Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Nonprofits are increasingly involved in collaborative governance mechanisms, on the premise that their proximity to end users and better understanding of the local contexts can lead to better policy outcomes. Although government–nonprofit relations have been theorized and explored by several studies, few studies have examined specifically collaborative governance, instead focusing on other phases of policy development or service delivery. In this article, we present a realist evaluation of data gathered from in-depth semi-structured interviews (N = 41) and four focus groups with stakeholders involved in collaborative governance arrangements within “Strategic Public Social Partnerships” in Scotland. Our findings indicate that collaborative governance processes involving nonprofits can potentially lead to improved services through mechanisms such as the development of trust and the establishment of new learning dynamics, and when knowledgeable leadership and mutuality drive collaborations. However, this is only true if the long-term sustainability of these processes translates into the mainstreaming of both the resulting services and their underlying collaborative principles.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Demographic shifts, economic restructuring, online-giving platforms, and growing competition threaten traditional models of community philanthropy. Responding to these pressures, philanthropy thought leaders have supported “a new way forward” for community foundations—community leadership. However, change is difficult, and little research examines organizational processes of moving toward community leadership. This study uses a simultaneous qualitative mixed methods design to describe organizational paths to community leadership while considering field-level aspiration toward such change. To confirm previous research, we examine community foundation mission descriptions from 2011 to 2016, finding limited evidence that the field is aspiring toward the community leadership model. Using interviews with leaders of organizations that have begun to shift toward community leadership, we unpack how such transformation occurs. We find that change, even amid field-level pressures, unfolds through localized improvisation and bricolage as community foundations adapt their work to demands in their community.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Our contribution lies in exploring loci and reach of leadership diversity’s influence on proximal and distal performance outcomes to understand how and where these can be mobilized. Our moderated-mediation modeling decomposes the direct, indirect, and interaction effects of demographic diversity among three types of focal actors in governance—Boards (gender-, age-, and ethno-racial variety), Board Chairs (gender and ethno-racial demography), Chief Executives (gender and ethno-racial demography)—on five factors reflecting functional and social dimensions of Board Performance and two dimensions of Organizational Performance. We demonstrate that the Board composition affects proximal board performance outcomes, whereas CEO demography is more related to distal organizational performance outcomes. Board Chairs, a less-examined aspect of nonprofit governing, stand out as bridging both proximal and distal outcomes, both directly and through their interactions with Board diversity and CEO demography.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This study provides a novel methodology at the nexus of Customer Discovery and business analytics for critical location decisions charity retailers with circular supply chains face. It integrates spatial network analysis with Customer Discovery and multicriteria decision-making. Traditional analyses are primarily based on customer location but for donated goods applying Customer Discovery and expert judgment and systematic analysis of data prevails. This integration provides an agile approach to producing optimal alternative locations, which can be applied to Habitat for Humanity ReStore, and Goodwill Industries, and similar organizations globally. This cross-disciplinary approach is practical and cost-effective and can increase efficiency, decrease risks, and strengthen organizational buy-in. It categorizes the drivers affecting location decisions and combines the current business model search techniques and an overall analytical framework to create the Expert Knowledge and Evidence-Based Location Methodology (EKELM).

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. The research field of nonprofits and philanthropy has grown exponentially. To what extent do nonprofit scholars share a common language? Answering this question is crucial to assessing the field’s intellectual cohesiveness. We studied how coauthor networks, scholarly reputation, and the prevalence of female authors influence consensus formation. We found that the degree of consensus for all major research topics in the field has increased over time—For every 10% growth in the volume of literature, shared language increased by 1.4%. A cohesive research community on nonprofits and philanthropy has been forming since the early 2000s. Female scholars are fewer in number and less cited than males; their presence did not exceed 40% for most topics. The citation counts of scholars and small-world property of networks are positively associated with consensus, suggesting that star researchers and knowledge brokers bridging different intellectual communities are key to sharing research interests and language.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Nonprofit activity produces social benefits, brings engaged actors in social networks, and promotes a sense of community and belonging by instilling shared values and norms, resulting in community trust and support back to the nonprofit. This reciprocal pattern of community building features the nonprofit role in building social capital. Social capital develops in interaction with the entrepreneurship context. Social entrepreneurial models of nonprofit learning and innovation demonstrate the potential of new entrepreneurial methods and market opportunities to help organizations achieve desired social impacts. This article adds a discussion on nonprofit missions as a vehicle driving nonprofit learning and innovation to be motivated to facilitate community building. By developing a moderated mediation model, we propose that value-instilled innovation from the interactive form of learning and shared mission enhances the nonprofit role in building social capital. The findings support the hypothesized relationships, producing implications for the community-building motivation of nonprofit organizations.