Browsing by Subject "Community foundation"

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    Board and Staff Representation and Grantmaking in Community Foundations: The Effect of Racial Representation, Intersectionality, and Donor Control
    (2024-07) Ming, Yue; Paarlberg, Laurie E.; Badertscher, Katherine; Gazley, Beth; Rooney, Patrick
    As the United States continues its significant demographic shift, concerns persist about philanthropic responsiveness to the needs of diverse communities. While foundations aim to address societal challenges, historical leadership structures can pose barriers to equitable outcomes. This raises questions about the representativeness of philanthropy to the broader public. The theory of representative bureaucracy establishes a framework for understanding the connection between representation and outcomes, positing that passive representation, which is bureaucrats share the same demographic origins as the general population, will result in active representation, which is producing policy outputs that benefit the interests of individuals who are passively represented. This study applies the theory of representative bureaucracy to nonprofits, specifically examining the case of community foundations in the United States. It investigates the influence of racial representation, the intersectionality across race and gender among representatives, and the impact of donor control on grant allocations to underserved groups. Key questions examined include: Does a positive relationship exist between racial representation in board and staff in community foundations and grant allocations to grantee organizations serving people of color? Does intersectional representation yield stronger results than solely racial representation? Does increased donor control weaken the positive relationship between board and staff members’ representation and grant allocations to grantee organizations serving people of color? This study utilizes longitudinal data spanning from 2012 to 2016, collected from a national sample of community foundations. The findings contribute both theoretically and practically to the understanding of the relationships among representation, discretion, and grant-making outcomes within the nonprofit sector.
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    Building Civic Infrastructure Organizations: The Lilly Endowment's Experiment to Grow Community Foundations
    (2019-05) Wang, Xiaoyun; Benjamin, Lehn; Burlingame, Dwight; Guo, Chao; Ottoni-Wilhelm, Mark; Steensland, Brian
    In the past 50 years, we have seen significant public and philanthropic investment in building civil society in countries around the globe. This includes initiating community foundations to support the development of vibrant communities and civic life. Yet we have little knowledge about why some initiatives bear fruit and others fail to do so. More specifically, why some community foundations initiated by institutional funders are able to garner local giving necessary to sustain themselves and others are not. This dissertation contributes to our knowledge about such initiatives by researching the Lilly Endowment’s GIFT Initiative (Giving Indiana Funds for Tomorrow), a project providing incentives to start nearly 60 new community foundations and revive 17 existing community foundations in Indiana since 1990. I employed mixed methods and three sources of data: historical archives, statistics of community foundations’ financial information and community demographics, and case studies of four community foundations. First, I found two existing explanations offered in the literature did not account for the lack of local support for the community foundations I studied. More specifically, I found that high level of income and wealth does not necessarily lead to high level of giving to community foundations and the lack of community identity is not the primary reason explaining community foundations’ struggles in attracting local donations. Rather the study shows that social capital is crucial for garnering local giving through the mechanism of facilitating information sharing. Second, I examined the long-term effects of matching grants, a key strategy used by Lilly Endowment to leverage local giving. I found that long-term provision of matching grants might reduce organizations’ incentives to seek funding sources on their own. My dissertation lends further insight into the sustainability of civic infrastructure organizations, a popular institutional model for building local civil society even today.