Shena Ashley

Nonprofit Performance, Fund-Raising Effectiveness, and Strategies for Engaging African Americans in Philanthropy

During the past two decades, the field of philanthropy has grown in its knowledge base, knowledge sharing, and sophistication in reaching out to and cultivating donors and volunteers. The growing literature focusing on African American philanthropy has contributed to that knowledge base. Throughout much of the research conducted, African Americans are found to be an untapped philanthropic resource who have yet to be leveraged. Yet previous studies provide mixed results on giving and volunteering profiles and the impact of certain solicitation strategies. In this study, the authors use survey data from the Atlanta metro region to do what no other study on African American philanthropy has done. Using multivariate analysis, the authors match fundraising strategies to sociodemographic characteristics to create a development taxonomy to assist nonprofits in effectively engaging this group of potential donors. Nonprofit organizations can use these development taxonomies and empirical findings to enhance their fund-raising operations and improve nonprofit performance.

Is the Inequality Equitable? An Examination of the Distributive Equity of Philanthropic Grants to Rural Communities:

The primary question in this study is whether the inequality observed in rural and urban giving patterns is equitable. Practitioners and policy makers have expressed concern about equity in foundation giving, but these concerns are often conflated with equality measures. The focus of this article is to disentangle equity and equality and then propose—in the absence of equity standards in philanthropic literature—three equity standards that can be used by scholars, practitioners, and policy makers to assess the spatial distributional equity of philanthropic grant making. In an illustrative application of the equity standards to grants made in 2005 by foundations in the state of Georgia, it is determined that rural communities receive an equitable share of philanthropic grants and grant dollars in the state.

Inherent System Dynamics of Instability and Resilience in Nonprofit Human Services

This study advances the notion that the observed instability of nonprofit human service organizations may be inherent to the institutional environment and that decisions to save in order to smooth resources across the business cycle may be, in part, outside of the control of any single organization. The conclusion drawn from the analysis points to a need for more sufficient reserve funds in the sector. But, the discussion of barriers in the institutional environment raises the caution that increasing reserve funds in these organizations cannot simply be done by encouraging better financial management practices. Consideration has to be given to reducing the barriers created by the set of complex perspectives and norms that affect the legitimacy of surplus accumulation.

Introduction: public administration and international relations – converging on a new research frontier

There is now a vast collection of global and regional institutions, nongovernmental organizations, ad hoc groups and advocacy networks engaged in activities to advance policy goals across a broadening range of public issues. With the rise of this new ‘governance architecture’ (Biermann and Siebenhüner, 2009) and its associated bureaucracies, there is a new crop of global public professionals – largely hidden from public view – working to formulate and implement public policy in a transnational context. Together, these groups are active in global governance, a term defined most broadly by Finkelstein (1995, p. 369) as ‘governing, without sovereign authority, relationships that transcend national boundaries . . . doing internationally what governments do at home.’ This definition of global governance makes it clear that it is an area suitable for the study of public administration since there is leadership and management of publicserving organizations and implementation of public policy. With the growth of international organizations and bureaucracies, an important task lies before public administration theorists and researchers to describe and examine the purposes, values, legitimacy, authority and accountability of these institutions. The global governance arena presents a unique opportunity to contemplate how the nature and practice of administration is transformed in a context where the role of the state is changed and where the lack of a formal government means global public professionals are not directly accountable to elected officials and citizens. Research is also needed at the level of operations to understand and inform the structure, functions and activities within these organizations. This is still largely uncharted territory in need of theoretical and empirical inquiry. As it stands, we are lacking a systematic, generalizable body of knowledge about how international organizations and bureaucracies make decisions and the factors that affect their performance and responsiveness.