By Robert A. Scott

Colleges and universities are promoting voluntarism and other forms of community service. Adelphi University and St. Joseph’s University-N.Y. are among those that combine community outreach with service-learning courses and credits.

In a truly ambitious project, Metropolitan State University in Denver created a Public Service Institute to foster teaching and research in the subject and promote government service as important to democracy.

The goals of these efforts are to fulfill a mission to serve the public that grants an institution’s charter, encourage civic engagement, promote work in public service, assist students in engaging in democratic processes, and teach about the third sector of society. The first sector, of course, is for-profit business.

The second sector is government, whether local, regional, state, or federal. The third sector consists of numerous non-profit, tax-exempt organizations. Think of houses of worship, schools and colleges, food pantries, hospitals, United Way, and after-school programs for at-risk youth in under-resourced neighborhoods, among many others.

The United States is unique among nations in having such organizations and embedding them in the tax code.

Following a nine-month visit to the United States in 1831-32, the French civil servant, Alexis de Tocqueville, marveled at the affinity of Americans to join associations to find common cause.

He wrote about the “not-for-profit, non-governmental organizations which aimed to serve the public good and improve the quality of human lives.”

Many of our neighbors belong to at least one and perhaps several organizations that rely on voluntarism and tax-deductible donations, a benefit that was made law for individuals in 1917. The tax-exempt status of organizations dates to 1894.

Such organizations were created by an individual or a group hoping to promote an idea, like Mothers Against Drunk Driving or the Long Island Arts Alliance, sponsor research into a disease such as breast cancer, promote climate action, and assist those who need food, shelter, or protection from abuse.

Long Island, with its population of 2.8 million, has thousands of tax-exempt organizations. There are churches, mosques, and synagogues, PTA’s, unions, and service clubs such as Lions and Elks.

There also are fifteen colleges and universities on Long Island, and they represent a particular kind of tax-exempt institution. They enroll over 160,000 students, employ some 34,000 full-time and part-time staff pay, salaries and benefits of about $3.2 billion, and spent another $1.8 billion on other than personnel.

They have endowments of $1.5 billion and have about $3 billion of capital projects underway or anticipated in the next five years. These institutions bring major amounts of federal aid to the region and generate income, sales, and FICA taxes.

While these institutions are, in many ways, different from what we mean, generally, by tax-exempt organizations, they share many of the same characteristics. They must balance their government-approved mission with their ability to meet new market demands and changes in demographics, economics, and technology.

They must decide when to compete and when to cooperate, when to build a new program, partner with another provider, or even merge. They must develop governing boards that honor the difference between oversight and management. They must engage in succession planning, a particular challenge for smaller non-profits run by the founder.

The opportunities for working in and with the “third” sector are enormous. Think of the opportunities for lawyers, accountants, managers, suppliers of equipment and energy, hotels and restaurants, and other businesses and professions.

When I was at Adelphi, we saw opportunities in this sector, even as we were part of it. We created the Center for Nonprofit Management and Leadership to provide strategic planning, succession planning, and board and leadership development to tax-exempt organizations of all sizes.

We also created the Jaggar Community Fellows Program that provides trained and paid student interns to non-profit organizations in the greater region each summer. The groups were helped; students learned about the non-profit world and earned a stipend, and we fulfilled our mission as the “engaged” university. We were always seeking ways to enhance the environment for teaching and learning and to serve the larger community.

The unique attribute of forming organizations observed by Tocqueville in 1831 still exists, and our nation is more vibrant and resilient because of it.

Our society functions well when the three sectors function well. Businesses take risks and can generate profits needed for sustained development, community benefit, and taxation. Government is intended to provide a safety net for times of travail, preserve order through uniformly administered laws, and provide for the common defense.

The third sector, the non-profit or tax-exempt sector, initiates functions that often are too small, too local, or too new for either business or government to take on. It can challenge business and government to be more mindful of the needs of the citizenry.

Robert Scott is president emeritus, Adelphi University; Author, “How University Boards Work,” Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018, Eric Hopper Book Prize Awardee, 2019