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. The collapse of public services in Yemen due to a protracted crisis raging since 2015 has compelled some local citizen-based coalitions to initiate community-based service delivery. This preliminary study identifies Community-Based Initiatives (CBIs) as non-state actors supplying basic services ordinarily provided by governmental institutions. It offers an overview of Yemen’s humanitarian crisis while focusing on public services provision pre- and mid-conflict and highlights the role of CBIs as a response to its breakdown within a severely fragile context. As this work considers CBI a societal constituent and not simply a temporary phenomenon, it discusses the general trends of Civil Society. This article fills the gap in the literature and compares the Western perspective and application of CBIs in Yemen aiming at developing a more specific and contextual conception. The analysis lays the foundation for much needed future studies on the role of informal organizations in service provision in developing countries of the Global South.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. To mark the 50th anniversary of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA), this article reviews the association’s history, from its 1971 founding by a small group of scholars interested in voluntary action to the current association of more than 1,000 members who study a broad range of nonprofit, civil society, voluntary action, and philanthropic topics. To inform the history, we recorded oral histories and reviewed the ARNOVA collection of historical records at the Ruth Lilly Archives and internal files provided by ARNOVA. Our article is divided into three important junctures of change: 1971–1989, the founding period; 1990–2006, the golden era of philanthropic support; and 2007–2020, a maturing field and strategic directions. Through our analysis, we identify recurring themes and tensions and how ARNOVA navigated through a changing environment and growing field. We conclude the article with forward-looking questions.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This article examines the uptake of social justice and climate change as focal issues among the largest U.S. environmental nonprofits. We use 2016 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) filings to identify 5,413 large environmental nonprofits of which 8% attend to issues of climate and 10% to issues of social justice. Larger organizations are more likely to attend to issues of climate change and social justice, as are groups founded more recently. Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling of organizational mission statements and descriptions of major activities is used to assign groups to six distinct issue categories. Results highlight the divide between wildlife groups that are decidedly unlikely to attend to issues of either climate or justice, and the rest of the national environmental movement. Energy and natural resource groups, while strongly vested in climate issues, rarely attend to social justice. These findings have clear implications for climate and justice advocates seeking change in the environmental advocacy sector.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Across the world, many individuals, organizations, and communities rely on the charitable contributions of others to meet critical needs. However, receiving aid can be challenging if donors discriminate against solicitors based on their demographic characteristics. We examined the potential impact of two of such characteristics, namely, the solicitor’s race and gender, by soliciting contributions from 162 dentist offices through phone calls, manipulating race (Latino/White) and gender (male/female) of the caller. We analyzed differences between race and gender on the likelihood of receiving donations and interpersonal interactions rated by blind coders. Logistic regression results revealed Latinos were significantly less likely to receive donations than Whites, and women were marginally more likely to receive donations than men. Multivariate analysis of variance results indicated, however, that Latinos received significantly better interpersonal treatment than Whites. Results show support for Patronization Theory extended to the solicitation context. Implications of these findings and future directions for research are discussed.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. We study the charitable behavior of the wealthiest individuals in a very affluent and unequal society, that of the Dutch during their “Golden Age” (late 16th to the 17th centuries). Did these wealthy elites share their prosperity with those less fortunate? Using rare data from printed sources and wills located in archives, we study their inter vivos giving as well as their charitable bequests. Our study shows that the elites were surprisingly uncharitable: Only 15% made documented life-time gifts, and their bequests were valued around 1% of their wealth. Charity was embedded in the whole social fabric save the frugal top. Our results show that burghers made more documented life-time gifts than those belonging to the nobility and regent classes. In addition, those belonging to a religious minority as well as those without children gave more. We conclude our article with implications and limitations of elite philanthropy for society.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Climate change is increasing the likelihood and magnitude of disaster impacts. The nonprofit sector’s ability to address disaster survivors’ needs will become an increasingly important aspect of adapting to a changing climate. Disaster recovery also provides time for nonprofits to affect community resilience to future disasters and climate change. This article analyzes a unique phenomenon of the sector during disaster recovery: Long-term Recovery Groups. These groups are increasingly encouraged by government and national nonprofits, yet little academic research exists on them. We assess the existence and location of groups, their missions and tasks, and their legal structure. We find heterogeneity in structure and location but similarity in stated goals of addressing failures of government and private sector recovery practices. These groups emerge, as expected, in areas with disaster losses and in areas with slightly greater social vulnerability. Most groups, though, miss the opportunity to include climate change as part of their mission.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. The impact of minimum wage increases on employment has been extensively examined with mixed results. We extend the literature by hypothesizing and showing a differential impact of state-level minimum wage increases on nonprofit organizations as opposed to for-profit organizations. While we find that increases in minimum wages reduce employment growth in both types of organizations, this decrease is substantially larger for nonprofit organizations. We also find that investment in automation, that is, information technology, rises in nonprofits postminimum wage increase, consistent with the substitution of capital for labor. Minimum wage increases also increase the likelihood of nonprofit exit.JEL: J38, J68, L

