This article examines how partnership between social organizations and popular protests is affected by the state in the field of environmental activism. Drawing upon content analysis and in-depth interviews, we study non-governmental organization (NGO) engagement with 22 grassroots environmental protests in China, 2007–2016. We find that NGOs and grassroots protesters were mostly distant from each other to avoid state repression and retribution, but NGOs occasionally collaborated with protesters in an ambivalent manner because state control was contradictory, fragmented, and varying. NGOs either used institutional means to support the protesters or were informally and invisibly involved in those protests. Our research contributes to studies of the triangular relationship between the state, NGOs, and social movements. Specifically, we find that when NGOs lack the institutional access to policy making but are not fully controlled by the state, they have both incentives and spaces to make joint actions with grassroots activists.

An area of ongoing debate is whether neighborhood organizations contribute to civic governance by enabling citizen influence in government, mobilizing constituents, and improving policy outcomes through localized knowledge, community organizing, and civic engagement. This article presents the findings of a study to understand the roles and contributions of neighborhood organizations in civic governance. The research design consisted of an exploratory and qualitative case study of individual interviews with 46 board presidents who described the roles of their neighborhood organizations within communities, in relationship to a city, and whether, and to what extent, they contributed to civic governance. Study participants characterized their neighborhood organizations’ roles according to three core themes: developing community and improving the neighborhood, educating and engaging citizens, and representing and advocating for the neighborhood. The findings reveal significant resource limitations that constrain civic engagement and participation capacities. Thus, as a result of the findings, I contend that there are several opportunities to strengthen their roles and contributions in civic governance.

This article presents the results of a survey of grant monitoring in 170 UK charities. The monitoring and evaluation process is modelled and the extent to which donors follow this is explored. Although over 70 per cent of donors monitored grants, a much smaller percentage proceeded to evaluate results. Reasons for this and an indication of how the processes are carried out are presented.

The objective of this paper is to analyze the historical roots and contribution to human development of civil society organizations in marginalized communities based on fieldwork undertaken in seven informal settlements of the City of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The paper provides evidence of a dense network of organizations whose principal function is the provision of social services, especially food assistance, through a complementary relationship with the state. The current effectiveness of the settlements’ representative organizations—the principal vehicles through which community members voice their collective demands—is limited by a mix of factors intimately related to civil society–state relations, including irregularities in election processes, conflicts between organizations, and lack of transparency in the allocation of public resources. The paper concludes that true empowerment of these communities to act as a unified force for change requires the strengthening of neighborhood organizations and greater government openness to civil society participation in public decision-making processes.

In this paper, we examine the changing landscape of migration policy work conducted by civil society organisations (CSOs) in the Czech Republic. We focus on how funding opportunities affect CSOs’ policy work, long-term planning and everyday practices. Through a qualitative analysis of 15 interviews with representatives of non-governmental organisations and 11 interviews with policy stakeholders, we explored the critical and reflexive strategies adopted by CSOs. A crucial role in developing critical capacity seems to stem from umbrella organisations—organisations whose members are organisations. With respect to CSOs’ strong dependency on the state, umbrella organisations might serve as shields protecting individual organisations from direct conflicts with governmental policies and institutions. In the end, we assume that meta-organisations potentially function as important vehicles for the reflexive development and evolution of organisations and decrease transaction costs for the organisation field.

This qualitative research study examines how volunteering and nonvolunteering is associated with immigrant perceptions of their integration into US society. The study analyzes 24 semi-structured interviews to explore differences in social integration experiences and perceptions of social integration between immigrant volunteers and nonvolunteers. The study’s theoretical framework is intersectionality, and the conceptual framework consists of social integration, rational choice, and symbolic boundary theory. While past studies assert that volunteering increases feelings of social integration, this empirical study offers a comparative perspective between immigrants who volunteer and those who do not. Study findings suggest that formal immigrant volunteers build a stronger sense of agency in their social integration journeys through their contributions to American society. Data suggest that most nonvolunteering participants achieve minor benefits by engaging in informal volunteering outside of organizational auspices.

