Joseph Mead

Source of Income Discrimination and Fair Housing Policy

The housing choice voucher program was designed with two main goals in mind: to eliminate concentrations of poverty and the social problems it causes and to provide poor households with greater access to higher-opportunity neighborhoods. However, research suggests that voucher holders would like to move to higher-opportunity neighborhoods, but often are unable to do so. One of the most prominent reasons for this is that, in most cities and states, local law allows landlords to discriminate against potential tenants on the grounds of their “source of income” (SOI). This article reviews the literature on discrimination of voucher recipients and the potential for SOI antidiscrimination laws to mitigate some of these negative outcomes.

Know Me Before You Speak for Me: Substantive Public Representation Among Nonprofits

Abstract Nonprofit and public administration scholars have increasingly turned attention to the wide variety of channels by which nonprofit organizations may influence public policy, raising critical questions about nonprofit representation. While recent years have brought important work about the extent to which nonprofits are perceived as symbolic representatives of their clients, scholars repeatedly note substantive representation remains understudied. This article seeks to address that gap by offering a conceptual framework of potential nonprofit substantive representation mechanisms. Two categories of mechanisms emerged from a scan of scholarly and practitioner literature—client engagement and client assessment, while an exploratory case study of one nonprofit’s explicit endeavor to improve substantive representation surfaced a third category—immersion. We offer this framework as a useful first step in organizing and presenting mechanisms for consideration, and to encourage future exploration and testing of mechanisms by which nonprofits may come to substantively understand those whom they represent.

A Legal Perspective on the Organization–Volunteer Relationship:

How does law view and shape the relationship between nonprofit organization and volunteer? To address this question, I draw on information from statutes, court decisions, and agency guidance from both the federal and state law in the United States. In general, “volunteer” is not a legally defined category in the United States, leaving a volunteer’s legal status to depend on whether the volunteering aligns with other, recognized types of relationships, such as employer–employee, principal–agent, or program–participant. By providing a synthesis of these varied legal rules as they apply to volunteers working for a nonprofit organization, this piece identifies different ways of describing the relationship between organization and volunteer, and the legal obligations and benefits that flow as a result.