[Carfreeliving] TLC as a membership organization

[Jason Henderson]

New Orleans needs this kind of institutionalized advocacy 
infrastructure. There is a big void. Thanks for the back story and 
clarification reminder about lobbying rules. Admittedly I have not been 
paying attention to much here in the last 4 months, so this helps. TLC's 
focus on parking is essential for all of this and I hope to see it 
continue.

Where is TLC or SFBC - Walk SF on the Better Neighborhoods Plus thing 
(another thing I have barely been able to follow)?  What I understand of 
it, the public benefits language is good.

-jh

Dave Snyder wrote:
> I understand that several folks were eager to see my answer to Joel's 
> question. So I asked the question at our board meeting tonight so I 
> could give a good answer, sanitized somewhat of my frustration at my 
> inability to create a single administrative structure with multiple 
> banners. I'll add the "backstory" at the end of this note.
> 
> TLC was created to fund the tax-exempt activities of sustainable 
> transportation organizations, and continue to fund Walk SF, SFBC Bike 
> Ed Fund, and the San Jose-Guerrero Coalition. TLC receives individual 
> contributions and foundation grants for TLC's programs, as well as 
> those of the other nonprofits. We need members because we work on 
> important initiatives of the alternative transportation movement 
> which are not addressed by any of the existing transportation reform 
> groups: Rescue Muni, Walk SF, or the SFBC. That is, the intersection 
> of urban design, environment, and transportation; land use and zoning 
> and policy and planning changes that actively reduce incentives to 
> car use. We work on many of the same issues as  SPUR, but with a more 
> explicit focus on environmental sustainability and social justice.
> 
> Members support our advocacy efforts financially and in spirit. 
> Foundation funders look to a membership base to ascertain whether the 
> organization is publicly supported. (Hence, your membership dollars 
> are in effect matched several times over by foundations.) Members 
> also give us numbers of people to rely on for grassroots activism. 
> We've already found that useful with our efforts to create a livable 
> downtown through parking restrictions in the new zoning. However, the 
> SFBC will always have the largest database and hopefully will share 
> their membership base with us and support our efforts with direct 
> outreach to their members when we need them.
> 
> Now, the back story...
> 
> You said, correctly, "I thought the idea was to have it be a funds 
> dispersing and support org for the membership orgs." The idea -- it 
> was Terry Miller's idea and he put in the long hours and creativity 
> in creating the structure for the IRS' approval -- was to have a 
> single 501c3 that received tax deductible donations from major donors 
> and foundations and dispersed that money to various satellite 501c4 
> lobbying groups per the board's and donors' discretion: the SFBC, 
> Walk SF, Rescue Muni, and whomever else. The problem came when I took 
> over TLC and turned it into a big-picture advocacy organization 
> instead of a big-picture, background funding organization. In Terry's 
> model, the work that TLC is doing should be done by one of those 
> satellite organizations, and the corporation known as TLC should 
> become the background organization that Terry envisioned. In reality, 
> because TLC is getting so well known as the big picture advocacy 
> organization, the SFBC Board and Leah Shahum no longer want it to 
> serve as its fiscal sponsor, so they're creating another 501c3 to 
> serve as its fiscal sponsor. Since TLC can legally do all the 
> lobbying we need to do as a 501c3 organization (we spend less than 
> 20% of our budget on lobbying), we're not going to create that 
> background organization. TLC is in fact fiscally sponsoring the SFBC 
> (though the SFBC will soon opt out), Walk SF, and the San 
> Jose/Guerrero Coalition. In sum, the two differences between Terry's 
> model and the reality today is that the SFBC will have its own fiscal 
> sponsor instead of TLC and that TLC's advocacy and education is done 
> "in-house" instead of contracted out to a 501c4. Does this make sense?
> 
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