Nonprofits contribute to communities and society through service delivery, innovation, knowledge-building, and civic engagement. They frequently partner with and push government to better serve its citizens through relationships that have been characterized as supplementary, complementary, and adversarial (Young 2006). In all of these roles and relationships, nonprofits must compete for resources, time, and attention with other nonprofits, government entities, and forprofit organizations within communities, nationally, and internationally. Competition sometimes shapes and sometimes is shaped by public policies that affect the rules of the game. In this conceptual paper, we explore the dimensions of nonprofit competition and the implications for the nonprofit-government supplementary, complementary, and adversarial relationships.
For families with children, employment comes at a price. They must subtract from their wages the cost of someone else caring for their child. Their wage minus the costs of obtaining child care, transportation, and other expenses that may be generated by employment is generally referred to as the effective wage. The Child Care Development Fund (CCDF) child care subsidy voucher, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and the Child and Dependent Care Credit (CDCC) are all intended to increase the effective wage of parents to support them entering and staying in the workforce. This paper explores the trade-offs between employment and effective wage that parents must make through the lens of three hypothetical North Carolina families facing promotion, bonus, and employer relocation opportunities. Through their eyes we understand why it would be rational to turn down these opportunities due to the potential loss of thousands of dollars in benefits. These situations demonstrate the weaknesses of the current system, where the needs of employers and employees become increasingly opposed as families approach the income eligibility threshold and the portability threshold. This paper proposes a policy to better align the needs of employers and employees by restructuring the incentive system to phase out benefits gradually, guarantee help to anyone who is eligible, make support sensitive to regional changes in child care prices, and administer it through the tax system rather than local social services offices throughout the country. While this paper focuses on the child care benefit system, the framework used to explore the issues of reversed incentives at the eligibility threshold can be applied to any social policy with income eligibility requirements.
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