There is little doubt that one of the most significant developments of the US nonprofit sector was its expansion in the 1960s, as it absorbed federal funding to implement Great Society social welfare and anti-poverty programs. Yet, even as that expansion remains an indisputable landmark, its significance with respect to broader political and ideological currents is much less settled. Should it be interpreted as a step toward the growth of the welfare state or a march toward the privatization of public goods? Was it a progressive victory or an anticipation of neoliberalism’s triumph?
These questions drive Claire Dunning’s new book, Nonprofit Neighborhoods: An Urban History of Inequality and the American State, which chronicles the partnerships that developed between community-based nonprofits in Boston and city, state, and federal authorities over the last half century. For Dunning, an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, the ability of these partnerships to hold different value for different sectors was a major reason for their initial spread. For some players, they represented the prospect of an urban government responsive to community needs, while for others they signaled the power of private action and the market to remedy social ills. Ultimately, Dunning argues, this latter vision prevailed. By the final decades of the 20th century, the popularity of these partnerships stemmed from their ability to promote the interests of the corporate, financial, and political elite who profited from the inequality these partnerships purported to address.
Dunning takes Boston, “the vanguard of social welfare experimentation,” as her primary case study of a “governance revolution,” in which federal grantmaking to nonprofits delegated governance but failed to remedy racial and economic inequities. “There is perhaps no better place to trace how high economic and racial inequality and an extensive nonprofit infrastructure not only coexisted but grew in tandem over the twentieth century,” she contends. Boston’s working-class communities of color exemplify what Dunning calls “nonprofit neighborhoods”: “places where neighborhood-based nonprofit organizations controlled access to the levers of political, economic, and social power and mediated the local manifestations of the state and market.”
Nonprofit neighborhoods also held broad political significance, as elected officials relied on them to respond to the “urban crisis,” the catchall, highly racialized term that policy makers often used to refer to the rising crime and poverty rates that cities confronted in the post-World War II decades. In the face of such crises, nonprofit neighborhoods represented a sort of concession from political elites, a way “for traditionally excluded groups to participate in governance,” Dunning suggests. Although she recognizes the long history of charitable associations partnering with local governments, Dunning identifies novel elements in the development of nonprofit neighborhoods, most significantly the close relationships that were established between federal agencies and neighborhood-based nonprofits.