Nonprofits have grown steadily since the early 1960s, when politicians looked to dramatically expand the role of public-private partnerships in urban governance, particularly in distressed areas. Today, they comprise the third largest sector of the U.S. economy: well over 1.5 million nonprofits employ roughly 12.5 million people as of 2017, the latest year for which comprehensive data is available, according to the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies. This growth has coincided with decades of yawning inequality, prompting social movements and scholars alike to look askance at the so-called “nonprofit industrial complex”—the dense networks that connect community activists with professional social workers and managers, public administrators, and philanthropists.
Historian Claire Dunning examines the rise of this complicated web of governance in her illuminating new book, Nonprofit Neighborhoods: An Urban History of Inequality and the American State. A professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, Dunning shows, using a case study of Boston from the late 1950s through the early 2000s, how marginalized communities navigated shifts in municipal and federal engagement with urban poverty and development. They answered the Johnson administration’s call for “maximum feasible participation” in urban renewal by forming organizations to win grants for daycare and after-school programs, job training and translation assistance,
— source thebaffler.com | Justin H. Vassallo | Jul 25, 2022