Jodi Sandfort

No longer unmeasurable? A multidimensional integrated model of nonprofit organizational effectiveness

Few topics in nonprofit research and practice have received greater attention in recent years than organizational effectiveness. In spite of this intellectual interest, little consensus has emerged, either theoretically or empirically, as to what constitutes organizational effectiveness and how best to measure it. In this article, we introduce a multidimensional and integrated model of nonprofit organizational effectiveness (MIMNOE). The model captures two prominent dimensions of organizational effectiveness, management effectiveness and program effectiveness. In addition, to illustrate how this framework can be used empirically, the article proposes a method of analysis that exploits the interrelationships between the multiple dimensions in the model. MIMNOE is useful for both scholars and practitioners because it requires attention not only to program outcomes, but also equally to the factors that influence those outcomes.

The Structural Impediments to Human Service Collaboration: Examining Welfare Reform at the Front Lines

This article examines the ability of frontline human service agencies to collaborate across organizational boundaries. Data come from an in‐depth study of the public welfare and private welfare‐to‐work contractors in two Michigan counties and document significant problems that arise from the inability of these two sectors to collaborate in the provision of welfare programs. I use ethnographic methods that capture the perspectives of frontline workers themselves in order to understand how collaboration is actually thwarted. In spite of dramatically different organizational settings, frontline staff in both sectors draw on the same sources of evidence, that is, past relations, daily experiences, and client stories, when assessing the organizations with which they are mandated to collaborate. These collective beliefs create parameters within which staff interpret events and react to them. Their interpretations and reactions further reinforce the beliefs shared throughout the organization about the legitimacy, efficiency, and effectiveness of the partner organization. In this way, the social process at the front lines of the welfare system creates systemic barriers to collaboration. I conclude by considering how this analysis can help the local manager improve policy implementation and human service collaboration.

Effects of Childhood Poverty on Productivity Later in Life: Implications for Public Policy.

Abstract This paper presents a conceptual model for better understanding how poverty jeopardizes a host of childhood and adulthood abilities. An explicit link is made between this conceptual model and various policy initiatives which attempt to curb poverty or its detrimental effects. To better flesh out the model—and illustrate the myriad ways poverty exerts its effects on childrens lives—this paper reviews related social science research. This review reveals that low family income compromises childrens physical growth, cognitive development and socio-emotional functioning. It decreases the achievement of children when they are in school and puts them at heightened risk of dropping out of school early. Studies also reveal that low childhood income impairs productivity later in life. While productivity is partly compromised through limited educational attainment, there are other important causal pathways not adequately explored in existing social science research.

Building a Policy Fields Framework to Inform Research on Nonprofit Organizations

Although the importance of the public policy environment for strategic action of nonprofit organizations has become increasingly clear, research on nonprofits is often divorced from their policy context. The purpose of this article is to present a theoretically informed framework for analyzing policy environments that can inform nonprofit research. Drawing on insights from political science, organization theory, public management, and nonprofit studies, the authors propose that the framework reflects a policy field that is an identifiable set of elements in a specific environment that directly shapes local public service provision. These elements include the structures created by institutions that deliver public programs and the ways in which state and local actors interact with and shape these structures as they work on public problems. Through a research example, the article presents the policy field framework’s analytic steps.

Using lessons from public affairs to inform strategic philanthropy

Although private, institutional philanthropy can be an engine of significant social change, often this possibility is not realized. This article creates a new framework to inform philanthropic strategy built from lessons gleaned from decades of public affairs research. Drawing on what is known about social change movements, government relationships with nonprofits, and nonprofit management, key questions help foundation staff develop and hone their strategy. A flexible framework for private investment in human services fields is developed and implications for practice and future research are considered.

Exploring The Structuration Of Technology Within Human Service Organizations

This article seeks to improve our understandings of the process and daily operations of human service organizations. Building on past research that characterizes the core technology of such organizations as inherently indeterminate, this article explores how frontline staff engage in a social process that actually structures their actions. Ethnographic data gathered using multiple methods in three welfare-to-work organizations are examined. Structuration theory is used to analyze these data and probe both the similarities and difference found among these three human service organizations. Implications for future research about human service organizations are discussed.

Do Government Tools Influence Organizational Performance? Examining Their Implementation in Early Childhood Education

This article explores whether the multiple tools used by government to implement social policy influence organizational performance. This analysis focuses on three tools—grants, contracts, and vouchers—and their use in the field of early childhood care and education. Through analysis of a field-based study of 22 organizations, the authors explore qualitative evidence and examine the relative consequences of each tool using multivariate modeling. The authors conceptualize organizational performance along four dimensions—management capacity, management outcomes, program capacity, and program outcomes—to better explore how government tools influence organizations delivering publicly funded services. Findings reveal that the different tools the government uses to implement early childhood programs have distinct consequences; grants have the most significant, positive consequences on a variety of desirable outcomes.

Learning to facilitate deliberation: practicing the art of hosting

Deliberation is increasingly embraced as a mode of policy-making, and this paper focuses on how facilitators of deliberative policy processes become critical, pragmatic practitioners of their complex craft. We analyze how deliberation facilitators learn to do their work through ethnographic study of an approach to facilitation known as the Art of Hosting and Harvesting Conversations that Matter. We identify three ways in which people learning to facilitate transform knowledge so that they become skilled facilitators. They do so by metabolizing hosting techniques to understand and incorporate or eschew them their repertoire; by situating hosting knowledge to apply or adapt it in particular contexts; and by coproducing knowledge of hosting with a community of practitioners. We demonstrate how these learning processes support public policy deliberations through illustrations and discuss the potential contributions of the Art of Hosting for enhancing societal capacities for deliberative policy-making.

InCommons: supporting community-based leadership

Cohort-based community leadership programs (CLPs) are a common approach to enhancing knowledge, skills, and networks within a particular community. However, the CLP model is resource intensive and, as a result, limited in impact. This article describes an alternative approach being undertaken on a statewide scale. InCommons is focused on activating a network that lets people find each other so they can share credible knowledge, resources, and insights for solving community problems. One dimension involves finding and sharing the information people need in a leadership commons. Another offers support through well-facilitated gatherings that allow communities to make progress in spite of thorny differences. Using a participatory action research (PAR) approach, we explain the theory of action informing the whole initiative and assess initial implementation in terms defined by community leaders. As such, this article provides practical insights for those interested in increasing the scale and impact of their work with community-based leaders.

Analyzing Policy Fields: Helping Students Understand Complex State and Local Contexts

Abstract A collaborative approach to public management is critical in an era of governance that depends upon networks more than centralized bureaucracies, yet public affairs education has not adequately responded to the need to develop new tools to support analysis of complex settings. Policy field analysis is one tool that can help professionals-in-training learn to act purposively within complex policy environments. Policy fields—public and private institutions, in a substantive public policy or program area, in a particular place—shape how state and local actors work to solve public management problems, and their pursuit of programmatic goals in turn shapes the policy field. Using a well-known teaching case, the authors present a series of analytical questions and mapping tools that help clarify the structure of complex policy environments; the institutional and interorganizational relationships involved; and the resources that influence interactions in the policy field.