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Did Barack Obama win the nonprofit sector vote? As varied as this loosely constructed sector might be, you could surmise that he won by a landslide among 501(c)(3)s, and maybe other “c” category nonprofits.

Now get ready for the dose of political and fiscal reality: Like every successful candidate who has ever run before him, President-Elect Obama cannot possibly fulfill every campaign pledge he has made. He and Vice President-Elect Joe Biden will be inheriting the problems left by a nightmarish administration, confronting recalcitrant opponents who have burrowed their ways from political appointees to protected civil service jobs, and facing an economic situation that has been characterized as a ‘’contained depression.’’

Based on the choices he might be compelled to make, Obama faces tough choices that some might see as having forsaken them -- or his campaign pledges. Those whose worship of Obama is akin to a rock star, will be particularly disheartened. Others know that this historic election in the midst of global economic turbulence plus the previous administration’s military adventurism means the start of some really hard work to make sure the Obama/Biden administration makes the choices our sector -- and our society need.

Start with the clear-eyed perspective of retired Boston University professor Howard Zinn, who told Real News (click here for story ) that he supported Barack Obama’s candidacy despite the often vague, middle-of-the-road, constituency-pleasing rhetoric of the campaign, but saw the need for a post-electoral activism:

“[E]ven though Obama doesn’t represent any fundamental change, he creates an opening for the possibility of change. That’s why I’m voting for him; that’s why I suggest to people that they vote for him. But I also suggest that Obama will not fulfill that potential for change unless he is enveloped by a social movement which is angry enough, powerful enough, insistent enough that he fill his abstract phrases about change, fill them with some real, solid content.”

What content do we want? And what choices will the incoming administration have to make?

The challenge that Zinn poses to President Obama is “guns or butter:” will Obama stick to his pledges to increase the U.S. presence in Afghanistan as a desultory repetition of the Soviet failure there and to expand the size and cost of the U.S. military, or will he devote the nation’s wealth, nationally and internationally, in a humanitarian rebuilding of distressed communities and societies? Tucked into that question we can discern questions directly relevant to the nonprofit sector. Will President Obama deliver on the implicit and explicit commitments he made that impact us as 501(c)(3)s?

1. Pressing for President Obama’s commitment to community service: In his campaign, Obama called for a massive expansion of the Corporation for National and Community Service programs and the creation of new ones, adding up to a community service corps of 250,000 participants. All well and good, but he said that that service expansion (and everything else in his program for nonprofits) would be financed by finding cost savings in the federal budget.

This plan will be paid for in part by canceling tax provisions that would otherwise help multinational corporations pay less in U.S. taxes starting in 2008 by reallocating tax deductions for interest expenses between income earned in the U.S. and income earned abroad. The rest of the plan will be funded using a small portion of the savings associated with ending the war in Iraq.’’ (http://obama.3cdn.net/3b3158f85f69a39217_hydpmvzbb.pdf)

The challenge: Everyone knows that the combination of the Bush Administration’s pre-2010 tax cuts plus an economy in the tank means less revenue in government coffers, hardly a surplus from which to prune waste and reprogram savings. Moreover, with Obama’s plans for expansion of the military by 65,000 additional Army soldiers and 27,000 Marines, investing in new production of drones and other military hardware, and even the “cost-effective” development of new missile defenses, it is difficult to see where the revenues will be in an Obama post-Iraq peace dividend.

The Obama commitment to community service will require a nonprofit sector ready to take action to press for the Obama expansion without its being held hostage to the incoming administration’s (or potentially Congressional Democrats’) unwillingness to make the choice of butter over guns.

2. Pressing for President Obama’s commitment to nonprofit R&D: The Obama campaign platform called for the creation of a “social investment fund” that would overcome the “disconnect between charitable foundations that can fund innovation and the organizations on the ground that can test new concepts and bring them to scale.” No question that the nonprofit sector needs R&D, but what kind—and is it for the nonprofit sector?

The challenge: There is a subtle but unmistakable direction by the authors of Obama’s platform toward the social enterprise sector, the not-so-nonprofit groups, in many cases for-profit. Many of Obama’s advisors on his platform are from the movement of social entrepreneurs, many of them an odd kind of entrepreneur that is massively funded by the federal government, often through less than competitive earmarks.

The new language describing the proposed fund omits nonprofits as a specific target: “Obama and Biden will create a Social Investment Fund Network to use federal seed money to leverage private sector funding to improve local innovation, test the impact of new ideas and expand successful programs to scale.” (http://www.barackobama.com/pdf/ObamaBlueprintForChange.pdf, p. 61; the original description of this Fund from the Obama campaign’s earlier version used nonprofits as example of a kind of recipient of these funds, cf. http://obama.3cdn.net/3b3158f85f69a39217_hydpmvzbb.pdf).

