Through the Lens of the NGO
Public policy, as defined by Susan Carter (2011), refers to “decisions taken concerning the selection of goals for society and the means of achieving them” (p. 428). These decisions are based on approaches formed and agreed upon by governments to address problems through explicit (i.e. introducing legislation or regulation) or implicit (maintaining the status quo) choices.
Yet there remain important actors and stakeholders outside the government that are key to the success of an initiative by focusing on aspects of the decisions overlooked by the larger institutions. The perspective of non-profit organizations is highlighted in the SPPG-intensive course PPPG2013: Making an Impact from Outside, that I currently have the pleasure of taking in my last semester at the School.
In the first class, we were faced with the challenge of defining “community”, “impact” and “community-based policy-making”. While appearing simple at the beginning, the task proved to be quite a challenge for the group of master’s students in coming to a clean and clear definitions for all three.
Could the challenge in defining “community-based policy-making” be related to the enormity and potential of what a non-profit organization can be and what the voluntary sector can represent? While a lot of my prior experience involved work at non-profit organizations in Winnipeg’s arts and culture sphere, this is only one sector of the types of work done by non-profits. As Susan Phillips notes, the array of policy fields in which a non-profit can be implemented include education and research, health, international development, and universities and colleges to name a few. This allows for important, under-voiced messages and perspectives from a specific community to make its way to the policy discussion.
The definition of “impact”, in which something of tangible, noticeable, positive or negative change, could also be related to the realty that many community-based NGO’s are faced with. As ethereal as I may have made the above paragraph sound, the reality and numbers sometimes paint a more solemn picture of the issues of funding surrounding these organizations. Two-thirds of non-profits in Canada have annual revenues below $100,000 and are comprised solely of volunteers (Phillips, 2007). As a result, many non-profits may not have the capacity to engage directly in policy as actively as they want and achieve that “impact”. For instance, in 2007, only 16% of provincial and national health organizations had staff devoted to government relations or the development of policy (Phillips, 2007).
However, regardless of definitions we may settle upon, this course aims to highlight the importance of NGO’s and the impact that they can have on shaping both policy and the community it engages. Take the Lake Ontario Waterkeeper as an example. With the City of Toronto only measuring the water quality of 11 beaches along the vast waterfront, this NGO provides an important service informing the community of the state of Toronto’s harbour water quality. In this way Lake Ontario Waterkeeper hopes to shape water quality policies in the area. By the course’s end, we will have a greater perspective of “community-based policy-making” in which NGO’s play an integral role.
