Nonprofit Agencies ‘Profit’ from Public Administration Project

By Kathryn Podolsky

Nonprofit agencies, created for the purpose of helping those with few resources, are also businesses that must have the funds to be able to continue year after year to help those less fortunate.

The College of Health and Public Affairs’ Department of Public Administration, in a two-year-long project funded by Florida’s Orange County Health Department (OCHD), are assisting eight Central Florida nonprofit agencies with financial planning, technical assistance and, very importantly, writing grant proposals to secure future funding.

“We’re here to help them do the business part, otherwise they won’t be able to help people for very long,” said Montgomery Van Wart, chair and professor of public administration and the project manager. “We are here to give them a higher chance of ‘staying in business.’”

Eight public administration graduate students are involved with this project, as well as several faculty members and professionals working within the College of Health and Public Affairs. The students’ primary function is to help the agencies get proposals written to request funding, a job that can be very detailed, very specific and perhaps a new area of expertise to a small agency.

One agency among the eight targeted by the project is the Nehemiah Educational & Economic Development (N.E.E.D.) agency, founded in 2000 by Willie C. Barnes, the pastor of the Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church in Eatonville, Fla. N.E.E.D.’s mission is to help individuals and families become self-sufficient, amidst the community’s growing population of HIV/AIDS infected persons.

Public administration graduate student Maria-Elena Augustin has been working with N.E.E.D. since January 2004. Located in a small office building on “main street” Eatonville, the agency has a total of four employees, which includes the executive director, Christine Farquharson.

“Christine is incredibly admirable,” Augustin said. “She’s working in a volunteer status as executive director, basically unpaid, until more money comes in.”

Augustin worked on deadline with Farquharson to complete a proposal to The Blue Foundation for a Healthy Florida, in which the requested $92,982.58 will specifically help to develop a 24-hour service for HIV/AIDS infected persons.

“Not everyone needs medical or mental [health] assistance between 9 and 5,” Farquharson said.

She added: “Words can’t really express what this program has done for us. It has brought us a higher level of understanding for the accounting system and helped with our vision, things a big agency already knows.”

There will be four grant proposals written by each agency, working alongside the graduate students who desire to make a career of public administration. The contract with OCHD also pays for agency staff to attend conferences to assist with board development and to improve skills such as the management of volunteers.

Van Wart believes this is a great opportunity for UCF to “do the right thing for the neediest in Central Florida” and wishes to continue these collaborations in the future.

Note: This fall the Department of Public Administration new master’s program in nonprofit management begins. For more information, please contact the department office at 407-823-2604.