Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This article explores how to inspire youth to volunteer. Drawing on ideas of inspiration and motivational framing, we develop insight into how constructing and cultivating a sense of efficacy and obligation pushes a young individual passively inspired by the good deeds and acts being performed in the third sector into becoming someone who is inspired to take action and volunteer. Getting out into the real world of practice allowed us to explore the situated practices carried out in a youth summer internship program. We find that five program practices—authorizing, creating safe relational spaces, reflecting, revealing privilege, and simplifying—fostered an emergent action-oriented set of beliefs that supplied the impetus youth needed to become inspired to volunteer. This has implications for our understanding of the inspirational process as well as for philanthropic foundations looking to design effective programs. Limitations and directions for future research are also discussed.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Third-sector organizations (TSOs) in Europe have been confronted with profound changes to their regulatory and societal environments. By applying the concepts of “organizational paradoxes” and “governance,” we analyze how TSOs have adjusted their governance as a response to these environmental challenges. Based on organizational case studies in France, Germany, and the Netherlands, we argue that TSOs have found multiple ways to address tensions at the organizational level, for example, by mobilizing and combining resources, re-arranging their organizational governance and by adopting new legal forms. These changes have resulted in hybridization and increased organizational complexity that might translate into the emergence of new paradoxes at the organizational level. Therefore, dealing with paradoxes constitutes an ongoing process for TSOs that goes beyond incremental adjustments.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Trust is assumed to be important for charitable giving. However, disparate associations have been found, and recent theoretical approaches emphasize motives for giving that do not rely on trust. To resolve this tension, we conducted a systematic review of evidence generated between 1988 and 2020. A meta-analysis of 69 effect sizes from 42 studies sampling 81,604 people in 31 countries confirmed a positive association between trust and giving across diverse measures, r = .22. Meta-regressions showed that organizational (r = .35) and sectoral trust (r = .27) were more strongly associated with giving than were generalized (r = .11) or institutional trust (r = .14). The relationship was also stronger in non-western (vs Western) countries and in nonrepresentative (vs nationally representative) samples. All evidence was correlational, and few studies measured actual behavior. We discuss implications for theories of trust and for fundraising practice, and highlight critical gaps in evidence.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. How can charities solicit high-capacity donors to provide the funds for matching grants and leadership gifts? In conjunction with Texas A&M University’s fundraising organizations, we conducted a field experiment to study whether high-income donors respond to nonpersonal solicitations. We also designed the experiment to test the impact of allowing for directed giving on the giving behavior of high-income donors and their willingness to direct their donations toward overhead costs. High-income donors are not responsive to letters or emails, regardless of whether they have the option to direct giving; we cannot conclude, therefore, that giving behavior is different for those who could direct giving compared with those who could not. Our results highlight the difficulties of motivating some high-income donors, especially when only impersonal communication is used.

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