Waves of foundations project
My basic argument in this project is the following: whether a public policy problem is tackled by private money is partly a random outcome of history. As the leaders of economic transitions and technological revolutions amass great fortunes, they create waves of philanthropic foundations (think of Carnegie and Rockefeller, or Gates and Zuckerberg). I hypothesize that these foundations’ missions are an exogenous function of the streams of unmet policy concerns at the time of their creation. To the extent that foundations’ missions are sticky, under the right conditions, a public agenda item might be funded (or neglected) by foundations for generations, all because of an accident of history –were there fortunes looking for philanthropic ends at the right time? In other words, if my expectations are correct, we should see cycles of foundation creation, and thus cycles of philanthropic agendas, that are the product of historical accidents but then crystallize and become path-dependent over time. This suggests a feedback loop whereby foundations and governments' agendas influence and shape each other over time.
Navigating the roles of nonprofit police foundations in times of unrest
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In the last decades, police foundations have proliferated. But more than a year of racial justice protests may have increased the scrutiny under which police foundations have found themselves. Using data from a new survey, we conduct qualitative and quantitative analyses to assess the extent to which police foundations have been affected by this movement and how they have responded to demands for racial justice and criticisms of police. How has a year of scrutiny of police brutality and calls for change affected their finances? Their transparency? Their relationships with local communities and police departments?
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Change can be good: A new perspective on mission drift
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While the phrase “mission drift” suggests that mission change is inherently bad for nonprofits, this paper challenges this assumption by introducing a more value-neutral approach to organizational change. Against the notion that change involves mission abandonment, this study intends to show how positive change in the form of “mission adaptation” can occur in nonprofit organizations. To be more specific, we focus specifically on the conditions under which a nonprofit’s mission is displaced. Using resource dependence theory, the study derives propositions on how resource diversification, government funding, and competition affect a nonprofit’s potential for programmatic and administrative drift. The data for this study will come from a survey of nonprofit human service organizations studying changes in their mission during the Covid-19 pandemic.
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