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Iowa nonprofits: Philanthropy cannot fill gaps left by federal cuts
Nonprofit funding, collaboration will be topics of discussion at this week’s Iowa Ideas conference
Sep. 28, 2025 5:30 am
The Gazette offers audio versions of articles using Instaread. Some words may be mispronounced.
Nonprofit organizations across Iowa and around the country have been in a state of flux this year as President Donald Trump’s administration has drastically shifted federal funding priorities, moving money away from grant programs that social service providers have historically relied on.
The nonprofit landscape is constantly shifting, and while providers can’t say with any certainty where recent changes will take them in the next few years, they agree on one thing: federal funding cannot be replaced by community philanthropy alone.
“If there are less federal dollars coming into our nonprofits, philanthropy cannot fill that hole at all, and there will be more people who need more services. At some point, if it hits a tipping point, it will be very visible,” said Kristin Roberts, president and CEO of the United Way of East Central Iowa.
Other providers, including Iowa Nonprofit Alliance Executive Director Alex Rice and Joe Heitz, vice president of the Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation, echoed Roberts’ sentiment, repeating it almost verbatim in separate conversations with The Gazette.
“If you look at all the federal spending that supports our communities, we simply don't have enough dollars in private philanthropy to make up for that,” Rice said. “This is a much bigger lift than most people recognize. But, to the general person out there, what I would say is now more than ever is the time to support your nonprofits because they're trying to do more and to do it with fewer resources than ever before.”
“We are so proud to and grateful to be able to put money into the community, but philanthropy alone can’t replace government resources in the community,” Heitz echoed. “We’re proud to continue doing all that we are able to, but philanthropy alone is not well positioned to replace government support.”
The topic of nonprofit funding — as well as collaboration and advocacy among Iowa’s nonprofits — will be discussed this week as part of Iowa Ideas, a free, virtual conference from The Gazette.
Register to participate in Iowa Ideas conference
Iowa Ideas, the annual free virtual conference hosted by The Gazette, will be Thursday and Friday, Oct. 2 and 3. More than 50 panel discussions and keynote addresses are planned over the two days of programming. Find a full schedule and register at iowaideas.com.
Increasing requests for community funding
The Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation is in the middle of its Fall 2025 funding cycle, but has already seen an increase in requests from nonprofits this year. For its Spring 2025 funding cycle, the foundation received 88 applications totaling $1.85 million in requests. That’s up from the Fall 2024 grant cycle with its 76 applications totaling $1.64 million in requests, and the Spring 2024 cycle when 55 applications requested $1.04 million.
The foundation funded 40 of the 88 applications it received this spring, a total of $742,465. Heitz said the donations the foundation receives for funding haven’t kept pace with the increased applications, and the foundation is having to turn down more requests than it did in the past.
Speaking with nonprofit leaders, Heitz said he’s heard concerns about the increased competition for funding, even among organizations that haven’t been as directly affected by federal funding cuts.
“Generally speaking, human services organizations tend to get a larger percent of their budget from government sources than, say, arts and culture organizations. However, those organizations were expressing some concern about a ripple effect, if individual donors shift their priorities toward human services,” Heitz said. “I don’t mean to pit arts and culture against human services — it’s kind of a false dichotomy there — but I think for us, the takeaway was that the changes of the landscape are just creating remarkable uncertainty across the entire sector.”
Despite not being able to fund every request it receives, Heitz said the Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation has been trying to find other ways to help support local nonprofits, including offering trainings on how nonprofits can better advocate for themselves and advertise their importance in the community.
Flexibility essential for nonprofit survival
Roberts, with United Way of East Central Iowa, said she’s been impressed with the way Eastern Iowa’s nonprofit leaders come together in times of difficulty to collaborate, rather than focusing on the competitive aspect of the universal funding shortages.
United Way hosts quarterly meetings with a council of agency executives, and Roberts said recent conversations have centered on how different organizations can work together to use donations in efficient ways that still allow for the work they’re doing to move forward.
“I think obviously, in the beginning, there was a lot of sense of anxiety. A lot of not knowing what was going on. A lot of having to pivot in the moment and being able to figure out, how can we keep things moving along?” Roberts said. “I think that’s one of the things that you’re starting to see the nonprofits really turn to, is getting their minds wrapped around this. The world is changing. How can we adjust and how can we move forward and be the flexible, nimble pieces that we need to be?”
That flexibility has already come in handy, Roberts said. An agency that United Way partners with lost federal funding for a program that United Way also was helping to support. That program had to be shut down, but the agency approached United Way with a proposal for how those funds could be redirected to another program, and United Way agreed to make the change.
“We still want to provide services within the community, and if we can be that flexible funder along the way … let’s do that. That’s the way we’ve been trying to help in our realm,” Roberts said.
