Independent Sector

Community building:at the heart of Independent Sector's work to create a healthy and racially equitable nation where all people can thrive, is our belief in the transformational power of building and sustaining community. Through intentional and targeted strategies, Independent Sector builds a sense of community among leaders, provides opportunities to build capacity, and strengthens bridges and trusted relationships to ensure leaders, organizations, and communities are aligned toward a healthy and equitable future. With health safety in mind, our engagement with our is community in 2022 continued to be primarily through a virtual environment. Nevertheless, we maintained and deepened our connections with changemakers across the country, engaging more than 2,200 changemakers through a variety of options, including upswell pop-ups and exchanges, and our fellowships. Following are highlights of our community building work this year: is hosted three upswell pop-ups attended by about 1,000 changemakers. Each pop-up focused on key conversations that are imperative to creating a racially just nation. Each emphasized the wellbeing and self-care of changemakers and communities; bridging differences toward justice and belonging; and transforming and changing systems through advocacy and narrative change. New in 2022, we included upswell exchanges as part of our upswell pop-ups to give changemakers the opportunity to unpack immediately what they heard during pop-up presentations, share their thoughts, and connect through deeper relationships with one another. Independent Sector brought together more than 1,000 changemakers from across the nation for our final virtual upswell summit to focus on our collective mission: building a healthy and racially just nation. Planning is underway for an in-person upswell summit in dallas/ft. Worth in november 2023 including securing the hotel and confirming several supporting funders. Independent Sector redesigned our fellows programming with a primary focus on strengthening the sense of community among changemakers. The updated program enables participating fellows to expand their networks, gain new knowledge, contribute their perspectives, and instill a renewed commitment to serving their communities. They connect with changemakers from across the country, learn from each other, gain new tools and skills to accelerate their work in their organizations and communities, and share knowledge and thought leadership to advance a healthy and equitable civil society. We also launched our alumni community of over 300 leaders from the charitable Sector, who meet monthly to connect, receive tools, and share knowledge. Is also initiated our inaugural bridging fellows program. This two-year program brings together 40 fellows from pittsburgh, dallas and chicago to socialize and embed bridging as a core competency in their organizations and communities. The program focuses on specific areas of societal division, including ideological, racial, socioeconomic, and geographical. Is continued to refine and execute around a data-driven sense of community theory of change based on quarterly sense of community surveys, distributed to all community members in our database. In 2022, we also deployed targeted messages and focus groups to is members to assess their sense of community. Additionally, we continue to partner with the five virtual community organizers to refine and interrogate our strategies.

Accelerating Sector health:working in collaboration with members and other partners, Independent Sector creates, curates, and disseminates knowledge designed to help organizations respond to challenges and opportunities, increase their effectiveness, and fulfill their missions. Covid-19 presented new opportunities for us to curate and distribute resources rapidly and have evolved from responding to the crisis and to helping organizations manage their "new normal": Independent Sector, in partnership with edelman data & intelligence, released our second annual "trust in civil society" report, in may 2021, of survey findings that explore the nuances of trust in american nonprofit and philanthropic organizations. Building on Independent Sector's four decades of bringing together the charitable community for the common good and edelman's experience studying trust in both the global and u.s. Context, we conducted two national surveys, totaling 8,000 american adults, to assess general population trust in philanthropy and nonprofits and uncover the factors that drive trust in the Sector. An important learning from the research over three years shows nonprofits demonstrating impact is key to building trust, but it may not be sufficient by itself if broader economic barriers exist. Independent Sector, with the do good institute at the university of Maryland, announced on april 18, 2022 that the latest value of a volunteer hour is estimated to be $29.95, which is a 4.9% increase from 2020 to 2021. Estimated from data collected in 2020, the figure shows the valuable contributions volunteers make to support our communities and country. This data is the most visited part of the Independent Sector website because it helps nonprofits quantify the impact of volunteer engagement for funders, partners, and the public. Independent Sector released health of the u.s. Nonprofit Sector quarterly reviews in march, june, and september, and december. These reports complement the 2021 health of the u.s. Nonprofit Sector annual report and provide Independent Sector recommendations and analysis of recently released data on the Sector's economic contribution, charitable giving trends, and characteristics of Sector employment.

