Nonprofit Work Research Articles

Beyond “Psychic Income”: An Exploration of Interventions to Address Work-Life Imbalances, Burnout, and Precarity in Contemporary Nonprofit Work

Abstract Nonprofit scholars and practitioners alike adhere to a long-held assumption that nonprofit work is, and will remain, inherently meaningful work. The long-term marketization of the nonprofit sector coupled with the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic has undercut this narrative. Our research on meaningful nonprofit work indicates that while many nonprofit workers do find their work meaningful, pay, flexibility, and work/life balance are increasingly important to them. This commentary suggests that nonprofit leaders can no longer presume that workers motivated by prosocial values will seek out and stay with nonprofit work, satisfied with the “psychic income” that comes from doing good work. Nonprofits must be managed and led differently such that they center workers’ contemporary needs and desires. Organizational and public policy initiatives around pay equity and flexible work can support such a transition for the nonprofit sector.

Breast/Chestfeeding and HIV: Shared Decision-Making and the Needs of Women [ID: 1372281

INTRODUCTION: Breast/chestfeeding is considered both the healthiest infant-feeding option for the general population and the standard of care for birthing parents living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in resource-limited settings. Inadequate research on breastfeeding and HIV in high-resource settings has resulted in a lack of clinical guidance for providers to support informed decision-making among women living with HIV in these areas. METHODS: The Well Project, a nonprofit working to change the course of the HIV pandemic through a unique and comprehensive focus on women, conducted a survey in 2021 that included questions about breastfeeding experiences. Among 200 self-identified women living with HIV surveyed via Survey Monkey, 33 women reported experiences around breastfeeding. RESULTS: Forty-nine percent of women reported discussing breastfeeding with their provider—60% with ID providers and 57% with obstetrician–gynecologists. Half of respondents reported their provider initiated the discussion. Sixty-nine percent said their provider told them they could not breastfeed; 19% said they received incomplete/inaccurate breastfeeding information; and 13% reported their provider supported them in making the best decision for their families. CONCLUSION: These numbers, although small, supplement anecdotal evidence suggesting that most U.S. women living with HIV are not counseled according to the Perinatal HIV Guidelines, which recommend people living with HIV who are interested in breastfeeding receive patient-centered, evidence-based counseling on their options and those who choose to breastfeed be supported in order to minimize transmission risk. Education is greatly needed to ensure providers support their patients through this decision-making process.

Charitable assets: social outcomes, financial values, and the new, nonprofit funding regime

ABSTRACT Amidst growing signs of inequality, poverty, and marginalization, there have been calls for a new approach to funding the social sector organizations tasked with addressing these challenges. Rather than paying for services, governments and philanthropists are being encouraged to fund programs based on their ‘outcomes.’ This paper explores this growing movement around ‘outcomes-based funding’ (OBF) suggesting that outcomes in this context embody a distinctly financial logic and reflect an effort to turn the work of charities and nonprofits into a type of pseudo asset. The paper teases out these dynamics and their implications based on one particular form of OBF, the social impact bond, a financial instrument which uses private capital to fund social programs and calculates returns based on program outcomes. While SIBs have struggled as a market, the operations underlying these projects and informing the production of outcomes as investable assets have been carried forward into non-SIB work informing flows of public and philanthropic capital and embodying the practices of the larger OBF ecosystem. As a window into the new, outcomes-based nonprofit funding regime, the paper offers a unique lens and set of critical tools for exploring the relationship between capital, the social sector, and poverty governance.

How to improve nonprofit worker wellbeing and mental health

Years of health‐ and economic‐related disruption have left nonprofit workers straining under the pressure of supporting a struggling population. Executive directors and their boards can help prevent burnout and turnover by offering benefits that promote staff wellbeing without breaking the bank. Here's how.