‘We have to get creative sometimes’
Roberts said it’s still too early to say exactly what large-scale collaborative efforts might look like in response to current funding struggles, but she pointed to the Linn County Alliance for Equitable Housing as an example of nonprofits and other agencies coming together to overcome unexpected challenges. The alliance is a coalition of government, nonprofit, and business organizations in Linn County that developed out of the need to respond to housing difficulties in the aftermath of the 2020 derecho.
“It’s the idea of, ‘You can do A, you can do B, you can do E, and you can do F. How are we going to find C and D?’ And then we each have people saying, ‘Well, we could do a little of this,’ and ‘We could do a little of that’ and that’s how our community is moving things forward.” Roberts said. “It’s us coming together and saying, ‘What's the barrier? How can we collectively bust that barrier down?’”
The Alliance for Equitable Housing has run multiple successful housing programs, including a Landlord and Tenant Initiative that is working this year to connect tenants who have had a hard time finding housing with landlords who are willing to house them, and provides financial backing to reduce the risk for landlords.
The program was funded with a $100,000 donation from Cedar Rapids Bank & Trust, and Roberts pointed out how crucial that business support has been in the success of the initiative.
“For us to be able to solve some of these large, large issues, complex issues, it cannot be the nonprofit sector alone. It’s a combination of municipalities, it’s funders, it’s nonprofits, it’s businesses, it’s governments, it’s everyone coming together,” Roberts said. “That’s going to be the key. If the nonprofit sector is looked to, to solve these problems, it’s impossible. We do not have the dollars to be able to do what would need to be done.”
The Hawkeye Area Community Action Program (HACAP) has been working with the Cedar Rapids Community School District to solve a funding issue it ran into this year after a lack of federal funding and changes to Iowa child care grants compounded to drastically reduced funding to its Head Start program.
The program took a notable hit, and unfortunately HACAP had to reduce staff and close some program sites, but they were also able to move some of their Head Start centers into Cedar Rapids Community School District buildings, so that they could cut the Head Start programming to half days instead of full days, and work with the district to provide the other half day of programming.
“We’re always looking to work with community partners, because we can’t do it alone … Maybe we can’t operate at full capacity, but we could if we worked with this organization,” Christopher Ackman, the communications and volunteer manager for HACAP, said.
“We have to get creative sometimes. I’ve been here for 10 years, and I think this past year, I don’t think we’ve ever been through such a winding turn of not knowing where our funding was going to be from or what was going to happen to it. It felt like two or three years in one year, and that’s everything, too, from the state level and the federal level.”
The funding issues have hit other aspects of HACAP’s work as well, including adding even more strain to the already overwhelmed food services network in Linn County, which HACAP’s food bank is a vital part of as the main supplier for most pantries in the area.
Ackman said that support from businesses and individuals in the community has been essential so far this year in supporting the efforts of the pantry, both through donations and volunteer time. He said he’s been impressed with the number of people who have made an effort to step up as they’ve learned about the difficulties the nonprofit and others in the community are facing.
“There’s always that effect where negative media attention toward us, from a funding standpoint, can sometimes lead to a positive because that just expands our awareness more,” Ackman said. “Luckily, we live in a great community, in a great state where people will take notice to that, and then they'll donate, or they'll advocate for us, or they'll volunteer.”
Nonprofits banding together for advocacy
Along with working together to find creative ways to use funding, a number of Iowa’s nonprofits have also been banding together to find ways to advocate for themselves, by reaching out to state and federal lawmakers, as well as everyday citizens, to try and spread the word about the important role nonprofit work plays in the state.
Rice, with the Iowa Nonprofit Alliance, said there are about 32,000 nonprofits in Iowa, representing about one-tenth of the state’s workforce.
“I think that’s one thing we don’t always give ourselves credit for, is just how critical we are to the state of Iowa, to our economy, to making our community strong” Rice said. “At the same time, when we look at advocacy issues, that’s an awful lot of power that we can, if we work together and have a unified voice, that we can apply to getting change.”
Rice said the Nonprofit Alliance has been working this year to provide training and support to help organizations that aren’t used to advocating in the political realm know where to start, because many nonprofits have been looking for ways to step into advocacy work.
Earlier this year, when Congress was working to pass Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” Rice said the Nonprofit Alliance worked with a coalition of partners to write a letter outlining several things they wanted to see changed in the bill.
The letter was signed by about 100 Iowa nonprofits and sent to senators before the U.S. Senate passed its version of the bill. When the Senate version of the bill was released, some of the changes the alliance requested in its letter — including an increase in the universal charitable tax deduction — had been added to the bill.
“That was not only our efforts here in Iowa, but the efforts coordinated across the country by nonprofits. I think sometimes people feel like we're powerless to change what's happening in Washington, but the reality is, if we get enough of us together, and we're all speaking with the same voice about the changes that we want, we might not get everything, but we will get some things,” Rice said.
Comments: (319) 398-8328; emily.andersen@thegazette.com
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