The Hidden Gaps: Rethinking Racial Disparities in Nonprofit Funding 

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Shuyi Deng

Indiana University, Bloomington, USA

When people talk about racial equity in philanthropy, the conversation often centers on one divide: White communities versus Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities. Accordingly, most racial equity initiatives in philanthropy have adopted a broad, dichotomous view of inequity, assuming that if funding for BIPOC communities increases, racial inequities will be reduced. As important as this approach is, it can also hide another layer of inequity. BIPOC communities are not a single, uniform group. When diverse communities are bundled together under one label, important differences in access to funding can disappear from view.  

My recent study in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly examines this less visible side of nonprofit funding inequity: disparities within BIPOC communities themselves. While previous research has documented the funding gap between White and BIPOC communities, I ask a different question: what if inequity also exists among the very communities that racial equity initiatives are intended to support? 

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“I know where my boundaries are”: Understanding volunteer psychological contracts 

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Michelle Cleveland1, Debra Gray2, Rachel Manning3, and Kim Bradley-Cole4

1University of Chichester, UK, 2Kingston University, London, UK, 3University of Worcester, UK, 4University of Winchester, UK

“We want to volunteer because we want to be part of making the difference” 

“We are all there for each other”  

“I’m doing this because I don’t want to let my colleagues down” 

Experiences of volunteering often highlight depth of commitment. This commitment is often collective in nature: We do it together, we do it for others. We do it because we are part of a ‘we’. And yet, while experiences of volunteering often highlight the profound impact on – or, indeed, how volunteering is part of – people’s identities, volunteers leave. So how well do we understand what volunteers expect from the organisations they give their time to?  

Commitment to volunteering is finite and breakable. Volunteering commitments are not straightforward commitments: they are often conditional and are part of reciprocal expectations. Volunteer-organisation relationships also differ from employee-employer relationships in a variety of fundamentally different ways (Nichols, 2013). Volunteers don’t leave because they will get paid more somewhere else.  

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When North-South Partnerships Evolve: What Happens When the Balance Begins to Shift? 

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Michel Majdalani1, Lea Stadtler2, and Charles-Clemens Rüling2

1Lebanese American University, Beirut, Lebanon, 2Grenoble Ecole de Management, France

Picture a familiar scene in international development: A well-established organization from the global North partners with a hospital, school, or community-based group in the global South. Expertise travels South. Funds travel South. Protocols and standards are adapted. Over time, the Southern partner grows stronger, but the partnership remains marked by asymmetry. So what happens when the Northern partner changes direction? And what possibilities arise when the Southern partner is ready not just to receive, but to lead? 

Our recent study, published in NVSQ1, examines exactly this question through the evolution of a long-standing North-South twinning relationship in global health. The case shows that partnerships do not have to end in conflict, withdrawal, or dependency. They can evolve. 

More specifically, we show how a Southern organization built on the resources gained through collaboration, while the Northern organization shifted into a more supportive, less directive role. Over time, the relationship moved toward greater balance, not by cutting ties, but by reshaping them. 

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What can we learn about and from dropouts? 

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Andreas Kewes

German Sport University Cologne, Germany

This blog post is a travelogue. It describes my journey into the world of volunteering, which culminated in my research article “Dropouts in Volunteering and the Role of the Multidimensional Experiential Space.” The journey began in the early 2010s. At that time, my colleague Chantal Munsch from the University of Siegen, Germany, and I wanted to find out why people drop out of volunteering for charitable organizations. We were familiar with research on lack of resources, i.e., the research insight that volunteers give up their involvement due to lack of time, for example. However, this result seemed too individualized to us. We wanted to know whether social situations and group conflicts played a greater role in these withdrawals than had previously been assumed. That is why we focused our sample on welfare organizations: in Germany, they clearly originate from milieus such as Catholicism, Protestantism, or the working class, for example. At the time, we thought we could show that such milieus of engagement still exist, that they shaped the organizations, and that new volunteers were bothered by this. To further emphasize this perspective in our sampling, we interviewed former volunteers with their own migration histories, because we thought they would certainly be outside the milieu ties. 

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