The Snelling Center for Government was flush a year ago. The nonpartisan civic leadership group had seven employees, a budget of about $800,000 and an office space in downtown Burlington.
Today, the well-regarded center, named for the late Gov. Richard Snelling and run by his son, Mark, is operating with half that budget and has relocated to Shelburne. All but two employees have been cut from the payroll.
As part of the reorganization, the center’s 16-member board has even let its president, Charlie Smith, go. Mark Snelling, who manages several businesses and is a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, became the titular head of the organization in July. He is not receiving a salary for his services, and he has provided free office space for the center in a back office of his business in Shelburne.
J. Churchill Hindes, the board’s treasurer, says the cuts in overhead were necessary to keep the center viable.
“I think every nonprofit should have a board like the Snelling Center that’s willing to step up and act before they get in trouble,” Hindes says. “Too many Vermont boards wait too long and just assume everything is just going to continue as it does.”
The board’s main priority, Snelling says, is to maintain the Center’s signature training programs: the Vermont Leadership Institute and the Vermont School Leadership Project, which have produced more than 500 graduates over the last 15 years, some of whom are among the state’s most prominent leaders in business, education, government and the nonprofit sector.
The adult participants learn leadership skills, get a grounding in state public affairs and interact with the state’s best leadership talent: VIPs like Darby Bradley, founder of the Vermont Land Trust, and Michael Dubie, adjutant general of the Vermont National Guard and brother of Vermont’s current Republican Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie.
“We wanted to make sure that we were in a situation where we could absolutely be positive that the two leadership programs would be on a solid financial base,” Snelling says.
The Center loses money on both adult leadership programs. It charges a $6,000 tuition fee to participants for the intensive weekend sessions that stretch over nine- to 18-month periods and offers scholarships to participants who need financial help. Snelling says the Center has never turned anyone away for lack of ability to pay.
Other services the Center provides—think-tank-style reports on issues of statewide import like constitutional term limits—are now being provided on an ad hoc basis. Instead of taking on independent studies with an in-house team of experts, the Center is now outsourcing research projects to consultants (the former employees). Sponsoring companies and organizations, such as the Vermont Electric Power Company and the American Association of Retired Persons, are footing the bill directly, Snelling says.
“We got a little bit ahead of ourselves financially,” Snelling says. “So now when we do these things (reports) we’re relying on outside funds to do that. We’ve been successful, and we’ve raised more money than the previous year since we’ve been in existence, but our appetite got ahead of us on how many studies we could do on our own nickel.”
The Snelling Center does not have an endowment or associated foundation, nor does it receive funding from the University of Vermont, even though it has a loose affiliation with the college. Its revenues come from donations, grants, fees for service and tuition income, and these sources of income have fluctuated over time. The Center’s budget reached a high of $1 million in 2006, and dropped to $620,000 in 2007, according to IRS 990 forms, then went back up to $800,000 last year.
The Center’s fund-raising efforts are going well, Snelling says, and he anticipates 2010 revenues will exceed this year’s total of about $400,000.
In 2008, Smith says the Center had a number of paying projects on its research slate, but by the end of last year, the fee-for-service work dropped off sharply.
“Both the fee-for-service work and contributions were tailing in the wrong direction,” Smith says.
Snelling, who has served on the Center’s board for 15 years, says shifting from in-house staff to outside consultants isn’t a radical change in protocol. That’s the way the Center used to handle reports, he says.
The four people who had been salaried staff members continue to affiliate with the Snelling Center as senior associates, Smith says. “Our hope is there will be good projects we bring to the Snelling Center, because it’s the best place to organize a particular kind of project,” Smith says.
Partnering with other organizations enables the Center to leverage its resources, Snelling says. The organization, for example, is currently bidding on a stimulus grant for a broadband project in conjunction with the Council on Rural Development.
The Center, however, will no longer conduct its own independent reports, according to Snelling.
“People come to us and have said, can you facilitate this discussion?” Snelling says. “We say OK, what’s your funding for it? We put together a budget for them, and we use their funding. We hire the people who used to work for us full-time as consultants. We don’t have the ongoing overhead, so we can tailor our labor force, in essence, to the project and to the timing of the project.”
Snelling characterizes the managerial changeover as a peaceful transition and says Smith now serves as a consultant for the Center, although he isn’t currently working on any projects right now.
Snelling says he doesn’t see his campaign for lieutenant governor in any conflict with the nonpartisan Center, because his primary responsibility is supervising the budgets for leadership programs.
“There is nothing that I do in my day for the Snelling Center that is in any way partisan,” Snelling says. “We have worked very, very hard over the years to be nonpartisan…We have an even number of people who would claim they were Democrats and Republicans, and we always have.”
Hindes isn’t particularly troubled by Snelling’s run for lieutenant governor. Nor is Smith. As he put it, “It’s in the DNA of the organization to be nonpartisan.”
