One essential role of nonprofits (NPOs) is to provide opportunities for people to participate in movements and resolve collective issues. This study investigates how NPO participation affects participation in political activities in Asian countries. Specifically, we ask how nonprofit engagement fosters active political activities in Asia. Using the Asian Barometer Survey, which provides information on NPO participation, political contact, and political participation activities, this study empirically examines the correlation between nonprofit participation and political participation in Asia. Our findings confirmed a positive relationship between nonprofit participation and political participation in Asia when controlling individual characteristics, location, and time fixed effects. Furthermore, our analyses further verify moderating effects of political regimes on this relationship, especially for the authoritarian and hybrid regimes. Our findings suggest that regulations, policies, and self-governance should be designed to cultivate a healthy NPO sector in terms of growth, diversity, and accessibility to citizens.

Policy and sociocultural advocacy are still entrenched within their disciplinary silos. This makes that a lot of research is missing out on the complete picture of nonprofits’ social change efforts. Moreover, this also relates to inconsistencies (i.e., determinants) and ambiguities (i.e., tactics) that are characteristic of the current ‘morass’ in which nonprofit advocacy literature finds itself today. In this study, we empirically analyze whether nonprofits engage in policy and/or sociocultural advocacy as well as whether determinants and tactics relate differently or similarly to both advocacy goals. Making use of a large-N survey database of Flemish nonprofits, our findings show that: (a) most nonprofits engage in advocacy in general and around half pursue both policy and sociocultural change, (b) the field of activity, age, public and market income are important explanatory variables and (c) not all advocacy tactics are used for pursuing both policy and sociocultural advocacy.

The societal value of non-profit organizations (NPOs) and the enabling aspect of digital transformations (DTs) pinpoint these as cornerstones in our running after sustainable development goals (SDGs). However, applying DT to NPOs foreshadows outstanding but untapped opportunities to enhance our capacity to meet those goals. This paper shed light on those opportunities by exploring the DT of a food redistribution charity which commits to reach zero hunger in London, the United Kingdom. Our results not only highlight the importance of studying DT in the setting of sustainable-oriented NPOs but also reveal the key role of leadership, entrepreneurship, agile management, co-creation, user-friendliness, and building a data-driven learning culture to strengthen its impact.

Volunteering by immigrants provides dual a contribution: To civil society, immigrant volunteers can add an untapped human and social capital, social diversity and multiculturalism; to the immigrant, volunteering offers cultural, economic, and social benefits in their integration efforts. Yet, we need a more multidimensional probing of the term ‘immigrant volunteering’, because the multiplicity of migration generations requires questioning who is an ‘immigrant’, and formal volunteering does not capture the full array of unpaid work done by immigrants, suggesting the need to consider informal volunteering. By comparing formal and informal volunteering behavior of three immigrant groups (second-generation, generation 1.5, first-generation), we reflect on several distinctions and overlooked dimensions that might better explain whether and why immigrants withhold their volunteering. Using the 2014 wave of the German Survey on Volunteering, our findings indicate variation on formal and informal volunteering between the migration groups: differences are greater in formal volunteering, but smaller when we consider informal volunteering. Citizenship status and language proficiency also play a role. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Social entrepreneurship within the nonprofit sector has gained popularity as a concept informing the management of high functioning human service organizations. However, research has neglected to quantitatively test and measure factors contributing to this multidimensional model. Addressing this gap, this research collected primary data on executive directors (n = 306) of human service nonprofit organizations in Canada to validate a pre-identified scale of social entrepreneurial orientation (SEO) consisting of social innovation, risk taking, proactiveness, and market engagement. Findings from confirmatory factor analysis found all four latent variables had strong construct validity and reliability, as did the higher order variable of SEO (including all factors). Results support the adoption of this model as a robust measure of SEO in human service nonprofits, and can be used to inform the management and assessment of specific organization-level factors that contribute to social entrepreneurship.

This research examines the role that myths play in sustaining the institutional position of philanthropy in a context of sector reinvention during the COVID-19 recovery. Specifically, we study discourse around the post-pandemic philanthropic sector reforms to the Disbursement Quota (DQ) in Canada. The DQ is the minimum asset payout rate that philanthropic foundations in Canada must maintain to enjoy charitable status and associated tax benefits. We examine submissions to government, media articles, and public statements by philanthropic sector advocates to analyze the ideological work of DQ-related discourses in creating and entrenching philanthropic myths. Our findings coalesce around three philanthropic myths: (1) the Modernization Myth (2) the Goodness Myth; and (3) the Equity Myth. We argue that these philanthropic myths function to maintain the institutional position of philanthropy in this moment of sector reinvention by obscuring the sector’s colonial-capitalist histories and institutional contradictions.