Although the language looks nonprofit, it’s not hard to see the direction as fitting into the conceptual juggernaut overtaking philanthropy, best articulated by a leading spokesperson for the trade association of foundations that philanthropy now views itself as “sector agnostic.” In other words, foundations, ostensibly dedicated to granting to and supporting the nonprofit sector, suggests that there is no preference for working with much less through nonprofits as the vehicle for delivering on their philanthropic mission.

With that perspective in mind, nonprofits are going to have to fight to make sure that the Obama Administration’s social investment fund invests in nonprofits as opposed to becoming a Small Business Administration for nonprofits with smiley faces.

3. Pressing for Obama’s promise neighborhoods: Like every incoming administration, the Obama Administration has a targeted neighborhood strategy in mind. Unlike “enterprise” or “empowerment’’ zones in the past, this one will be “promise neighborhoods,” modeled on the highly publicized Harlem Children’s Zone programs. The description of how communities might become a Promise Neighborhood sounds like an empowerment zone with a heavy veneer of kids programming:

“The sites for Promise Neighborhoods will be selected by the federal government after review of applications from cities in conjunction with their existing non-profit social service organizations and school districts. Prior to implementation of the Promise Neighborhoods, a comprehensive long-term business plan will be developed with neighborhood residents, local community organizations, local business, school districts, city and state governments, and economic development researchers. The plan will then be adopted by consensus from community stakeholders and gradually scaled up to ensure success in every program component. Individual cities, or private entities, will be required to pay for 50% of the costs of the program.” (http://www.barackobama.com/pdf/UrbanPovertyOverview.pdf)

The challenge: Bringing 20 promise neighborhoods to fruition is no small undertaking in an environment of reduced federal revenues, even if the Bush tax cuts are eventually discarded as they should be. Where will the local government matches come from?

With state and local government revenues taking it on the chin, the Obama Administration had better be ready to press philanthropy to take up a role here -- the way philanthropy promised to, but frequently did not in the Empowerment Zone program. The performance of foundations in programs such as the Clinton era EZ program was pretty poor, many foundations running for the hills when they realized that it meant dealing with local political types (the EZ commitments of foundations in Detroit and Atlanta are among the notable exceptions to this history).

The foundations’ own HCZ-like programs, Comprehensive Community Initiatives, have a spotty history. President Obama is going to have to use his bully pulpit to leverage and mobilize foundation dollars to make replications of the Harlem Children’s Zone work.

4. Pressing Obama on universal health care and higher education: Obama’s proposed health care plan would be among he most significant societal advances that his administration could possibly undertake -- and hopefully achieve. The National Health Insurance Exchange will offer coverage for all Americans at a cost that they can hopefully afford. For higher education, the Obama platform would create the fully refundable American Opportunity Tax Credit, one of a number of tax credit proposals in the Obama plan.

The challenge: As much as health care and higher ed need to be fixed to work for the broad mass of poor and working Americans, the underlying institutional providers constitute a problem to be remedied.

As hearings on Capitol Hill have shown, a good slice of purportedly nonprofit hospitals don’t do much more than their for-profit counterparts in terms of charity care for the truly indigent -- though the hearings prompted one of the more muscular nonprofit lobbying efforts in history by health care providers.

Congressional attention to university endowments has revealed the same, that many universities sit on huge tax exempt endowments which could be easily mobilized to do more to make higher education more accessible to a broader range of American families and less of a self-serving indulgence to the youthful scions of the wealthy.

Since the puny proportions of hospital revenues dedicated to charity care have been well documented, some facts on universities help make the point.

In 2007, the Congressional Research Service calculated the 2006 tax exempt endowment value (not other assets) of nonprofit universities at $340 billion, presumably players like Harvard and other Ivies, Duke, and Stanford accounting for the lion’s share. That year, those endowments grew by 15.3 percent but the universities’ payout (spending) rate was only 4.6 percent -- at the same time that the universities hiked tuition costs. Remember that many of these entities earned their investment returns in off-shore investments (for Duke, approximately 75 percent of its hedge fund investments are off-shore) (http://finance.senate.gov/hearings/testimony/2007test/092607testjg.pdf).

Their endowments, like foundations’, have sunk in this freefall national recession, but these endowed institutions are a heck of a lot better resourced than the vast majority of the nation’s 501(c)(3) nonprofits with puny revenues and minuscule fund balances. President Obama would be well advised to make sure that we get nonprofit hospitals and universities to stop sitting on their assets and deploy the revenues to incentivize more support for the poor and disadvantaged.