Public policy leadership:public policy is about systems. Fortified by our members and partners, Independent Sector plays a key role as a national, sector-spanning infrastructure organization with the capacity to advance federal policies. Much of our policy work this year focused on ensuring that federal resources for and federal relationships with the Sector are strong and growing. Following are highlights of our public policy leadership work this year:restoring and expanding the charitable deduction for every american is an urgent need for nonprofit organizations and the people they serve. In march 2022, then is president and ceo dan cardinali proudly represented the nonprofit Sector in testifying to the u.s. senate committee on finance in support of the charitable deduction and other key priorities. Independent Sector's "seat at the table" initiative, through legislation and a proposed executive order, aims to create permanent, structural mechanisms for the Sector to help shape and improve federal policy, while also expanding opportunities for government to work more effectively with the Sector to achieve shared goals. In 2022, is saw the bipartisan introduction by representatives betty mccollum (d-mn) and fred upton (r-mi) of the nonprofit Sector strength and partnership act. Over 650 organizations, from all 50 states, have endorsed the bill. Pieces of the initiative also have made legislative progress separately, with bicameral support in the appropriations process for quarterly nonprofit employment and wage data.now in its third year, the nonprofit infrastructure investment advocacy group (niiag), co-founded by Independent Sector and kaboom!, continues to engage a diverse group of community leaders from across the charitable nonprofit Sector. In addition to support for the nonprofit Sector strength and partnership act, niiag members advocated this year for critical investments in civic and community infrastructure, including childcare, workforce development, broadband access, and the civilian climate corps. Although these priorities ultimately were not funded, the coalition notched some smaller but significant victories with passage of the inflation reduction act.independent Sector commissioned a nationally representative study of nonprofit institutions' advocacy and civic engagement activities. This research will fill a 22-year gap in data and help us see what, if any, progress has been made in nonprofit advocacy and diagnose barriers to advocacy, identify opportunities to build advocacy capacity in nonprofits, better understand the role equity plays in nonprofit advocacy, and gauge nonpartisan civic engagement rates. We anticipate releasing the results during 2023.robust nonpartisan voter engagement is one of the Sector's most effective ways to ensure that our voices, and those of the communities we serve, are "at the table" when critical policies are being decided. To achieve this, Independent Sector and nonprofit vote launched the it's on us: nonprofit voter empowerment project, a nonpartisan pledge campaign to support nonprofits' efforts to increase voter participation among their staff, grantees, volunteers, and constituents.

Operational excellence:a healthy and equitable civil society is essential to achieving the goal of all people living in the u.s. Thriving. Independent Sector was founded to focus on and lead the Sector in fundamentally contributing to a healthy and equitable Sector. To realize this long-term goal, Independent Sector embraces excellence in the execution of our daily external and internal work, and in driving innovation to meet our goal more expeditiously and effectively. This includes ensuring Independent Sector is a healthy and equitable organization; that the Independent Sector community is known for our values-driven culture; that nonprofit and foundation changemakers build and identify with the Independent Sector community to ensure all people living in the u.s. Thrive, and are healthier and more equitable as a result of engagement with the Independent Sector community; and that nonprofit and foundation changemakers act outside of their organizations to improve the health of the nonprofit Sector and ensure all people in the u.s. Thrive. Following is an overview of our operational excellence highlights during the year:with investments from a gift from mackenzie scott in 2020, we made significant progress toward a complete overhaul of is's digital infrastructure through upgrades to the crm system and new Independent Sector website. The crm and website allow Independent Sector to provide an improved user experience throughout, more accurate data than the current database, more improved integration for community member targeting and customization, online donations for the first time, and engagement scoring.independent Sector upgraded strategic and operational planning in order to execute our work more effectively and deliver needed financial resources.