Framework for Democracy
Role of Non-profits (continued)
John W. Gardner |
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Accountability Finally, the nonprofit sector holds government officials accountable for their actions and also provides new ideas that keep our democracy fresh and vital. In the following excerpt, as referenced in the Scholars' View essay on the Learning to Give web site, Dr. Gardener comments the government accountability that is provided within the nonprofit sector. “Government bureaucracies are simply not constructed to permit the emergence of countless new ideas, and even less suited to winnowing out of bad ideas. In the nonprofit sector someone with a new idea or program may well find the few followers necessary to nurse it to maturity. Virtually every significant social idea of the past century in this country has been nurtured in the nonprofit sector.” In this quotation, Dr. Gardner elaborates on this subject. He is responding to an inquiry of how citizens can hold power accountable. "First of all by voting. But, by joining like-minded citizens. The environmentalists have done an astonishing job. Whether or not you agree with everything they've done, they've done an amazing job of joining together to gain political power to get their points across. And that's how we got the vote for women in 1920 and that's how we got civil rights; the citizens joining together and acting together. None of those movements could imaginably have been hatched in the bureaucracy. And I respect the bureaucracy; I respect government; I respect government agencies. After all, I was the head of an agency with a very large number of employees, well over 100,000 employees. But you can't imagine the Civil Rights Movement being hatched in a government agency, nor the women's movements. National Parks, the Pure Food and Drug Laws, they came out of citizens, banning together." Also quoted in the Scholars' View essay is Waldemar Nielsen, a well-known expert on the nonprofit sector. “...the ultimate contribution (of the sector) (is) what it does to ensure the continuing responsiveness, creativity and self-renewal of our democratic society.”
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The sector that is variously called the nonprofit, independent, charitable, tax exempt, voluntary sector of our society is vital to the existence and the well-being of our democratic form of government.