Three months after Donald Trump began his second term as president, change was being felt at the Talbot-Bernard senior housing development in Dorchester. It was just one more spot in a flooded zone of funding and policy shifts under the new administration, many of them aimed at programs and services provided by community-based organizations (CBOs) around the country.
Built in 2003 and developed by the nonprofit Codman Square Neighborhood Development Corporation (NDC), the 31 units of supportive affordable housing on Talbot Avenue had been approved last November for a $750,000 federal grant to install an energy recovery ventilator (ERV) system.
The goal was to improve air quality for residents while saving money and energy needed for heating and cooling. But, in April, the NDC’s executive director, Gail Latimore, reported that the project was “on hold,” with funding “paused and under threat of elimination.”
She explained in an email that “given that a number of seniors in the building have chronic health issues (like asthma, heart disease, etc.), delaying installation of an ERV system that will help bring fresh air into the building, while preserving energy, has negative implications for their health, as well as for operating costs.”
In March, the Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation, a nonprofit based in Dorchester’s Uphams Corner, had already posted an alert about an order by the Trump Administration to eliminate the Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Fund. The order’s stated purpose was to reduce “unnecessary” elements of federal bureaucracy and make “cuts to woke programs” that were “abused to advance a partisan agenda,” in this case, “ ‘racial justice’ against a ‘white monopoly on capital.’ ”
In an email, the EDC’s CEO, Kimberly R. Lyle, described the action differently: As “devastating cuts” that “would “reduce the capital and capacity-building support available to community-based lenders who finance the kinds of small businesses that make neighborhoods like Dorchester vibrant—family-owned restaurants, nail salons, childcare providers, neighborhood bars, and other local anchors.”
She also noted, “These businesses don’t always fit traditional lending models, but they are essential to local economies and job creation and Dorchester Bay is going to continue betting on them.”
In addition to federal budget cuts, Emily Haber, the president and CEO of the Massachusetts Association of Community Development Corporations (CDCs), reported concern among affordable housing tenants about immigration enforcement, as well as the added costs that new tariffs would impose on production of new units.
“It is already phenomenally expensive to build affordable housing in Massachusetts,” she wrote in an email, “and the tariffs are likely to be crippling. At least one CDC already reported that their general contractor is changing the language in their contract to shift most of the tariff risk to the CDC.”
Before the end of April, new federal policies had triggered concern in another part of the nonprofit sector, with seven community health centers in Dorchester, Mattapan, and South Boston calling possible Medicaid funding cuts a “serious threat” to patients.
On May 9, the nonprofit grocery chain, Daily Table, announced the closing of its four remaining stores, one of them near Codman Square. Among the financial challenges cited in the chain’s announcement was “the current uncertain and difficult funding environment.”
The Trump administration has called for cutting nutrition benefits by $230 billion over ten years, though the move has met with resistance, even from Republican leaders in both chambers of Congress.
On May 5, the Boston Foundation (TBF) was another flooded zone, mainly filled with nonprofit leaders and staff members. They were on hand to discuss a survey of the state’s nonprofits by MassINC Polling Group that reported “near-universal pessimism” about the effect of Trump policies on the organizations and their communities. The survey was done in conjunction with TBF and the Massachusetts Nonprofit Network (MNN).
According to TBF, the event drew a “record” turnout of almost 1,200 registrants, in-person or online. In opening remarks, TBF President and CEO Lee Pelton asserted that “community, as it always does, will triumph over chaos,” but he was sharply critical of new federal actions.
“Our convening and shared purpose,” he said, “is in sharp contrast with the federal administration that is, at its core, mean-spirited, dreadfully callous, uncaring and downright cruel.”
According to the MassINC Polling Group survey of more than 500 nonprofits, 58 percent reported getting federal funding and said that they expected cuts. Some also reported new difficulties with delivering services. According to the polling group’s research director, Zayna Basma-Doyle, one respondent said, “Our current clients are already afraid to meet their volunteer tutors in public. They’re canceling sessions more frequently due to fear. We fear our numbers of new clients will decline.”
In a panel discussion after summary of the polling results, the executive director of the civic engagement nonprofit Massachusetts Voter Table, Shanique Rodriguez related, “We just heard from one of our partners, who do work in the immigrant workers space, that workers are not coming to meetings anymore because they’re scared. And that impacts not only your organizations, but also community as well, because these are workers who need to be aware of all of the things that are happening in communities and all of the policies that might be impacting them as workers. And this is not to say that this is just around undocumented folks.”
