IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/aph/ajpbhl/19998991425-1429_6.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Lobbying and advocacy for the public's health: What are the limits for nonprofit organizations?

Author

Listed:
  • Vernick, J.S.

Abstract

Nonprofit organizations play an important role in advocating for the public's health in the United States. This article describes the rules under US law for lobbying by nonprofit organizations. The 2 most common kinds of nonprofits working to improve the public's health are 'public charities' and 'social welfare organizations.' Although social welfare organizations may engage in relatively unlimited lobbying, public charities may not engage in 'substantial' lobbying. Lobbying is divided into 2 main categories. Direct lobbying refers to communications with lawmakers that take a position on specific legislation, and grassroots lobbying includes attempts to persuade members of the general public to take action regarding legislation. Even public charities may engage in some direct lobbying and a smaller amount of grassroots lobbying. Much public health advocacy, however, is not lobbying, since there are several important exceptions to the lobbying rules. These exceptions include 'nonpartisan analysis, study, or research' and discussions of broad social problems. Lobbying with federal or earmarked foundation funds is generally prohibited.

Suggested Citation

  • Vernick, J.S., 1999. "Lobbying and advocacy for the public's health: What are the limits for nonprofit organizations?," American Journal of Public Health, American Public Health Association, vol. 89(9), pages 1425-1429.
    • Handle: RePEc:aph:ajpbhl:1999:89:9:1425-1429_6
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Miller-Stevens Katrina & Gable Matthew J., 2013. "Lobbying in the Virtual World: Perceptions in the Nonprofit Sector," Nonprofit Policy Forum, De Gruyter, vol. 4(1), pages 47-63, May.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:aph:ajpbhl:1999:89:9:1425-1429_6. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Christopher F Baum (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.apha.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.