Last week was the third anniversary of the passage of the American Rescue Plan Act, which included billions of dollars in relief funding for communities. Time is running out for nonprofits to speak up with state and local officials to make sure funds are allocated to nonprofit missions before they have to return to federal coffers.

In this guest article published in The NonProfit Times, Donna Murray-Brown and David L. Thompson, NCN’s Vice President of Strategy & Development and Vice President of Public Policy, detail the urgency for nonprofits to act now, and the steps to advocate for your nonprofit to receive these relief funds.

If your nonprofit is one of the thousands that earn funds through government grants and contracts—or if you’re interested in applying for federal funding in the future—it would be wise to be thinking about a federally negotiated indirect cost rate agreement (NICRA) to ensure your nonprofit receives more funding for your indirect costs than you might otherwise receive. If the thought of navigating another federal bureaucratic process makes you shudder, don’t worry. Rob Hoshaw, NCN’s Senior Grant Writer, who has more than a decade of experience with NICRAs from his prior employer, shares insights he gained as he walks you through the steps in this article.

An issue in the IRS’s transmission of Form 990 data to other sites is causing FY2022 data to be displayed on FY2021 forms, resulting in some inaccurate displays of information. If your nonprofit points donors or funders to one of these sites to view your Form 990, you may want to send them directly to your Form 990 on your website instead until the issue is fixed. A big thank you to the Nonprofit Association of Oregon for identifying the issue and quickly taking action to spread the word and seek a fix.

To kick off the series, we’re starting with the “why.” Why should your nonprofit be engaged in these activities? Nonprofit VOTE’s new report, “Nonprofit Power: Building an Inclusive Democracy,” shares the impact you can create. They look at the work done by nonprofits and how it has resulted in voter turnout rates that are ten percentage points higher, and even greater than ten percent with historically marginalized groups. As they share, nonprofits have an “unmatched ability … to foster equitable and sustainable voter participation in communities from coast to coast.”

Our friends at Building Movement Project are conducting a short survey to better understand the effects of the current political climate on nonprofits. They want to know the impact of court decisions, policy, and legislation on issues such as affirmative action, reproductive freedom, LGBTQIA+ rights, immigration, and more. Please help us all by sharing your insights.

In the article “Beyond efficiency: A human-first AI adoption strategy,” Beth Kanter and Allison Fine write about the importance of centering people when adopting AI solutions. The goal shouldn’t be to replace jobs, but to have AI tools supplement and aid the work being done by people. As they write in the article, “There is a balance to be struck internally—in which humans and AI each do what they do best, with humans always in charge of the final product or action.”

Hundreds of people visit our job board each day, where they find thousands of nonprofit jobs across the country like those in this recent sampling. Browse jobs or list openings at your nonprofit.