Foundation Impact on Environmental Nongovernmental Organizations: The Grantees' Perspective (original) (raw)
Related papers
Purpose -This paper seeks to examine executive directors' perceptions of the relationship between access to funding and an organization's programmatic and advocacy activities. Design/methodology/approach -This study is based on data from a national survey of executive directors of non-profit advocacy organizations in the USA. The organizations were selected because they served minority and disadvantaged groups, and were heavily reliant on public funding. Findings -The findings indicate that several factors are associated with how organizations balance their programmatic and advocacy activities. They include dependence on public funding, constituencies served, and perception of funders. Despite evidence for institutional pressures to reduce advocacy activities, the results indicate that such activities are sustainable in organizations with a strong individual donor base. In essence, a stable source of grassroots resources can counter institutional pressures to reduce advocacy. Research limitations/implications -This study focuses on a specific subgroup of advocacy organizations. Although it offers insights into their perceptions, the findings do not necessarily reflect more general perceptions. Social implications -The findings enhance understanding of impediments to non-profit advocacy that stem from trends in public funding and regulations related to non-profit lobbying and advocacy activities. The findings also enhance understanding of the extent to which the influences of the emerging non-profit industrial complex are offset by traditional grassroots support for non-profit advocacy. Originality/value -This paper adds to the body of research on non-profit decision making in relation to the balance between programmatic and advocacy work. It adds to the understanding of how organizations interface with larger institutions in society and the constraints that institutional ties entail.
The effects of perceived funding trends on non‐profit advocacy
International Journal of Public Sector Management, 2011
PurposeThis paper seeks to examine executive directors' perceptions of the relationship between access to funding and an organization's programmatic and advocacy activities.Design/methodology/approachThis study is based on data from a national survey of executive directors of non‐profit advocacy organizations in the USA. The organizations were selected because they served minority and disadvantaged groups, and were heavily reliant on public funding.FindingsThe findings indicate that several factors are associated with how organizations balance their programmatic and advocacy activities. They include dependence on public funding, constituencies served, and perception of funders. Despite evidence for institutional pressures to reduce advocacy activities, the results indicate that such activities are sustainable in organizations with a strong individual donor base. In essence, a stable source of grassroots resources can counter institutional pressures to reduce advocacy.Researc...
Public and Private Dimensions of Grantmaking Foundations
This paper considers the extent to which grantmaking foundations in the United States are more or less public or private given multiple conceptualizatio ns of what is meant by these terms across disciplines. An overview of foundations is provided for the purpose of highlighting differences in structure, operations, and missions or objectives. A hegemonic definition and description of the private nature of grantmaking foundations is presented, and argued to be a perspective that fundamentally conditions how foundati ons operate and how they relate to external stakeholders. Different foundation types are contrasted in the context of four other contested conce ptualizations of public and private : regulation of institutional activity; pursuit of a public interest, purpose, or good; impact on others; and distribution of benefits to whole or part of a whole. The analysis concludes that grantmaking foundations have unique institutional claims to a mix of public and private dimensions beyond the hegemonic perspective that foundations should operate and be seen as primarily private entities.
