Revisiting Nonprofit Carrying Capacity

Abstract

This paper re-examines the concept of nonprofit carrying capacity. While alarms have been raised that too many nonprofits competing for a finite pool of resources are impacting the performance of the nonprofit sector, there is limited empirical evidence to how the density of nonprofit organizations impacts the health of the nonprofit sector. While the concept of carrying capacity and measures of organizational density figure prominently in ecological studies of nonprofits and descriptions of the sector, there have been few attempts to connect the concepts of carrying capacity to the fiscal health of the sector in order to test concerns about the overcrowding in the sector.