The Nonprofit Crisis: Leadership Through the Culture Wars argues that there is a crisis of public trust in nonprofits in the United States and proposes a way out of that crisis. While it is published by Oxford University Press, it is not a scholarly book, but rather one written by a practitioner for other practitioners.

The author, Greg Berman, was for many years the executive director of the Center for Court Innovation, a large criminal justice reform nonprofit in New York City. He is the co-author of two previous books, Start Here: A Road Map to Reducing Mass Incarceration and Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age. He is thus well positioned to write a book that tries to bridge the divide between the left and the right in the United States, having written one book that advocates for an issue important to liberals and another that advises reformers to take a conservative approach to change.

The nonprofit crisis in the United States, according to Berman, is the decline in public trust in nonprofits. Berman identifies three causes of the decline: generational change; political polarization; and initiatives for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The first half of the book assigns a chapter of explanation to each cause.

The second half of the book describes solutions, but the chapter structure does not match the first half’s three chapters on causes. Instead, we get chapters on organizational decision-making, mentoring, mission creep, and the right time to step down. He advises leaders to walk a middle path between top-down and consensual decision-making and to invoke trust, reciprocity, and generosity when they become mentors. Leaders should avoid mission creep and know when to step down.

The book is well written and persuasive. Berman skillfully supports his arguments with a combination of stories about single nonprofits, taken mainly from the news media and academic arguments adapted from journals. Berman is not an academic and, thankfully, does not write like one, but his presentation of academic research is clear and accurate.

The author is eager to present himself as a moderate and is careful to spend an equal amount of time critiquing nonprofits from both right- and left-wing perspectives. In the chapter on DEI, for example, Berman begins from a left-wing perspective, acknowledging the problems that nonprofits have regarding DEI. He then pivots rightward to criticize the lack of “viewpoint diversity” within the nonprofit community and to label much diversity training as “conformity training.”

My main critique of the book is its lack of contribution. The book has little to offer to the readers of Voluntas, as it is aimed at a nonscholarly audience and focuses exclusively on the United States. However, even as a book for practitioners, its usefulness is limited. Its analysis of the problem and advice on how to solve it have all been published elsewhere. The book does make a contribution in that it unites this research in a single volume and presents it in an accessible format, illustrating the scientific research with stories taken from the author’s own experiences. Even so, I would not assign the book to a class on nonprofit leadership, but would look up the studies he cites and assign those instead.

A more serious critique is that it misdiagnoses the problem. While there has been a decline in public trust in nonprofits, is it really a crisis that demands an immediate response? The decline has been gradual; 52% of Americans still trust nonprofits, and trust in nonprofits is higher than trust in any other American institution. Social scientists have been documenting the decline in all types of trust over the last two decades, so it seems more likely that nonprofits are being caught up in this larger decrease in trust. I was not persuaded that nonprofits have made mistakes that have caused them to lose the public’s trust.

A third critique is that in attempting to be politically moderate, the book leans too far to the right. Its emphasis on presenting both the political right and the left as threats to the nonprofit sector is misguided, as the facts indicate that the attack from the right is much stronger and more dangerous. The book went to press in January 2025, a week after Trump’s inauguration, and Berman notes that, even at that early date, “Trump has already signaled an urge for disruption and retribution that could have a massive impact on American nonprofits” (xi). Nevertheless, Berman argues nonprofits’ resistance to Trump during his first administration was counterproductive, and that “nonprofit leaders who want to reduce polarization and prevent the next authoritarian threat to American democracy should take pains not to succumb to Trump derangement syndrome” (182).

Unfortunately, it turns out that those who feared what Trump would do to the nonprofit sector were not deranged, but prophetic. The nonprofit crisis in the United States is not the slow erosion of public trust, but the direct attacks on it by the governing party. What to do about it will have to be the subject for a different book.