Designing misinformation interventions for all: Perspectives from AAPI, Black, Latino, and Native American community leaders on misinformation educational efforts

This paper examines strategies for making misinformation interventions responsive to four communities of color. Using qualitative focus groups with members of four non-profit organizations, we worked with community leaders to identify misinformation narratives, sources of exposure, and effective intervention strategies in the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI), Black, Latino, and Native American communities. Analyzing the findings from those focus groups, we identified several pathways through which misinformation prevention efforts can be more equitable and effective. Building from our findings, we propose steps practitioners, academics, and policymakers can take to better address the misinformation crisis within communities of color. We illustrate how these recommendations can be put into practice through examples from workshops co-designed with a non-profit working on disinformation and media literacy.

Designing misinformation interventions for all: Perspectives from AAPI, Black, Latino, and Native American community leaders on misinformation educational efforts

This paper examines strategies for making misinformation interventions responsive to four communities of color. Using qualitative focus groups with members of four non-profit organizations, we worked with community leaders to identify misinformation narratives, sources of exposure, and effective intervention strategies in the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI), Black, Latino, and Native American communities. Analyzing the findings from those focus groups, we identified several pathways through which misinformation prevention efforts can be more equitable and effective. Building from our findings, we propose steps practitioners, academics, and policymakers can take to better address the misinformation crisis within communities of color. We illustrate how these recommendations can be put into practice through examples from workshops co-designed with a non-profit working on disinformation and media literacy.

Pause But Not Panic: Exploring COVID-19 as a Critical Incident for Nonprofit Workers

Critical incidents often have significant impacts on workers, sometimes causing disruptions to career pathways and a re-evaluation of past career decisions. This article seeks to explore the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on nonprofit workers and their commitment to the sector using a critical incidents lens. In-depth interviews with nonprofit workers provided insights on the pandemic’s impact on workers’ personal and professional lives and how they made sense of these. Changes to work including flexibility and work-from-home options were often viewed positively, yet workers expressed a loss of connection with their colleagues, mental health and well-being challenges, as well as challenges to adapt to new ways of working. In making sense of these changes, commitment to the sector was mostly sustained; however, respondents also noted a shift in priorities and expressed a desire for better balance between their personal and professional lives.

How the type of public benefit work in nonprofit organizations influences social media presence: an example from Facebook

How the type of public benefit work in nonprofit organizations influences social media presence: an example from Facebook

Beyond efficiency in low-income housing provision: Everyday negotiations of nonprofit staff and the limits to caring through marketized housing in Buffalo, New York

This paper analyzes how conflicting understandings of housing – housing as a commodity, a financial asset, a human right, and/or a form of service provision – coalesce in and are negotiated by nonprofit organizations that oversee low-income housing in Buffalo, New York. Critically analyzing nonprofit organizations as sites where discourses about housing come into conflict, I argue that the work of nonprofit staff materializes into the conditions of the contemporary system of housing provision and these organizations are important sites of everyday resistance to the marketization of low-income housing in the US. Through an institutional ethnography, I track how nonprofit workers fill the gaps in the private housing market in meeting the housing needs of low-income households. I also show how the marketization of low-income housing constrains nonprofit workers’ ability to enact a politics of housing as a right or a form of care. I look to the literature of feminist care ethics to argue that a broader, communal, and embodied understanding of housing provision could provide an alternative, non-marketized basis for a more just housing system – but one that must necessarily exceed the contemporary housing system.

There is No App for That: Manifestations of the Digital Divides During COVID-19 School Closures in India

The COVID-19 induced lockdowns forced people to shift several activities, including education, online. However, in the context of online schooling, the Digital Divides have magnified and perpetuated existing inequities in the education system and in society. Through a qualitative study with 48 participants across four stakeholder groups we find that students in under-funded government schools in India largely have not been able to access online classes because of a lack of devices, poor quality of Internet access, unreliable data networks and expensive data plans. We also document attempts by teachers and non-profit workers to use mass media broadcast technologies to work around the issue of digital access, highlighting the importance of a human infrastructure to build resilience during a disruptive event. Socioeconomic factors have also forced several students to drop out of schools and into taking up jobs to support their families. We document the importance of enabling environments and economic safety nets at home for online education to succeed. We present some focus points for researchers and policy makers working in the space of digital divide and education to build more resilient systems through Digital Welfarism.