5. Pressing for a national commitment to fight poverty: On the campaign circuit, candidates only talk about the “middle class,” sometimes venturing into working families that can’t make ends meet, but rarely if ever raising the “p-word” about the 37 million families below the artificially low federal poverty level. President Obama’s platform called for green jobs, transitional jobs, expanded Earned Income Tax Credit supports, raising the minimum wage to a hardly nose-bleeding $9.50 an hour by 2011, and funneling new funding to urban and rural job-creating entrepreneurs.

The challenge: In the middle of a contained economic depression, the Obama Administration faces a situation a lot more difficult than 37 million poor Americans. With rampant, cascading job layoffs and mortgage foreclosures bursting through the subprime market into conventional mortgages, the poverty challenge left to Obama might well take us back to the days of Michael Harrington’s The Other America. Harrington’s book propelled the administration of John F. Kennedy to make the fight against poverty everyone’s business. In philanthropy, it led to innovations by the Ford Foundations and others that gave rise to the best elements of community action programs and community development corporations.

Just recently, the Metropolitan Policy Program of the Brookings Institution and the Community Affairs Offices of the Federal Reserve System released The Enduring Challenge of Concentrated Poverty in the U.S. (http://www.frbsf.org/cpreport/docs/cp_fullreport.pdf), a compilation of 16 urban and rural case studies. This report could be a bit of a wake-up call to our all too insensate nation that there are challenges faced by people other than the “working poor,” that in too many communities, the poor face a combination of problems in employment, education, social structure, and isolation that are frequently not the first policy priority of middle class-focused political campaigners.

The Brookings/Federal Reserve study perhaps unintentionally reveals something very important, that the most important resources being delivered to the residents of communities of concentrated poverty critically depend on the presence and financial stability of nonprofit CDCs, service providers, and faith-based organizations.

Often that anti-poverty work is carried out not by big Washington think-tanks, but by smaller, community-based nonprofits. One would hope that the new president would remember non-platform commitments such as revitalizing, relaunching, and, hopefully, depoliticizing a White House program to work with faith-based nonprofits. Hopefully, they can learn from what the legit players in the Bush Administration’s faith-based program actually did do to serve the nation’s poor, despite the former president’s often overtly manipulative, partisan funding decisions. Perhaps he might remember his endorsement of legislation that would rectify the mileage reimbursement imbalance that harms nonprofit volunteers, often the providers of basic services to the poor such as meals, health care, and other supports.

For all the big name social entrepreneurs out there, it is the tried and true community-based nonprofits, often sneeringly dismissed by the think tanks as “alms-givers,” that are on the front lines of the nonprofit delivery system combating poverty. Supporting those community-based nonprofits and the infrastructure that undergirds them should be crucial to an Obama anti-poverty agenda.

President Obama and his Congressional colleagues have to ratchet poverty up on the national agenda, uncloaked behind euphemisms of focusing on helping the middle class.

The nonprofit sector has to be the new president’s ally in galvanizing the nation’s attention to the burgeoning poverty in our midst. That has to include rethinking what the nation is doing with its charitable expenditures, a huge proportion of which don’t reach much less benefit the poor. The unfortunate reality as members of Congress such as Xavier Becerra have recognized is that much of charitable giving goes to nonprofits that serve the economic interests of the givers. In many cases, the best targeted charitable giving for programs addressing the needs of poor and working families comes from the poor and working class, a demonstration in practice of the biblical parable of the widow’s mite.

If nonprofits really want to mobilize about social change, they will have to press President Obama to remember the multiplicity of his campaign commitments -- and the nonprofit sector that believes in social change will have to live its message. When Obama and Biden take office on January 20, 2009, our work will have only just begun.

In addition to the American Opportunity Tax Credit are the Small Business Health Care Tax Credit (new), the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (expanded), the Tax Credit for Purchasing Advanced Vehicles (new), the Universal Mortgage Credit for nonitemizers (new), the Research and Development tax credit (made permanent), and the Making Work Pay tax credit (new).

1 In addition to the American Opportunity Tax Credit are the Small Business Health Care Tax Credit (new), the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (expanded), the Tax Credit for Purchasing Advanced Vehicles (new), the Universal Mortgage Credit for nonitemizers (new), the Research and Development tax credit (made permanent), and the Making Work Pay tax credit (new).

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Rick Cohen is the former executive director of the National Committee For Responsive Philanthropy in Washington, D.C. His email address is cohenreport@npqmag.org and the Web site for the Cohen Report e-newsletter is http://www.nonprofitquarterly.org/cohenreport/