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To say the past three years have been difficult for the Minnesota nonprofit sector, and every Minnesotan, would be an understatement. In times of crisis, nonprofits are often on the front lines helping our neighbors in need. And when the crises continue year after year, nonprofits continue to work to provide Minnesotans with the food, housing and medications they need, while simultaneously ensuring the most vulnerable are protected.
Nonprofits not only provide these essential community services, they also employ 14% of the state's workforce and help to drive their local economies.
As leaders in the nonprofit and philanthropic sector, we are grateful we could step up for our communities when they needed us — and we want to continue to be there for our neighbors. Years of pandemic response have left organizations overextended and under-resourced as needs increase. Inflation aggravates this already difficult situation, resulting in a nationwide dip in individual giving compared with 2020 and 2021.
Additionally, a number of recent incidents, most notably fraudulent activity discovered in the organization Feeding Our Future, have raised public concerns regarding the integrity of the nonprofit sector. Together, we offer a set of perspectives as we approach a critical moment in the calendar for our sector, the year-end giving season:
First, it is important to note that the set of circumstances represented by Feeding Our Future and its affiliates, while disturbing and worthy of thorough investigation, is an anomaly in the world of Minnesota state grants and nonprofits, which overall are well documented to be scrupulous in their performance and use of funds. (While federal exemptions eased the typically stringent rules and oversight during the height of the pandemic, those standards have since returned to pre-pandemic levels in Minnesota.)
In fact, the nonprofit sector is uniquely accountable and transparent in its financial activities and is required to comply with the numerous regulations and agencies that guarantee oversight, accountability and transparency (such as publicly available annual tax filings through the Minnesota Attorney General's Office and the IRS, functioning boards of directors, etc.). Feeding Our Future lacked in all these areas of compliance to operate as a charity in Minnesota.