Bargaining with the Black-Box

The increasing prevalence of large-scale labor aggregation platforms, worker analytics, and algorithmic decision-making by management raises the question of whether workers can use similar technologies to advocate for their own goals. Yet, there are inherent challenges in building worker-centric tools that collect, aggregate, and share data in responsible and ethical ways. In this paper, we present the design and deployment of the Shipt Calculator, a tool developed in collaboration with non-profit worker groups that allows app-based delivery workers to track and share aggregate data about their pay, increasing wage transparency. We first discuss the design challenges inherent to building worker-centric technologies, particularly for informally organized workers, and ground our discussion in the history of worker inquiry and co-research. We then describe some principles from this history and our own lessons in designing the Calculator that can be applied by future researchers and advocates seeking to build technical tools for organizing campaigns. Finally, we share the results of using the Calculator to audit an app's shift to a black-box pay model using data contributed by 140 workers in the Summer of 2020, finding that although the average pay per-order increased under the new payment model, almost half of workers experienced an unannounced pay cut during the shift, and many workers worked shifts that paid under their state's minimum wage. Finally, we discuss how tools like the Calculator demonstrate the important role that aggregate worker data, and a new Digital Workerism, can serve in creating and maintaining a more balanced platform economy.

How Are Nonprofit Workers Doing? Investigating the Personal and Professional Impact of COVID-19

COVID-19 has presented unprecedented challenges to the nonprofit sector, and while evidence is accruing about its impact on nonprofit finances and operations, less is known about how nonprofit workers are faring. With so many organizations in the increasingly professionalized nonprofit sector reliant upon their paid staff, this study assesses how COVID-19 has changed the way nonprofit workers think about their current and future work. We use a survey of nonprofit workers who have a nonprofit graduate degree to describe pandemic-related work changes and to explore the impact of these changes on their commitment to the sector. Our findings reveal that nonprofit workers are nuanced in how they approach their work and commitment to the sector. We distill our findings considerate of how future research should endeavor to unpack the degree to which workers’ personal and professional circumstances affect how they think about their work in the sector.

The influence of cognitive bias on crisis decision-making: Experimental evidence on the comparison of bias effects between crisis decision-maker groups

A crisis requires the affected population, governments or non-profit organizations, as well as crisis experts, to make urgent and sometimes life-critical decisions. With the urgency and uncertainty they create, crises are particularly amenable to inducing cognitive biases that influence decision-making. However, there is limited empirical evidence regarding the impact of cognitive biases on estimation, judgment, and decision-making tasks in crises. Possible biases occurring in crises are: (1) to be influenced by how information is framed (i.e., framing effect), (2) to overly rely on information that confirms rather than opposes preliminary assumptions (i.e., confirmation bias), (3) to rely heavily on a skewed informational cue when making estimations (i.e., anchoring bias), and (4) to see the own decision-making as less biased than decision-making of others (i.e., bias blind spot). We investigate these four cognitive biases using three online survey experiments targeting crisis-affected people of the general public (n = 460, mTurk workers), governmental and non-profit workers (n = 50, mTurk workers), and crisis experts (n = 21, purposefully sampled). Our findings show that crisis experts are the least biased group but are still significantly affected by anchoring, framing, and bias blind spot. Crisis-affected people from the general public showed the strongest susceptibility to all four biases studied. The findings have implications for future research on crisis information systems (IS) design. As crisis response is increasingly facilitated through IS, we propose debiasing functions that account for biased user behavior in crises.

Urban wildlife corridors: Building bridges for wildlife and people

Urbanization is rapidly expanding across the globe, leading to increasing threats to wildlife in and around cities. Wildlife corridors are one strategy used to connect fragmented wildlife populations; however, building wildlife corridors in urban areas remains a challenge because of the number of barriers between habitat patches and the extensive number of property owners and stakeholders involved. Successful urban wildlife corridor conservation thus requires a collaborative approach and a cohesive plan that transcends municipal boundaries. Here we demonstrate how urban wildlife corridor conservation can provide a unique opportunity to build bridges not only for wildlife but also among scientists, non-profits, government agencies, and communities. Our case study centers on the conservation of a network of wildlife corridors in one of the world's megacities, Los Angeles, and the positive feedback loop sparked by collaboration between research and non-profit work. We discuss the benefits of and challenges to building complex collaborations for the purpose of strengthening urban resilience and redesigning sustainable cities.