Within nonprofit organizational studies, there has been a long-standing interest in democratic governance as ways of building political participation, civic skills and fostering inclusion. While established approaches to democratic governance have many benefits, existing research points to numerous challenges, including apathy and oligarchization. This paper explores an alternative form of democratic governance, sociocracy. Sociocracy, sometimes called dynamic governance, is organized around four key elements: circular hierarchy, consent-based decision-making, double linking, and practices to foster inclusivity and voice, a unique blend which distinguishes it from other forms of democratic governance. This article explores the implications on workplace democracy that a nonprofit organization experienced when limiting it. We find that sociocracy offers many benefits, including empowering members and reducing the risk of domination, and also highlights the many challenges that can accompany the implementation of sociocracy, particularly how four forms of inequality contribute to those challenges.

This article examines a decade of charity law review processes in six jurisdictions—Australia, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales and Ireland. Using a life-cycle basis viewed through a functional comparative lens, it examines review terms of reference, stakeholder involvement in public consultations, report recommendations and governmental responses. The article compares post-review recommendation implementation across government-owned and independent review processes. In identifying areas most open to and most difficult to reform (including charity definition and advocacy) and probing the hidden state/non-profit sector tensions that underlie such reform attempts, this article provides new insights for future review processes.

Charity sport activities provide a sense of contributing to the lives of others and offer participants an extra source of motivation. SL has been used in a variety of sports and recreational contexts to research dedication to leisure activities. However, no study has investigated SL in charity sports events. In this regard, a model integrating key variables from the studies of serious leisure, charity sport event participation motivation, experience value, and behavioral intentions was proposed and tested on the participants of charity sport events. It is anticipated that the findings of this study will help to understand the multidimensional aspects of charity sports event participation, which may increase the effectiveness of the organization of charity sports events. Besides, this research adds to the literature by providing empirical data analysis regarding charity sports events from an unexplored country (Turkey).

As NGOs have emerged as arguably the most prominent actors within the global development enterprise, their international activities and presence have grown to represent a key area of inquiry for development scholars. Existing literature on the geographic distribution of development NGOs leans heavily on quantitative analysis, which lends little insight into the deeper motivations behind the location-based decisions that these organizations make; this study uses a qualitative lens to fill this gap, shedding light on the question “Why do NGOs work where they do”? After interviewing representatives from 22 Canadian development NGOs, the research team determined several key catalysts, which shape the geography of these entities. These factors include existing relationships, personal visits, local requests, logistical ease, funder restrictions, documented need, and humanitarian crises. Furthermore, the decision-making framework related to project locations appears to evolve as organizations grow.

This essay embraces a notion of critical scholarship concerned with proposing normative and actionable alternatives that can create more inclusive societies and focuses on the role of institutionalizing experimental places for inclusive social innovation as a bottom-up strategic response to welfare state reforms. By mobilizing the notions of utopias and heterotopias in Foucault, the paper sheds light on the opportunity to move from policy utopias to democratic heterotopias, discussing the politics embedded in this cognitive shift and the democratic nature of social innovation changing social and governance relations by interacting with politico-administrative systems. Some obstacles to institutionalizing social innovation are highlighted, as well as some key governance mechanisms that can be activated either by public and/or social purpose organizations to try to overcome those obstacles. Finally, we discuss the importance of linking inclusive social innovation with democratic, rather than market logics.

Philanthropic foundations in the USA have long wrestled with how to demonstrate they contribute to the public good in a democratic society given the outsized voice their wealth provides. Evaluating the work of their grantees is one way that foundations can demonstrate what that contribution is; the data drawn from evaluation are used to give accounts about the value of their work. Recently, foundations have confronted the evidence-based policy movement which promotes randomized controlled trials as an evaluation tool that can help reveal “what works” in the realm of social services. This provides a path for foundations to more firmly establish that they are benefiting society by providing impact but also presents risks around entrenching inequities and diminishing the voice of community partners. Drawing on interviews from 2019 with program officers from large U.S. foundations that fund social services evaluation, we find that, perhaps surprisingly, the majority of these foundations have serious concerns about RCT-based evaluation, are not giving impact-based accounts of their contributions, and instead rely on equity-based accounts, presenting grantees as partners and recognizing pluralist forms of knowledge. This approach offers a different, less top-down, solution to ongoing demands that foundations demonstrate their value in a democracy.