A commonly explored theme in international civil society organisation (CSO) collaborations is the dominance of Northern CSOs and how this impinges on Southern CSOs’ autonomy, but there is little work on the relative importance of different collaborations for Southern CSOs. This study examined complementarity as a new approach to understanding CSO collaboration. Seeking Southern perspectives, we examined the case of CSOs working on disaster risk reduction in India and developed a typology of complementarities in this domain. The article considers the implications for understanding complementarity in broader CSO collaborations. We find that constructing collaborations through the lens of complementarity may facilitate capitalising on diversity among CSOs and help build collaborations that consider the domestic orientation of many Southern CSOs and reshape the roles of Northern CSOs as complementary rather than leading.

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the characteristics and impact of different institutional environments in non-profit welfare provision in Denmark. Based on an analytical framework inspired by the policy fields approach (Stone and Sandfort 2009), the paper argues that to understand the non-profit sector, it is necessary to take a closer look at the differences and similarities not only across welfare fields, but also across non-profit providers and their public counterparts within the same field. Based on data from case studies on primary schools and nursing homes in two Danish municipalities, a number of explanatory factors are identified and analyzed: Regulative rules, funding issues, norms and expectations, and the degree of competition. Results show important differences in the institutional environment of the two welfare fields, and that these differences have an actual impact on outcomes: Both collaborative activities of welfare providers and organizational commitment among leaders, employees, and users are highly influenced by characteristics of the institutional environment. It is argued that the applied analytical framework can help understand and explain the large variations in non-profit welfare provision across fields, within countries.

In stark contrast to the robust social safety nets found in many developed nations around the world, the modern American welfare state is increasingly operated by a variety of non-governmental actors and voluntary organizations. The operation of this welfare regime depends on the discretionary decisions of street-level bureaucrats. As street-level bureaucrats confront new circumstances, their discretionary decisions change. Normative institutionalism and the concept of bricolage are used to explore how discretionary decisions change within an organizational role in the context of a voluntary organization. Understanding this process of bricolage sheds light on the decision-making processes of street-level bureaucrats, explains how behavior in an organizational role shifts over time, and points to the dynamic nature of institutions. We present an in-depth qualitative study of the emergency food network in Oregon as a critical case to illustrate this argument.

Many NGOs which focus on development have operated child sponsorship programs due to their effectiveness in raising funds. Existing studies offer a critique of child sponsorship as a de-humanizing marketing strategy and as a targeted service provision. Some NGOs have revised their child sponsorship by integrating it with a rights-based approach (RBA), which emerged rejecting the individual focus and disempowering process of development intervention. The objection of other RBA NGOs to child sponsorship leaves questions about whether child sponsorship can fit an RBA. The aim of the present study is to explore how child sponsorship is perceived and practiced in relation to an RBA in an NGO. The findings from a case study of ActionAid present how an RBA guides ActionAid’s child sponsorship to promote empowerment, campaigning, solidarity and alternatives. This study identifies the potential of an RBA to address problematic marketing and operational practices of child sponsorship as well as remaining issues. The complexity of NGO practices when aligning organizational practices with an RBA warrants further examination.

Nonprofit research and resulting theory have evolved in a limited context of North American and West European historical experience, culture, and political economy. Recognizing this fact, Estelle James proposes, among other things, a widening of the research arena. This response to her proposals argues that existing studies of nonprofits involved in international development already provide significant comparative evidence that can enrich existing theory. This body of work suggests complementary and alternative research priorities.

Alhough women often played a central role in the creation of non-profit organisations through their donations of time, money and material possessions, their efforts have received little systematic attention from students of the non-profit sector, particularly outside the United States. This special issue of Voluntas traces the ties between philanthropy and women's social, economic and political roles in Argentina, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, Russia, India and Australia. Written as part of an international collaborative study co-ordinated by the Center for the Study of Philanthropy at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, these essays test a variety of theoretical models for assessing the significance of philanthropic activities in empowering disadvantaged groups and fostering the growth of civil society.

Food insecurity manifests itself on a continuum, and we note that it can range from absolute food insecurity to relative food insecurity, especially in the context of affluent countries. We focus on one such relative food insecurity that manifests itself when Dutch children cannot afford the culturally appropriate foods to participate birthday celebrations in primary schools, which is a long-established local custom. The inability of children to celebrate their birthdays in this public manner leads to school absenteeism, stigmatization, and social exclusion. This case study analyzes an intervention undertaken by Jarige Job, a Dutch nonprofit, that recognized and addressed this hidden social problem by using existing networks and infrastructures of national foodbanks. It provides insight into how a unique intervention of providing birthday boxes has become a successful social innovation that not only combats this relative food insecurity but is also able to address and mitigate the challenges of moral and cognitive legitimacy.