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Some microfinance institutions (MFIs) can drift from their social mission, generating well-studied effects for their borrowers. We focus on the lesser-known effect of mission drift on the financial return to other stakeholders (employees, government, micro-savers, and banking creditors). Using a sample of 534 MFIs, we calculated the economic value distributed by the MFI to these stakeholders by considering salaries, taxes, and interest paid. We found a negative relationship between average loan size and return to employees (RTE), government, and banking creditors, and a positive relationship between women borrowers and RTE and government. This is explained by the fact that mission-focused MFIs are usually small, labor-intensive institutions with a stable business model. We found a positive relationship between average loan size and return to micro-savers, and a negative relationship between women borrowers and return to micro-savers. The reason is that many mission-focused MFIs do not offer micro-savings, undermining financial inclusion.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Disparate research on overhead aversion and nonprofit starvation can benefit from a conceptual model that explains their relationships. Following resurrection of such a model, we focus on one important piece: the relationship between overhead spending and nonprofit donations. Studies on this topic have produced inconclusive results. Our meta-analysis clarifies the relationship by synthesizing a sample of 30 original studies with 244 effect sizes. We uncover a negative association suggesting that donors penalize nonprofits with higher overhead costs. Moreover, our meta-regression models reveal that experimental designs detect higher donor aversion than studies that use other research designs and that amateur donors have more intense overhead aversion than professional donors. However, studies that measure administrative costs do not report more negative effects than studies that measure both administrative and fundraising costs. The overall contribution of the meta-analysis solidifies the conceptual link between reported capacity costs and funders’ giving decisions, a key arc in the nonprofit starvation cycle.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Voluntary participation in local groups or organizations varies by individual and across communities. Few studies examine the influence of structural resources on voluntary participation, with prior studies often considering it a single, binary action. Drawing from three data sources, we examined the extent to which individual-level and community-level factors—including the presence of nonprofit organizations—were associated with voluntary participation. We model participation as two distinct actions and estimate the likelihood of respondents participating in one organization or group compared with the likelihood of participating in multiple organizations or groups. We found individual characteristics such as homeownership, marriage, and better health were associated with participation in only one group or organization. Identifying as White, having some college education, more children per household, and church attendance were positively associated with participating in one group or organization and subsequent participation. At the community level, nonprofit density was positively associated with voluntary participation.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. In this article, we introduce the concept of “engageability,” which refers to the ability of volunteer-employing nonprofit organizations to engage, motivate, and manage volunteers to maximize their potential and sustain the volunteering human resource. Engageability conceptually complements the two well-established concepts of volunteerability and recruitability. By offering this conceptual framework, we enable volunteer-employing organizations to assess the degree to which they are engaging volunteers and to make improvements in this regard. Engageability questions how organizations that have already recruited volunteers make themselves volunteer-friendly and engage volunteers effectively. Based on the literature, we offer a comprehensive framework that considers a large set of organizational practices from germane to engageability, framing them into four fundamental clusters: (a) value-based (ideological), (b) managerial, (c) physical, and (d) supportive connections. We introduce the conceptual model and provide explanation for each cluster and each with-cluster organizational practices and discuss the potential contribution of this conceptual model.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Donors often experience donation regret caused by charity wrongdoings and mismanagement, which will reduce future donation willingness. The literature has not fully delineated the underlying mechanism of donors’ response to experienced regret. The effective advertising appeal and message framing which could be used to mitigate the detrimental impact of experienced donation regret also remain unknown. This research dissects the impact of experienced regret on donation willingness by revealing the mediational effect of anticipated regret and the moderating role of advertising appeal (altruistic vs. egoistic) and message framing (gain- vs. loss-framed). The findings of two studies demonstrate that experienced regret negatively influences donation willingness through anticipated regret. Compared with egoistic appeals, altruistic appeals are more effective in extenuating the impacts of experienced regret. Gain-framed (compared with loss-framed) messages better mitigate anticipated regret and result in a higher level of willingness to donate. In addition to theoretical contributions, actionable practical implications are discussed.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. In recent years, the emergence of new legal forms allowing for-profit firms to incorporate with a formal commitment to both profit and social purpose has disrupted the traditional American business-charity dichotomy. The arrival of these hybrid firms can be expected to affect the functioning of markets and poses a potential challenge to the role played by large nonprofits that provide quasi-public services such as education and health care. We construct duopoly models of competition between a nonprofit firm and either a traditional for-profit firm or a hybrid firm, simultaneously choosing output levels of a homogeneous good. We show that when the nonprofit competes with a hybrid firm it becomes less competitive in the sense that its output level contracts, it raises less net revenue with which to fund charity care, and it is more easily driven out of the market.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Communities, intended as self-organized informal groups, are much less structured than nonprofit organizations typically considered by Cross-Sector Social Partnership (CSSP) studies. Building on the empirical investigation of a real CSSP, this article offers an in-depth analysis of the ambivalent dynamics implied by partnership with such communities. Our findings indicate that the mechanisms that create room for innovative collaboration opportunities made available by these communities (such as co-innovation, pricing co-determination, co-financing, and democratic decision making) can also, over time, adversely affect the partnership and cause it to permanently lose its shared purpose. In our conclusion, we provide potential remedies for the latter scenario and discuss how they may enrich CSSP literature.

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