It is February 16, 2021 and it is 3℉ in Dallas, Texas. It is June 25, 2022 and it is 118℉ in Portland, Oregon. Neither of these examples are isolated incidents, though, as these “extremely rare” weather events are now happening more frequently due to climate change.
I bet you have always wondered how nonprofits help after disasters or extreme weather events like these. If you are not in a disaster prone area, or researching disasters like us, you actually may not have thought about this. Well, it may be time to start.
I am a sociologist who has been interested in US environmental movements since my days as an undergraduate student in the early 1990s. Over the course of my career, case studies documenting local conflicts over the siting of hazardous facilities and the unequal distribution of environmental harms across racial and economic categories have been the dominant theme in sociological research on the US environmental movement. I took a different approach for my dissertation research, completed in 2004. I assembled information spanning 1960-2000 for a sample of roughly 1,000 national environmental organizations to assess what the population of environmental organizations does. This “population” based approach to research is common in studies of other social movements, but rare in the case of US environmentalism.
What struck me in my early professional research and what has continued to do so, is the strong disjuncture between sociological studies of the US environmental movement and what environmental organizations actually do.
Carlos Serrano-Cinca, Yolanda Fuertes-Callén & Beatriz Cuéllar-Fernández, University of Zaragoza, Spain.
Mission drift is a popular research topic with respect to non-profit organizations and, in particular, microfinance institutions (MFIs). The need for many microfinance institutions to generate profit often leads these institutions to lose sight of their social mission. The consequences of mission drift for borrowers and MFIs have been extensively studied. Mission drift usually reduces outreach, can be detrimental to the poorest borrowers, harmful to women, and disappointing to donors and social investors. However, the effects of mission drift on other stakeholders (employees, government, micro-savers, and banking creditors) have been insufficiently studied, a gap that our study seeks to address.
The nonprofit starvation cycle was named by Ann Goggins Gregory and Don Howard in a popular article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review in 2009. They did a lot to put the ideas on the map, but they are not the originators of the cycle. All the credit for the nonprofit starvation cycle goes to a guy named Ken Wing. Ken Wing? Yes, Ken Wing.
You’re maybe familiar with that SSIR article, or have heard the starvation cycle described. The idea is that too many nonprofits spend too little on administrative capacity like human resource and financial systems, information technology, and fundraising. Their low spending on these overhead costs (or, *ahem* fudging on how they report their spending) reinforces expectations among funders that non-program costs are not essential. This circles back to further disinvestments in administrative capacity.
I was working with Ken Wing when he first articulated his “circle” idea in the mid-2000s. He’s never gotten the credit he deserves for ideas that have been pretty popular over the past couple decades. I’m hoping that changes with publication of a new NVSQ article (ChiaKo Hung, Mark Hager & Yuan Tian), which features the unearthing of the “Wing Model.” However, you don’t get the full rundown of the genesis of model in that paper. So, I thought I’d Zoom with Ken and get more of his recollection.
NVSQ Blog 