Coalition Cancels Nonprofit Congress Gathering

From The Chronicle of Philanthropy — The National Council of Nonprofits has called off the 2009 Nonprofit Congress conference, which had been scheduled to take place in New Orleans in May.

The first meeting of the Nonprofit Congress took place in 2006, as part of an effort to bring charity leaders together to map out strategies for increasing nonprofit clout.

Instead the organization — which until recently was called the National Council of Nonprofit Associations — plans to hold a gathering of its member state associations in Washington, which will include a day for participants to go to Congress and talk with their representatives.

“We’re going to be bringing people to D.C. so that our policy voices can be heard much more fervently and directly,” said Tim Delaney, chief executive of the National Council of Nonprofits.

The date for the new meeting has not been set, but may occur sometime during the summer, he said.

Mr. Delaney said that the “early-bird-registration” period had just opened for the Nonprofit Congress in New Orleans and that it was hard to say how registration was faring for the meeting. But he acknowledged that the troubled economy was a factor in the decision.

“What we were forced to look at was should we be asking the food shelter in Des Moines or the domestic violence shelter in Missoula to take their limited resources, which are even more limited now, and come to a national gathering in New Orleans,” said Mr. Delaney. “We felt that it was important to have that same exchange of knowledge in a way that we could then lift our voices, and the best place to do that collectively is going to be in D.C.”