Contextualizing Foundation-Grantee Relations
A quick scan of the literature might lead one to believe that private foundations are extensively opaque to outsiders and disproportionately powerful in their relationships with grant seeking nonprofits. Issues of foundation transparency and foundation-grantee power sharing are attracting increasing attention throughout the field and in the literature. Opaque practice compounded by unequal power is most certainly confounding to the public's ability to see into charitable intent and activity, as well as to the development of foundation-grantee relations. Many outside of private philanthropy are calling for increased foundation transparency. The public credibility required to maintain favorable public policy (e.g., tax advantages, ability to practice outside the public's watchful eye, perpetuate insider control) and the civic trust needed to act as genuinely effective agents of change seem explicitly related to some level of transparency. Still, some believe the non-public circumstances in which private philanthropy is practiced offer a unique capacity to innovate – to disrupt and improve existing strategies and practices in pursuit of beneficial social change. Private foundations possess unparalleled capacity to resist unwanted outside interference and to make grant decisions with less concern about potential political benefit or consequence. Finally, it is said that private foundations are freer than more public grant making organizations to experiment without potential for damaging their institutional reputations as a consequence failure. Both sides of the foundation transparency discourse offer compelling arguments. Moving beyond a societal perspective on this matter to the matter of foundation-grantee collaboration, both transparency and power sharing are important issues in the development of effective foundation-grantee relations. Non-operating foundations rely extensively upon grantee partners for the executional capacity to pursue charitable objectives. Without grantee partners, foundations would be largely impotent in their efforts to benefit society. Research clearly shows that inter-organizational collaboration, such as effective foundation-grantee relations, demands mutual respect, trust, and perceived value. These three attributes of inter-organizational collaboration are most certainly underscored by mutual commitments to transparency and shared power, which the literature suggests too often fails to exist in private philanthropy. While many grant seeking nonprofits may experience private foundations as inaccessible, opaque, and disproportionately powerful, an examination of 33 private foundations and paired grantees found that there is more to this story. It turns out that private foundations become increasingly transparent and more willingly share power with select grantees under specific circumstances. Under these circumstances, grantees report their experiences with private foundations as especially satisfying and productive. With remarkable consistency, these particular grantees reported that they preferred working with private foundations over other kinds of grant making organizations. Benefits associated with working with private foundations included elevated respect, trust, access to valuable intangible resources beyond funding, and ability to safely engage in risky pursuit of new innovations. In these cases, foundations were experienced as intimately accessible, highly relational, deferential to grantee concerns/interests, and deeply respectful. These reported behaviors are dramatically different than observations typically made about private foundations in the literature. Observations typically reported in the literature are often based upon broad surveys of grant seekers and/or individually
Studies examining the role of philanthropic foundations in advancing social change have primarily focused on the impact of foundations' financial resources. Few scholars have analyzed how foundations also leverage social mechanisms to advance and legitimate desired change. We conceptualize philanthropic foundations as agents of change known as institutional entrepreneurs to illuminate the social mechanisms they employ in pursuit of institutional change. We study the case of charter schools within the field of U.S. public education, where foundations elevated a new organizational formthe charter management organization-by engaging in three social mechanisms: recombining cultural elements to establish the form, enforcing evaluative frameworks to assess the form, and sponsoring new professionals to populate the form with preferred expertise. We argue that foundations are distinctive due to their ability to simultaneously pursue social mechanisms that are often considered to be the realms of different types of institutional entrepreneurs.
VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 2021
Interest in collaboration between government and private, grantmaking foundations has grown considerably in recent years both in the USA and abroad. In the USA, one outcome of the increased interest has been the emergence of liaison offices in federal agencies tasked with facilitating partnerships between government and grantmaking foundations and others, such as corporate philanthropic programs. As the government/foundation relationship is still under-conceptualized, we propose a framework that extends general government/nonprofit relationship typologies to grantmaking foundations and present empirical evidence on the foundation roles that government liaison officers prioritize in developing partnerships with their foundation counterparts. Empirically, the article is based on semi-structured interviews with these officers in U.S. federal cabinet departments and independent agencies. Having foundation funding substitute for government outlays factors heavily for government liaison staff. At the same time, the role of foundations in seeding government innovation plays a relatively modest role, despite the prominence of the foundation innovation role in the literature. Rather than having government scale foundation-identified innovations, government liaison officers emphasize foundations funding support services that provide access to or enhance government programs and foundations providing expertise to help co-design better government programs.
