Brent Never

Understanding Constraints on Nonprofit Leadership Tactics in Times of Recession

The impact of the global recession has served to increase resource pressures on voluntary organizations in many social service sectors, serving to constrain the choices that organizational leaders can make in the face of changing resource niches. Not all organizational leaders face the same set of viable choices in the face of both changing demands from funding bodies and highly dynamic resource niches. Drawing on theories of organizational change, it is possible to identify three key factors that will serve to limit the tactics that voluntary organizations can employ: niche-level dynamics, niche density, and the presence of organizational champions. These three factors are illustrated through an analysis of the effects of the economic recession in Northern Ireland on two subsectors: community development and youth-serving organizations. We conclude with a call for greater theoretical and empirical development of the resource niche as the appropriate unit of analysis.

The Effect of Government Contracting on Nonprofit Human Service Organizations: Impacts of an Evolving Relationship

Governments contract with human service nonprofits to provide services in complex environments (Frahm & Martin, 2009). This article builds on the robust literature of public contracting for human services, but considers the effect of contracting on the contractor rather than the government. Using the National Survey of Nonprofit Government Contracting and Grants, conducted during the financial recession, we consider how contracting practices are harming trust. We find that human service nonprofits are more likely to cut salaries and jobs due to having government contracts, leading one to question whether the partnership mode of contracting will remain effective.

Framing Third-Sector Contributions to Service Provision: The Case of the Holy Cross Dispute

Third-sector organizations provide essential services, but not all types of organizations operate equally well given different intensities of public problems. This article considers the need to create three-dimensional maps of the sector matching populations of service providers with the intensities of public problems where they operate. It does so by providing a framework for understanding third-sector organizational service provision. It is illustrated by following a case of essential service provision in the face of state failure. It concludes by highlighting the utility of three-dimensional maps for policy makers.

Elinor Ostrom’s Contribution to Nonprofit and Voluntary Action Studies

Elinor “Lin” Ostrom, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics, spent her career developing ideas and tools to address the concept of governance—what Oliver Williamson describes as the “provision of good order and workable arrangements.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Action (NVA) scholars are similarly concerned with good order and workable arrangements but draw on different, if not more disparate, scholarly traditions. This special issue sheds light on the promise that integration of the tools developed by Ostrom and NVA scholarship holds. In this article, including its primer appendix, we provide a broad introduction to the tools created by Lin and her collaborators at The Ostrom Workshop (the “Workshop”) in the interest of exploring their utility for NVA scholars’ central questions.

Scope and Trends of Volunteering and Associations

This chapter has two themes: (1) the scope of formal and informal volunteering and of nonprofit, voluntary, membership associations (MAs) in the world, by which we mean the quantitative magnitudes of these phenomena at or near the present time, and (2) the long-term and recent (past few decades) trends in these magnitudes. Global data are used, when available, but we also report data for world regions and for specific nations when feasible. Besides such data, we also report on estimated magnitudes of association wealth and income, the economic value of volunteering, internal structures and processes of associations, participation rates in associations, and issues regarding computer mapping of data such as that presented in this chapter. Usable knowledge, future trends, and needed research are discussed.

Moving to Need: The Effect of Federal Contracts on Service Provider Location

Abstract Place matters, particularly when one considers human services. Proximity to individuals served is particularly important in those human services dedicated to people with low mobility or elevated fears of difference. Our project aims to explore the location decisions of job placement and training nonprofits at a national level. Relying on four separate data sets - 990 data from the National Center of Charitable Statistics, federal contracting from the Federal Audit Clearinghouse, and American Community Survey data at the census tract level - we analyze nonprofit movement from 2008–2012 and assess the impact of federal contracts on the prevalence to move. This analysis finds that federal contracts played a powerful but double-edged role in redistributing job placement and training agencies. First, federal contracts seem to have helped nonprofits move to ‘better’ neighborhoods post-recession. Second, and somewhat contradictory, we also find that post-recession these same agencies were located in far worse neighborhoods than non-contracted counterparts that also moved during the recession.

The Cost of Accountability for Small Human Service Contractors

ABSTRACT Human service contractors are an integral part of producing public services. Performance contracting over 30 years has increased accountability measures in order to mitigate transaction costs. Here we address whether the focus on accountability increases unreimbursed costs, something that is particularly harmful to small nonprofit contractors. Using a national survey of the government-nonprofit relationship, conducted by the Urban Institute in 2010, along with lagged financial indicators, we find that nonreimbursed costs associated with accountability harm human service nonprofits.

Prevalence Rates of Associations across Territories

This chapter reviews research on incidence–prevalence–exit (demise) rates of membership associations (MAs) across sets of geographic territories of varying scope, with a main focus on explaining MA prevalence rates (frequencies of associations in a territory). Basic changes in the economic structure/system of societies explain the four, global, associational revolutions in human history over the past 10 millennia (Smith 2016b). The determinants of prevalence vary across levels of analysis, but sheer population size is always a major determinant of greater absolute MA prevalence. Other important influences on MA prevalence at the level of nations include gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, average level of formal education, extent of civil liberties, government expenditures per capita, MA density in prior time period, prevalence of association-support infrastructure organizations, and experience with democracy (Schofer and Longhofer 2011; Smith and Shen 2002).