The Role of Policy in Prevention: Protecting People and the Environment

While the role of governments in promoting health policies and regulations to protect and support all its citizens, particularly those more vulnerable, needs to be reaffirmed, the work of non-profit organizations should be highlighted. Nsedu Obot Witherspoon discusses the mission, contributions, and actions of a national non-profit organization–the Children’s Environmental Health Network–that strives to foster equity, protect all children from environmental hazards, and promote safe and healthy environments for children to thrive in. This commitment is challenged by the traditional approach to environmental health laws and regulations that is based on proving harm from environmental hazards, such as carcinogens, before measures are taken to protect all, especially the most vulnerable. The goal of fostering a cancer free society is a collective and shared endeavor, which requires to acknowledge and address the troubling effects of systemic discrimination and racism on low wealth, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities.

Preparing Nonprofit Professionals: An Educational Needs Assessment from a Worker Perspective

Nonprofit management education is informed by curricular standards and feedback from students and alumni on the utility of its curriculum components. In a professionalizing and diverse nonprofit sector, we were curious to ask nonprofit workers about the skills and competencies they need for their work. Applying a survey design, we asked nonprofit workers about the skills and abilities they used in their work relative to general professional and nonprofit curricular standards. In our findings, we explore differences according to the professional profiles to make sense of the sector’s diverse workforce. Our assessment supplies fresh insight into the competencies nonprofit education promotes, describing how nonprofit professionals view the skills needed for their work, and how they think about professional development. The findings inform those who teach or administer nonprofit degree programs, as well as those who work or want to work in the nonprofit sector.

Review: Nowhere to Run: Race, Gender, and Immigration in American Elections, by Christian Dyogi Phillips

Review: <i>Nowhere to Run: Race, Gender, and Immigration in American Elections</i>, by Christian Dyogi Phillips

Nonprofits are undergoing a ‘great re‐evaluation’ and it's bolstering both people and purpose

The much‐touted “Great Resignation” has held a steady spot in the news cycle since early 2021, when following the initial effects of the Coronavirus pandemic, including significant layoffs and furloughs, people decided to voluntarily leave their jobs “en masse.” While the great resignation may be a catchy phrase, it may not accurately depict what has happened. I would argue that it incorrectly labels what has transpired in the nonprofit sector. Many nonprofit workers also left their jobs, and the rationale behind why is more accurately described as a “re‐evaluation.”

“Who Am I Fighting For? Who Am I Accountable To?”: Comradeship as a Frame for Nonprofit Community Work in Technical Communication

ABSTRACT While entrepreneurship is a pervasive cultural concept, it is not universally applicable. Drawing on a year-long study with nonprofit workers, this piece articulates a frame for understanding technical and professional communication work within nonprofits rooted in comradeship, which privileges community needs, everyday people, listening, and solidarity across stakeholder groups. Such a frame offers a more nuanced understanding of how accountability frames the work of nonprofit employees and other stakeholders dedicated to social justice.

The Racial Formation of Asian American Non-Profit Work in Orange County, California

This article examines how a distinct racialized identity of Asian Americans is asserted through the work of ethnic non-profit organizations in Orange County, California. This area is home to the third-largest Asian American population in the United States but also has historically been seen as a suburban region with limited infrastructure to support ethnic communities. Using a regional racial formation theory framework, this study shows how diversity has been integral to understanding the Asian American identity, but that the regional context matters in how we define this pan-ethnic identity and its diversity. This narrative of diversity expressed by non-profit organization community leaders contribute to a re-articulation of an Asian American identity that underscores the distinct mix of Asian ethnic groups that contrasts with older urban immigrant gateways; challenges the model minority stereotype through mental health and anti-Asian discrimination advocacy; and emphasizes place and issue-based work that extends beyond their ethnic communities. The findings highlight how Asian American non-profit work provides lessons for broadly addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion in public administration practice.