The polling group’s president, Steve Koczela, stressed that the survey had been conducted in February and March, before some of the administration’s actions had taken place. “What sticks out is that among those who do receive federal funding,” he observed, “you’re up to 95 percent who think that their work will be made harder. But, even among those who don’t, you still have 83 percent saying that they think that their work’s going to get harder, with just about half saying that they think it’s going to get much harder.”
In addition to funding cuts, the Trump Administration has also issued orders to eliminate “discrimination” through Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs and policies. The orders would apply to government agencies and funding recipients, but also to possible legal actions against the nonprofit foundations and even the private sector businesses. According to the Wall Street Journal, this has already prompted leading private foundations to consider how they should protect their tax-exempt status, which had recently been threatened by the administration for Harvard University. As early as 2021, that action had been recommended by the current vice president, JD Vance, who denounced “big foundations” and Harvard as “social justice hedge funds.”
A February order from Trump called for review of current funding of “nongovernmental organizations” (NGOs) and for future funding to be aligned with administration goals and priorities, including elimination of DEI and environmental justice initiatives. As Arnold & Porter, a leading national law firm based in Washington, D.C., advised on its website, “From a purely financial perspective, this review process could have a substantial impact on the operations and programming of tax-exempt organizations that rely on federal grants.”
Another panelist at TBF’s event, Diane Yentel, the president and CEO of the National Council of Nonprofits, connected the difficulties faced by local groups to the larger shift in powers between sectors spearheaded by the Trump Administration.
“The greatest existential threat that we face in this moment, and where all of these individual threats are coming from, is that this administration is pulling from an authoritarian playbook to suppress civil society,” she warned. “And one of the key ways that they’re doing that very purposefully in a really coordinated way is to vilify nonprofit organizations as an enemy to be fought. And the language and the rhetoric around this kind of narrative is dangerous, and it’s increasingly violent and it’s increasingly threatening.
And, for leaders in this space and nonprofit leaders that are speaking out, which we all have to do in this moment to protect democracy, there are real immediate threats to them.”
Social service nonprofits in Boston go back at least as far as the late 19th century, with settlement houses to meet the needs of immigrants and the other populations drawn to cities by job growth. For many of their constituents, the entry to civic engagement was typically through labor unions or a political clubhouse controlled by a local power broker.
In the 1960s, public funding played a larger role when nonprofits, increasingly spurred by grassroots activism, became vehicles for federal initiatives such as the “War on Poverty” under President Lyndon B. Johnson, which led to Boston’s “Model Cities” program in 1966. But, four years earlier, the Ford Foundation and the philanthropic predecessor of TBF were already supporting the “human renewal” efforts started by the nonprofit Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD).
By the end of the 20th century, some anti-poverty programs were counted as successful, while others were criticized, whether for outcomes, insufficient funding, or friction between nonprofit groups and local officials. In the 2000 book “Comeback Cities,” co-authors Tony Proscio and Paul Grogan—the latter Pelton’s predecessor at TBF—hailed the later emergence of nonprofits that were less confrontational and more focused on outcomes.
According to Grogan and Proscio, the newer groups were less susceptible to “enterprising demagogues,” yet more productive than “do-nothing patronage groups” directly controlled by elected officials. Thanks to the Community Reinvestment Act—to remedy past discrimination by lenders—and new tax incentives, nonprofit status could also be used by the 1980s to leverage more private capital for housing and economic development in areas struggling to recover from disinvestment.
According to the authors, Boston’s CDCs evolved into “part of a more organized industry,” collaborating with government, business, and other nonprofit groups. “In addition to becoming the primary producer of affordable housing in the Boston area for two decades and counting,” they wrote, “Boston CDCs changed the face of historically rough neighborhoods, particularly Dorchester, Roxbury, and Jamaica Plain.”
Over the same period, the stance of Boston’s city government toward nonprofits became more collaborative under Mayor Ray Flynn, who pressured the Boston Redevelopment Authority into ceding some of its land use powers to the recently organized Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative.
His successor, Tom Menino, affirmed the power of partnerships at multiple ribbon-cuttings. And, in 2014, the next mayor, Marty Walsh, enlisted Boston as one of the Rockefeller Foundation’s “100 Resilient Cities,” embracing goals to help withstand the stress of climate change and growing inequality—as well as the trauma from the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.
