‘People Can’t Believe We exist!’: Social Sustainability and Alternative Nonprofit Organizing

Abstract

Nonprofit organizational sustainability is increasingly framed in terms of fiscal expediency. This framing of sustainability has led nonprofit organizations to increasingly adopt for-profit innovations, at times at the expense of core organizational values or nonprofit mission. Drawing on ethnographic field methods and semi-structured interviews, I examine how one anarchist-run homeless shelter resists and challenges current trends in nonprofit sustainability. I argue that by drawing on a personalist organizing model, this shelter offers a refutation of the necessity of adopting business-like organizing practices to maintain organizational sustainability. The findings from this paper highlight how this organization has used personal connections and anarchist organizing practices over more than 30 years to continue organizational operations in a shifting market economy. The results have implications for how nonprofit sustainability may be accomplished, and more broadly offers an alternative to the idealized marketized nonprofit organization.