Planning for Sustainability: Becoming a Line Item in an Existing Budget
Learn what it means to become a line item in an existing budget, explore when and why you'd want to (and not want to), and explain how to go about it.
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WHAT DO WE MEAN BY BECOMING A LINE ITEM IN AN EXISTING BUDGET?
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WHEN MIGHT YOU TRY TO BECOME A LINE ITEM IN AN EXISTING BUDGET?
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WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO BECOME A LINE ITEM IN AN EXISTING BUDGET?
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HOW DO YOU BECOME A LINE ITEM IN AN EXISTING BUDGET?
For three years, the Patterson Youth Alliance had been working with Patterson's at-risk teens with great success. The program's combination of straight talk, clear structure, fairness, and responsibility, along with its teaching of life skills and academic support, spoke to teens with few positives in their lives and very little self-esteem. Most of the older participants had stuck it out to graduate from high school, and many had become real forces in the student community - peer mediators and student advocates. A considerable number were now enrolled in college. The younger kids were going through adolescent hell, generally complicated by horrendous family situations and their own self-destructive behavior. But with the support of the Youth Alliance, most of them were managing to stay out of trouble and in school, and were learning skills that would eventually equip them to become leaders in the community.
Nonetheless, the Alliance was in deep trouble. Its pilot funding had run out, and the foundation that had provided it wasn't interested in funding an ongoing program. The state agencies concerned with youth thought that the private sector should fund programs like this; the private sector thought the state should. The Alliance was caught in the middle... without money to operate for the coming year, and without future prospects.
The organization still had an ace in the hole, however: the county Human Service Coordinator really liked the program. PYA decided to approach her with a request to put a line item specifically for the program into the county budget.
Desperate circumstances sometimes call for desperate measures. In a case like this, where the existence of an effective and necessary program is at stake, one way to institutionalize it might be to get the program written into the local budget under its own name. Another option might be to get it included in the budget of a larger organization.
This section will examine what it means to become a line item in an existing budget, explore when and why you'd want to (and not want to), and explain how to go about it.
WHAT DO WE MEAN BY BECOMING A LINE ITEM IN AN EXISTING BUDGET?
Becoming a line item, in its simplest terms, means being specifically written into a public or organizational budget for the long term. Your organization, by name, is granted a sum of money in the budget each year
A line item is one expense category, with the expense attached, in a formal budget. In the situation we're describing here, the expense category would be your organization.
BECOMING A LINE ITEM CAN TAKE SEVERAL DIFFERENT FORMS.
- Your organization can be written into a line item as a specific expense to be taken from a larger sum. The county budget allotment for Youth Services, for instance, might include this line item: "5051-0001: $435,000 for the provision of support and training services to at-risk youth, with at least $78,000 to go to the Patterson Youth Alliance for this purpose."
- Your organization can be written into a budget as a specific line item in its own right. Thus, a separate item in the county budget might read "5051-0010: $78,000 for the provision of support and training services to at-risk youth by the Patterson Youth Alliance."
The numbers at the beginning of budget items here are the line-item numbers by which the line items are identified, and they're the same year to year. (For those familiar with accounting and bookkeeping, these are really account numbers.) Because governmental budgets are often big and complex, line item numbers become very important. Sometimes, the only easy way to find a particular line item is by number. If you 're advocating for or conferring about this process with a government official, you have to be familiar with the appropriate line item numbers: it may be the only way they'll be able to find them in the budget.
- Your organization can become a line item in a public agency budget, one remove from the public budget process. The county Department of Youth Services, for instance, may specifically include a line item for your organization in its internal budget. (You might convince the director to do this through political pressure, or she might choose to do it on her own, because she's familiar with your program and wants to make sure it's funded.) Thus, although you might not be in the county budget, you'll be a specific line item in the Department of Youth Service's annual budget. You might be able to obtain the same result from a regional or city agency.
- Policy makers at the state or local level might create a generic line item for the work that you do, describing it in a way that would make your organization a very competitive bidder for the funds.
- A particular program of a coalition or organization, or even a small organization itself, might become a line item in a larger organization's budget. This could mean that the larger organization takes over the work completely (likely in the case of a coalition, which, after starting a program, would probably look for a home for it.) It could also mean that the smaller organization would establish a long-term contractual relationship with the larger, and would be paid through the larger organization to do its work.
We focus in this section on local and organizational budgets, because getting your own line item is far more likely at the local than at the state level. At the town or county level, this is sometimes how health or human service appropriations are made: at the state level, this option is always at the discretion of a legislator who's willing to make it happen, and is seldom advisable. For these reasons, we include information on obtaining a line item in the state budget as Tool #1, but advise against it except in extreme circumstances.
A note about federal budgets. In this section, we assume most of our audience is composed of smaller grass roots and community-based organizations. Getting written in as a line item is also possible in the federal budget, but only if your organization is big enough, has a mission that would justify its inclusion in a national budget, and either has the lobbying power to sway a congressman or senator, or that politician has some personal or ethical reason to include it. Our assumption is that few Tool Box users have the kind of clout necessary to become part of the federal budget, and that those who do already know how to use it.
WHEN MIGHT YOU TRY TO BECOME A LINE ITEM IN AN EXISTING BUDGET?
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