Burgess received $89,769 in compensation.

Since then, the nonprofit has landed even more money. In August, the Washington State Department of Commerce awarded $1.39 million to Fourth Plain Forward as part of a statewide initiative to address wealth disparities and promote homeownership.

A portion of that money will be used to set up the nonprofit as a long-term lending agency, while the rest will be offered as loans to businesses led by people of color at lower interest rates than traditional financial institutions offer.

On the flip side, unrestricted grants and donations can go toward operational expenses, salaries and other overhead.

“There needs to be some leeway between restricted funds and unrestricted funds and the recognition that nonprofits need to have that flexibility within our funding to hire good staff, have decent computers and revamp our websites,” Burgess said. “If I have a strong team who knows what they’re doing, then the outcomes will be much better. You obviously need checks and balances, but the work gets done even better when we’re not constrained. There’s no need to restrict us.”

Southwest Washington Equity Coalition’s executive director, Siobhana McEwen, also understands the pressure on nonprofit leaders in Clark County. The coalition, which has three employees, works to bring the voices of communities of color into policy- and decision-making.

“I would encourage folks to consider supporting nonprofits through unrestricted donations,” McEwen said. “The organization tends to know what it needs more intimately than anyone else in the community. You can donate millions of dollars, but those funds come with a lot of strings attached and are very restricted and create, oftentimes, a nightmare for nonprofits.”

McEwen said the restriction of funding can also lead organizations to veer from their original missions because they’re chasing revenue.

“They have to pay their staff and keep the lights on, but they can’t get the funding to do it, and they drift further and further away from their mission in order to go after dollars that are available,” McEwen said. “It definitely creates a significant challenge for nonprofits as they try to figure out how to both meet a very severe need in the community, while also keeping their employees and their organizations healthy.”

Starvation cycle

Nonprofits across Washington serve and employ hundreds of thousands of people, according to the Nonprofit Association of Washington.

In 2021, 6,735 active 501(c)(3) nonprofits employed 235,118 people. Nonprofits make up 7.02 percent of the workforce of Washington.

Additionally, nonprofits paid $16 billion in wages and leveraged volunteer labor valued at approximately $4 billion in 2021, the association reported.

Still, nonprofits face similar challenges as the for-profit sector, including workforce shortages and high turnover rates.

Matt Morton, president of the Community Foundation for Southwest Washington, refers to it as the “nonprofit starvation cycle.”

“We continue to do more in the nonprofit sector with less,” Morton said. “Nonprofits are not immune to inflation and not immune to the cost-of-living increases.”

The foundation is a nonprofit itself but also a large funder of other organizations in Clark County. All of the organization’s grantmaking goes toward general operating support, as opposed to funding for a specific project or program.

Morton believes donors should lean on the expertise of the nonprofit sector, just as an investor in a private company would lean on the expertise of its leadership.

“When we do it that way, we see greater capacity to grow faster. We see greater innovation coming out of the nonprofit sector,” Morton said.

He and other nonprofit leaders said it’s important to open a conversation about charitable giving.

Part of advancing the nonprofit sector isn’t working alone in silos but coming together as a collective to make the biggest impact, Burgess said.

“Freeing the reins to enable organizations to do that,” he said, “is the way forward.”