A host of Guilford County nonprofit organizations that thought they were well on their way to receiving county money this year are instead going to have to go back and do much of the work all over again.
On Thursday, Sept. 3, the Guilford County Board of Commissioners will hold a work session to review a revised process for awarding Community-Based Organization grants for the 2026-2027 fiscal year.
The work session will be held at 3:30 p.m. in the Carolyn Coleman Conference Room on the first floor of the Old Guilford County Courthouse at 301 W. Market St. in Greensboro.
The revision became necessary after a last-minute change in state law approved by the Republican-controlled North Carolina General Assembly took effect July 1.
The new restrictions mean that Guilford County can no longer consider race or gender in the same way it previously did when awarding CBO funding.
That means organizations that already went through the county’s application process earlier this year will have to revise and resubmit their applications under a new set of rules. For some of these groups, it’s more than just an inconvenience.
The county’s CBO program includes a number of relatively small nonprofit organizations that don’t have large reserves or deep-pocketed donors. Some had been counting on county allocations to fund programs and services this year and had already gone through the application process months ago.
Now, they have to do it again.
Chairman of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners Skip Alston said county officials don’t have much choice.
“We can’t consider race, we can’t consider gender,” Alston said. “It’s basically race and gender, so we have to send it back out, another CBO policy, so that people can submit based on that policy and not reference race or gender.”
The change comes from action in Raleigh as Republican state lawmakers have moved to eliminate government policies that give preference or special consideration that’s based on race or gender.
Those efforts have also been encouraged nationally by the Trump administration’s aggressive push against diversity, equity and inclusion policies in government and institutions receiving public money.
The timing was particularly bad for Guilford County.
The county had already gone through its normal application process for its fiscal year 2026-2027 Community-Based Organization grants. Nonprofit groups spent months filling out applications, providing financial information and describing the programs and services they planned to provide with the county funding if they were lucky enough to get it.
Then Raleigh changed the rules.
Alston said the county can’t simply grandfather in applications filed before the new requirements took effect.
Asked whether the county could just use the applications submitted under the old rules, Alston said, “No, they won’t.”
He said county staff has been notifying applicants that another round of applications will be required.
“They’ve already notified all the applicants applying for the CBO grants and let them know that we have sent out new policies to them,” Alston said.
The commissioners are scheduled Thursday to “review and consider the County’s revised Community-Based Organization funding process for FY 2027,” according to the official notice of the work session.
The Board of Commissioners could also take action on the revised process at the meeting.
Alston said he expects county staff to move quickly once the revised rules are in place, but the process will still take time.
He estimated that applicants could have roughly two weeks to 30 days to submit revised materials, followed by perhaps another month for county officials to review them.
“We probably won’t award until sometime in October,” Alston said.
That’s considerably later than many organizations expected when they applied earlier in the year.
The list of organizations ultimately receiving county money could also look different.
Alston said some nonprofits whose programs specifically target people of a certain race or gender may not be eligible under the new rules unless those organizations change how their programs or applications are structured.
“Some organizations won’t be able to apply if they’re specifically targeting race or going to a specific gender,” he said.
Alston said organizations could potentially revise their programs to meet the new requirements.
“They could change their policies and then submit according to our policy guidelines,” he said.
For example, a nonprofit could offer a program designed to help children, but couldn’t make participation dependent on the children being members of one particular race.
There are circumstances in which sex may be inherent to the service being offered.
Alston gave the example of a nonprofit that provides services to women giving birth.
“If they’re doing a program where they help women give birth, that would probably be acceptable,” he said, adding that men don’t get pregnant.
The CBO program has been controversial for years for reasons that have nothing to do with the new state rules.
There are Guilford County taxpayers who don’t believe county commissioners should be handing taxpayer money to private nonprofit organizations in the first place.
The system also puts commissioners in the position of choosing winners and losers among many, many groups asking for county money.
Some of the organizations are large and well known. Others are tiny operations that many county residents have probably never heard of.
And over the years there have been cases in which commissioners have strongly supported particular nonprofits, had longstanding relationships with them or even served on boards connected to organizations seeking county funding.
That has periodically led to questions about whether the grants are based entirely on need and merit or, in some cases, on which organizations have the strongest champions on the Board of Commissioners.
Still, whatever anyone thinks of the county’s nonprofit funding program, the organizations applying for money this year followed the process Guilford County established.
Many spent considerable time preparing applications and financial information, and some had been planning their programs around the expectation of receiving county money.
Now they’re being told the rules changed in the middle of the game.
Alston, a Democrat, said the situation is frustrating, but praised County Manager Victor Isler, county attorneys and other staff members for responding quickly to the change.
“It is aggravating,” Alston said. “But we have very good staff, an excellent county manager, excellent department heads, an excellent attorney that’s basically telling us what we can do and what we can’t do.”
Alston said county officials aren’t looking for creative ways around the new requirements.
“If we can’t do it, we just can’t do it,” he said. “There’s no sense in trying to figure out a way to go around it when it’s explicit and that you just can’t use race.”
He added, “The law is the law.”
“People in power, they make the law, then you’ve got to respect the law,” he said. “Or you can take them to court and try to sue.”
Alston added that Guilford County isn’t currently planning a legal challenge – though he said there’s been discussion among outside organizations about possible litigation over the new restrictions.
For Guilford County, however, the job now will be on Thursday afternoon: getting a new CBO funding process in place so nonprofit organizations can apply yet again and, eventually, get the county money some of them expected to have months