The year 1947 saw the opening of Oxfam’s first permanent charity shop on Broad Street in Oxford. It was the prototype of what was soon to become a national franchise of Oxfam shops and it marked the genesis of widespread popular engagement with charity in the form of consumption. Donations and purchases of goods in this second-hand shop space were not simply a financial means to a humanitarian end, these shops offered active engagements with the charity; engagements that shaped donor and shopper knowledge of the organisation and that cemented a particular form of charity participation. This interdisciplinary analysis contributes to an emerging body of historical and geographical scholarship that is exploring the intersection between charitable action and consumption by beginning to fill a lacuna of research on the development of charity shopping as a key form of popular philanthropic action.

The reliability of volunteers is a major concern for many nonprofit organizations. To address this problem in more detail, we develop a theoretical model of volunteer reliability based on psychological contract theory. By taking this perspective as a starting point, we explore how individual volunteer characteristics, organizational factors, and sociological developments shape the exchange of inducements and contributions between volunteers and nonprofit organizations. We discuss how these factors can create tensions in the psychological contract and determine the extent to which volunteers behave reliably. As such, we develop a theoretical framework for addressing the reliability problem in volunteer management.

Volunteer management practices have been shown to have positive effects on employees in terms of skill development, job success, organizational identity, and morale in the public, nonprofit, and corporate sectors. Despite considerable research on volunteering, questions remain about how management practices of volunteer programs may affect volunteer performance. Leveraging data comparing self-enrolled and corporate-recruited volunteer mentors into a large-scale online program for entrepreneurs, this study measures the impact of institutional support on volunteer intensity, persistence, and quality. It also presents a novel way to measure volunteer quality through sentiment analysis to measure the tone of online messages, an emerging statistical technique. Findings suggest that a high level of institutional support leads to higher quality mentor engagement, compared to self-enrolled volunteers, while a low level of support leads to mentor quality much lower than self-enrolled volunteers.

Aspects of industrial relations and internal co-ordination have been a major topic of empirical research in the German business enterprise sector. In contrast, there are practically no empirical investigations into labour-management relations in third sector institutions. The largest share of this sector in Germany is represented by the two Christian churches with presently about 900,000 employees. According to the notion of church officials, labour-management relations in these institutions are characterised by a specific normative concept which emphasises a trustful co-operation of all employees in the mission of the church. The major concern of our research project focused on the question whether the specific conditions of employment within church institutions favour more hierarchical or more co-operative forms of co-ordination and how employees and employee representatives perceive the ‘ideal of the community of service’ (Dienstgemeinschaftsgedanke). The results of our research lead to the conclusion that church labour-management relations are characterised by a remarkable contrast between the participative or co-operative notion of the ideal of the ‘community of service’ and present forms of hierarchical co-ordination inside church institutions.

Conducting a study on a sample of 303 participants from the Novi Sad Voluntary Service we set out to validate the Volunteer Satisfaction Index (VSI) in the cultural context of the two European titles—Youth 2019 and Culture 2021. A battery of instruments was used for research purposes, Voluntary Satisfaction Inventory, Voluntary Function Inventory and Helping Attitude Scale. Our study is currently the only one in Serbia that evaluated volunteer satisfaction. The results support a volunteer model based on altruistic values, recognized and accepted, identifying volunteer benefits of personal gain and relationship with the organization. Since the Serbian version of the VSI scale was confirmed on the example of the Novi Sad Voluntary Service sample and has shown satisfactory psychometric properties, it can be used for the purpose of further monitoring and evaluating volunteer satisfaction, examining other factors on which volunteer satisfaction is based.

Chinese public education have long been considered to be part of the social safety net, but this safety net is no longer sufficient for today’s higher education needs. The recent worldwide economic recession, the increasing cost of operation of higher education, decreasing enrollments, and government budget cuts have prompted administrators to act aggressively. This study selected a public institution in Asia Pacific–Pacific region to assess its fundraising practice, strategy, and accountability. This university is one of the few institutions in the region that successfully initiated a fundraising practice. The study found that establishing an appropriately staffed professional fundraising office is an important step. Preferably, these officers should be hired from the business and non-academic sectors. Workshops and job training should be offered rigorously. The university must set a clear fundraising goal, and the fundraisers must possess strong marketing and communication skills, understand their products, academic needs, and be able construct social networks in Asia Pacific.