The increasing health inequity and injustice of the COVID-19 pandemic rendered visible the inadequacy of global health governance, and exposed the self-interested decision-making of states and pharmaceutical companies. This research explores the advocacy activities of humanitarian and development international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) in responding to this inequality and investigates how they framed alternatives for global health justice. It reviews 47 organizational documents and 43 media articles of five INGOs (ActionAid, Médecins Sans Frontières, Oxfam, Save the Children, and World Vision) and points to the importance of understanding advocacy frames in analyzing how these organizations prioritize agendas and advocacy strategies. The dominance of the ‘human rights’ frame, sometimes in combination with ‘scientific evidence’ and ‘security’ frames, reflects the identities, mandates, and histories of campaigning and collaboration of these INGOs. This paper contends that the advocacy of humanitarian and development INGOs highlights both deontological and teleological ethics, promoting the voices of people in lower-income countries, clarifying duty bearers and their accountabilities, and addressing structural barriers from a human rights perspective in a global health agenda setting.

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play a critical role in the response to human displacement yet face competing pressures. One ongoing site of displacement is among the 1.1 million Rohingya persons living in refugee camps in Bangladesh. NGOs are party to the ongoing humanitarian response yet operate under competing demands by multiple stakeholders. To what extent do NGOs meet the various expectations among different groups of Rohingya refugee beneficiary stakeholders? We used UNHCR survey data from 31 refugee sites in Cox’s Bazar to empirically examine the relationship between demographic and socioeconomic indicators with satisfaction levels of service provision. We find that female refugees and head of household disability (difficulty seeing, hearing, walking, remembering, or communicating) are indicators that present the most significant differences; NGO responses more often overlook the priority needs of females and persons with disabilities when compared to other refugees, a response gap that reduces their satisfaction and potentially heightens these groups’ vulnerabilities. Although UNHCR and NGOs face pressures from competing demands within beneficiary populations, they also have opportunities to develop refugee-centered policies and practices that are more responsive to vulnerable groups. Overall, this paper adds dimension to understanding of various refugee stakeholder perspectives within a camp setting.

Functional motivations are closely linked to important volunteer outcomes, yet more socio-political forms of civic participation (CP) besides volunteering are growing. There is little attention on the applicability of functional motivations to such CP, including in disasters. Using a critical realist grounded theory methodology, 39 in-depth interviews were conducted with Singapore residents who had engaged in a diverse range of CP before and during COVID-19. A key mechanism, fulfilling personal functions, was found to relate to functional motivations. Overlapping functions were found, but there are differences in how these functions were fulfilled depending on the form of CP. Perceived accessibility, the subjective mental state about one’s potential to engage, mediated the effectuation of motivations in actual engagement. COVID-19 contributed to emergent CP by increasing perceived accessibility. Participating citizens pre-COVID-19 made adaptations to maintain perceived accessibility to continue CP during the pandemic. These theoretical developments inform policy and research agenda in understanding and leveraging CP.

This paper explores the relationship between neighbourhood level density of civil society organisations (CSOs), diversity, and deprivation. We compare the UK and Sweden, two countries with different civil society traditions and welfare state regimes. We use data on formal civil society organisations to examine whether diverse neighbourhoods have lower levels of civil society infrastructure. In the UK, contrary to what could be expected from Putnam's assertion that diversity has a negative effect on trust, thus limiting civil society activities at the neighbourhood level, we observe a positive relationship between the density of CSOs and diversity. In Sweden, we find different patterns. First, we observe a negative correlation between CSO density and diversity. Second, we find lower density of formal CSOs in areas with high diversity and high economic disadvantage and higher density in areas characterised by low diversity and high disadvantage.

Volunteering is associated with health-promoting benefits for both recipients and volunteers and may contribute to a more inclusive society. However, studies have shown a persistent pattern of social inequality among those who volunteer, and immigrants participate as volunteers less than the majority population. To date, approaches for recruiting immigrant populations have not been sufficiently examined, even though multicultural societies are becoming increasingly diverse. This study investigates how recruitment is carried out in voluntary organizations and how volunteers who are involved in recruitment reflect on the inclusion of citizens with immigrant backgrounds. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 18 volunteers and three employees with recruitment responsibility at five voluntary organizations engaged in welfare and community-related activities in a semirural district in Norway. Our findings show that different structural factors and individual aspects of the recruiter influence the recruitment of immigrants as volunteers. Large-scale organizations are more professionalized and more directed by fundings and frameworks and demand more qualifications due to their volunteer tasks. This might make inclusive recruitment more challenging. Small-scale organizations have more flexibility and less professionalized volunteer activities, making recruitment more inclusive. In addition, if the small-scale organizations are minority driven, it seems to positively influence the recruitment of immigrants through increased diversity sensitivity and more connections with immigrants through their social network.