The Foundation Review, 2014
• Alongside a growing interest in nonprofit capacitybuilding programs has come a growing concern with the impact of these programs, especially by organizations that fund them. This article describes how the McKinsey Organizational Capacity and Assessment Tool and, to a lesser extent, the Abt Associates survey have been used to assess changes in nonprofit capacity as part of nonprofit capacity-building programs. • Drawing on field experience with both survey instruments in the context of a foundationfunded nonprofit capacity-building program, this article compares the respective benefits and costs of these instruments from the perspective of evaluators as well as survey respondents. Both perspectives are combined to offer guidance for organized philanthropy, particularly for foundations that are considering the incorporation of surveys into the design and evaluation of their nonprofit capacity-building programs. • The more foundation leaders and evaluators can be aware of how survey instruments compare with one another, the better situated they will be to effectively integrate these tools into their capacity-building programs and, more broadly, their philanthropic practice.
Blurred Boundaries: A New World for Some Foundation/ Grantee Partnerships
We all know that the relationship between foundations and nonprofits is most often a highly unequal one. But not all foundation-nonprofit relationships are the same. A study of 33 private foundations revealed many cases in which foundations engage in highly intimate partnerships with select grantees. These partnerships blur the usual boundaries between foundation and nonprofit and are characterized by heightened expectations regarding transparency, willingness to take risks, commitment to elevated impact, and meaningful value creation. See posting at: https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2018/09/17/blurred-boundaries-a-new-world-for-some-foundation-grantee-partnerships/.
The Effects of Government Funding on Non -Profit Organizational Behavior
This dissertation addresses the problem o f determining the effects of government funding on non-profit organizational behavior. The definition of a non-profit organization is a formal organization, privately incorporated but serving a public purpose, self-governing, voluntary to some degree and non-profit distributing (Salamon, 1993). The literature review demonstrates the increasing role of non-profit organizations as a means o f social service delivery in the United States. As a result o f policy changes and funding opportunities, nonprofit organizations are increasingly providing services that were in the purview o f government. The hypothesis for this study is that government funding positively affects the organizational behavior of non-profit organizations in terms of advocacy behavior, alliance behavior and program diversification. The principal research question for this study is: "What is the direct effect o f government funding on nonprofit organizational behavior in terms of (a) advocacy behavior; (b) alliance behavior; (c) diversity o f programs?" This study relies on a data set o f 170 cases of nonprofit organizations in Louisiana generated by a random mail survey in 1997 and five extensive case studies completed in 1999. The results o f the study indicate that the organizational behavior of non-profits is affected by government funding. The results o f the logit and regression models o f the different funding/organizational scenarios are not as clear and convincing as one would like to report. However, the results generally confirm the premise o f the study. 1 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. services, forty-seven are non-profit organizations. Many of these organizations actively pursue state funding through advocacy and alliance activities. Several o f the largest non profit contractors are new organizations formed in the last ten years specifically for the purpose o f contracting with government. As non-profit organizations alter their missions to ''chase the funding," it is apparent that government funding is affecting the non-profit's organizational behavior. One o f the concerns in the non-profit sector is how to maintain the trust o f the public and the traditional expectations o f the sector, as the funding and regulatory landscape changes. This dissertation examines the effects o f government funding on the organizational behavior of non-profit organizations in Louisiana. This introduction addresses the historical importance and scope o f the non-profit sector, the significance of this study, and the conceptual framework and outlines the organization o f the dissertation. The study o f non-profit organizations is a growth industry because of the recognition among scholars and practitioners that non-profit organizations are institutions playing vital roles in modem democratic societies by serving as the guardian of the public good, providing essential community services, mobilizing community responses to problems through advocacy and education, and generally serving as a means to build the social capital o f the country (Salamon, 1997, 3). The scholarly community has increased its interest in non-profit organizations as a result of a better appreciation o f the significant economic and programmatic role of non-profit organizations. In the last forty years, non-profits have greatly expanded in i Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ' ARNOVA, is a community o f people dedicated to fostering the creation, application and dissemination o f research about voluntary action, non-profit organizations and philanthropy (www.amova.org). 5 ARD1 accomplishes this mission through advocating the importance o f effective leadership and management and conducting applied research which creates, enhances and facilitates utilization o f knowiedgefwww.ardi.org).