In a 2017 video clip, Walsh proclaimed “a commitment to keeping equity at the top of the agenda in everything that we do.” In messaging that narrowed the distance between governmental policy and nonprofit mission statement, he went on to say that “we put racial equity at the heart of our resiliency plan.”
In the same presentation, the city’s chief resilience officer at the time, Dr. Atyia Martin, elaborated: “We are focused on equity because persistent racial inequality not only undermines our collective ability to withstand shocks; it is by itself a slow-moving catastrophe in too many of our communities.”
Less than three years later, after the outbreak of Covid-19, Walsh tapped cross-sector relationships when he established a “resiliency fund” that would raise $34.6 million in money for pandemic relief. But Claire Dunning, a historian and associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, warned that the alliance of nonprofits, donors, and government that could expand the public safety net came at the price of increased reliance on private funders, especially for nonprofit overhead.
In the March issue of the online journal, “Vital City,” Dunning contended, “The inadequacy of government grants positions elite donors as the ultimate arbiters of need and priority. Such deference to private funders is a particular concern given the racialization of wealth and poverty in the United States.”
In “Constructing Community,” a 2021 book on the role of CBOs and funders advancing projects along the Fairmount/Indigo Corridor, Jeremy R. Levine examined the mix of agendas and outcomes in parts of Dorchester, Mattapan, and Hyde Park. The book draws on meetings in the neighborhoods and at TBF, a leading supporter of the projects in what its 2014 annual report hailed as a “corridor of promise” for making “vibrant places.”
Though the projects boosted public transportation access and affordable housing development, residents in the corridor also faced new displacement pressures. As the book relates, the decision-making process revealed differences between CBOs and neighborhood residents, as well as elected officials—all in some way claiming to represent the community.
“The history of the growth of the nonprofit sector was, in practice, about creating a whole layer of formal organizations so that constituencies did NOT act as political agents on their own behalf,” Levine maintained in a recent email response. He also distinguished between the more specialized missions of individual CBOs and the varied needs of local residents, which could be jointly addressed by an elected official.
At the TBF convening, Rodriguez, pointed to one more divergence: between the state’s BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) populations and the Democratic Party’s liberal-progressive leadership and funders. In Boston and other cities, election results and surveys suggested that even populations with common economic interests could be sharply split by cultural or demographic identities.
“What we have seen out of the last election is a shift in ideology in many voters, even voters in BIPOC communities, against ‘blue’ ideologies, if you will,” said Rodriguez. “I think that we spend a lot of time pooling our funds into political parties, instead of into people, into movements, and into organizations, who are actually doing the boots-on-the-ground work, who are not doing transactional relationships with folks.”
Levine traces the divide to an even earlier time, when CBOs functioned as a proxy for constituents and, like elected officials, were a form of representation that didn’t always match individual sentiments.
“CBOs flourished to fill a void caused by poverty and weak local government,” he wrote. “Poor neighborhoods were not having their interests represented and were losing out on public resources. And so formalized nonprofit organizations subsumed those responsibilities, but in effect took them away from the very constituencies they represent. And because, on the whole, they aren’t especially well funded themselves, they are set up for failure and will have a difficult time providing all the necessary resources even under the best examples of ‘good’ representation.”
In a May 6 Op-Ed for the center-right American Enterprise Institute, its nonresident senior fellow, Daniel Stid, described a built-in tension between nonprofit independence and reliance on government funding that could become more strained by increasing political division. Policy splits have long applied to large foundations, with groups advancing rightwing agendas viewing current actions against “woke” nonprofits as a legitimate consequence of democracy in the 2024 election.
“The bipartisan consensus and inter-branch commitments that sustained federal funding of nonprofits across a range of domains have eroded and, in many cases, collapsed. They are not coming back anytime soon,” Stid concluded. “Indeed, the growing fiscal pressure on the federal government, destined to be increased by Trump Administration policies, will only tighten the budget squeeze.”
Like Levine, Dunning drew attention to the continued reliance on private sector support—by nonprofits and local officials, after decades of waning support from federal sources.
That dynamic will most likely expand under a second Trump Administration,” she wrote. “The immediate chaos of the attempt to freeze all federal grants may have passed, but the grant-in-aid system is clearly in the administration’s sights. Whatever the next action is, nonprofits and communities together will feel the brunt of government budget cuts.
A reliance on private donors will become all the more important for organizational survival and all the more troubling as a means of meeting the needs of urban residents. What an antidemocratic means of democratic governance.”