Mission Control: Texas Nonprofiteers Join Forces — Interview with Jason Sabo, Vice President for Pubic Policy, United Ways of Texas

As the younger generations in Texas, a majority of whom are Latino, enter public schools, who’s going to make sure they have the jump-starts to succeed later in life?

As more service men and women return from war overseas in need of support, who are they going to call?

Nonprofits! Nonprofits! Nonprofits! says Jason Sabo, Vice President for Pubic Policy, United Ways of Texas, a statewide association with roughly 75 member organizations.

Nonprofits will be the go-to organizations to meet the needs of millions of Texans in the future, especially in a political climate like today’s that frowns upon investing tax dollars in state-sponsored programs, he told the Lone Star Iconoclast.

But the first challenge is to get these not-for-profit entities on the same page so they learn to work together with what limited funding sources are already available. That initial step was made on Wednesday, June 28, during the Texas Nonprofit Congress in Austin. Under the motto, “Many Missions, One Voice,” representatives of 60 Texas nonprofits and another 40 more watching online via webcams gathered their opinions for where the sector is headed. The results of their survey will be forthcoming in the next month.

The Iconoclast’s Nathan Diebenow recently spoke with Sabo, the current manager of Texas’ largest electronic network of human services advocates with the United Ways of Texas, to discuss his organization’s work, the role of nonprofits as he sees them, his three “-ics,” and the strengths and weaknesses of nonprofits themselves.

ICONOCLAST: First off, tell me what the United Ways of Texas does exactly.

JASON SABO: We focus our work on three or four things. First, protecting the right and ability for non-profits to speak out on their behalf. We work a lot on improving access to prekindergarten. For example, in the just-completed special session, we were able to pass a provision in House Bill 1 that expanded eligibility for free state-funded pre-kindergarten to include children of active duty military, activated reservists, and any three- or four-year-old child whose parent had been killed or wounded in a war. That’s multiple-thousands of kids roughly, costing the state $6 million a year and increasing thereafter as more troops are realigned in texas.

That work is funded by an organization called PreK Now which is an arm of the Pew Charitable Trust. We also do a lot of work on improving the number of Texas children who graduate from high school and go on to college. That work is funded by the Bill and Linda Gates Foundation.

We also do a lot of work on disaster preparedness and particularly disaster response because I’m sure as you know a lot of the Katrina survivors in Texas are increasingly have a difficult time getting by as FEMA is ending housing allocations a