Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:33
And we are joined by a wonderful guest that we're very excited to talk to you today about their book. Claire Dunning is a historian of the United States in the 20th century, whose work focuses on poverty, racial capitalism, governance and the nonprofit industrial complex, and is Assistant Professor of Public Policy and History at the University of Maryland College Park. Claire is the author of the book, Nonprofit Neighborhoods: An Urban History of Inequality and the American State published by University of Chicago Press. Claire, welcome to the Death Panel. It is so great to have you here today.
Claire Dunning 2:07
Thanks so much. It's great to be here.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:09
First off, I mean, I know we were talking about this before we started, but we all really loved your book. And I really appreciated specifically the way that you think about your work as a historian as using historical analysis to get at and attempt to offer an answer not to a question necessarily about the past, but a forward looking question, as you've put it. And this book really does that in terms of trying to answer a few really important questions about why nonprofits have the role that they have in our political economy. And whether nonprofits, charity, or philanthropy can really, truly achieve racial and economic justice, or if those goals are themselves prevented by the very structure of the state's relationship to these kinds of nonprofit organizations. But it also gets at this question sort of about why the state is the way it is, and how it's constructed. And sort of how these choices and values that we sort of see and maybe take for granted as embedded in the political economy really have a very deep and important historical logic to them. And it's a really sort of careful and diligent history that was also fascinating and really fun to read. And I don't want to jump ahead, though. So just to start us off, for listeners who might not be familiar with the book or your work, can you talk about sort of some of the main arguments in Nonprofit Neighborhoods and elaborate on this idea that I mentioned sort of about how you think of your work and how you think about history in terms of pointing us towards knowledge about the present?
Claire Dunning 3:35
Thank you for all of that. I think I'll start with your second question first. As a reader, I love to know where people come up with their research topics. And we dedicate so much of our lives to these things, I want to know sort of what's the human story behind it. So maybe I'll start offering my own and sort of why I think this history can and hopefully is useful to those of us in the present. After college, I was working at a community foundation for a couple of years. And it was my first exposure really to thinking about the nonprofit sector, as a sector. So we were a grant making entity. I was a sort of junior staff member who got to observe these larger conversations, as my colleagues were grappling with both really sort of nitty gritty questions about budgets and accountability, and how our grant dollars were supporting particular programs, how they were evaluating their programs, etc. But then also grappling with big questions about legacies of racism. It was also the financial crisis. So we were sort of asking questions, at the time, about families going through foreclosure, but also nonprofits in the housing space going through foreclosure and how did we, and how could a foundation support these entities?
My colleagues were understandably thinking about the present and the future. And I just fundamentally couldn't understand why this was the set of relationships and what the role of the foundation was, and what the role of the city government, who was often in a lot of these meetings, what their role could or should be in this moment of crisis. And to me, that was a historical question about how we got to this current landscape and why we had both such a rich array of nonprofit organizations and such persistent inequality. And there was some temporal mismatch, right, we were talking in three or five year grant cycles at best. And we're also talking about problems that are decades, centuries in the building. And we're talking about individual small neighborhoods, but also talking about a financial crisis that was enveloping the whole city, country, globe.
So there were all these sort of puzzles that came up for me in that work. And again, plenty of people were asking about it in the present. And to me, it felt like a story whose origins lie in the past. So I went to graduate school, decided to write about the history of the nonprofit sector. Several of my advisors sort of had this puzzled look on their face when I said [Beatrice and Phil laughing], I want to write about the nonprofit sector. They said, well, what is that? And I said, well, A, I don't really know and B, it's sort of an awkward term, right, because the nonprofit sector incorporates everything from really small organizations to huge universities and hospitals. So it's an awkward catch-all term. But I think that there's work that we can do to historicize it and understand why these entities are so ubiquitous in our contemporary landscape, particularly in cities, and why we rely on them in moments of crisis and moments of semi-stability to solve public problems, right? Why do we rely on private entities to solve public problems? Why do we rely on small entities to solve big ones? And why do we rely on strategies that haven't really proven useful thus far? So those are sort of the questions animating this.
And so it's a story about Boston, which I write about as both sort of on the vanguard of social welfare experimentation during the 20th century, as people sort of looked to the city, and some of its successes and some of its failures as a model to replicate. It was a forerunner in a lot of federal programs. And it's a local story, because I think local stories give us that granularity to understand these big concepts of state and market and nonprofit sector, what that actually looks like. So the book, in brief, sort of locates the origins of what some people call the nonprofit industrial complex or just sort of the growth of the nonprofit sector, in the post World War II period, in a moment where cities were undergoing significant demographic and political economic changes, through deindustrialization and suburbanization, and cities seemed to be in this moment of urban crisis. Scholars have written a lot about this notion of urban crisis and how it was a constructed idea and social and political and economic manifestations. And I sort of write about well, there's also a governance change, and an administrative, and how government functions comes out of this moment of crisis, comes out of urban renewal, where the government for the first time begins to make direct grants from the federal government to local community organizations, and grants that sort of employ and charge these local community groups to facilitate participation in urban renewal, provide some services to people who are being displaced by urban renewal. And what begins as sort of these experiments on the ground, I write about a group called Freedom House in Boston, ends up becoming a blueprint for a wider array of policy and political strategies for dealing with Civil Rights protests, Black activism, long standing structural poverty, and these patterns of grant making. Initially, federal government to local nonprofit, later mediated by different tiers of government, becomes a really popular way of managing crisis and responding to demands. And that popularity, while genuine for a lot of reasons, I argue, really masks a deep inadequacy as a strategy for dealing with structural problems, whose structural origins remain fundamentally intact. That small nonprofit programs, while valuable, while important, right -- this isn't to denigrate the work that they do, or the important, in many ways, life saving role that nonprofit organizations can play -- it's masking a sort of deeper undercurrent of inadequacy. And this has not been a strategy to repair historical and ongoing harms. And so that's sort of the overarch of the book. It goes from the 1950s to the present, traces the sort of rise of what we would call today, social innovation, the notion that private entities can and should respond to our public problems, and argues that we need to think at a bigger, structural level, not just did this organization build 10 units of housing, or provide these after-school programs, or tweak their budgets here or there. But let's try and have a bigger conversation about why these organizations play the roles that they do.
Phil Rocco 10:21
... I think moving to a new city, I'm always like, okay, trying to understand politics. And it evidently is really difficult, not just because journalism has been sort of like hollowed out, which it has been, but also because the journalism that does exist, it's really hard to report on things that go on behind closed doors, with no public meetings, of a very decentralized set of nonprofits, right. And I think that trying to understand sort of why that is, and why, you know, if you look at like the local government's tax rolls in whatever city you're in, you're gonna see tons of exemptions, and the list of exemptions, that tells you where power lies, really. But, you know, I think you historicize that as something that didn't emerge directly because of machinations at the local level, but really, is the product of federal government strategies to try to respond to various iterations of what people called, with various meanings, like "the urban crisis." And so I wonder if you could talk about like, you know, this is really a story about the role of the state in reshaping the role of like the "voluntary" sector to do things the state might otherwise be doing, and where power might otherwise be concentrated in government agencies, the state is actually doing things to change kind of where power lies. So I wonder if you could talk about like, what's the role of the federal government in changing the political landscape of cities?
Claire Dunning 13:10
Thank you for all of that. I think that was one of my biggest surprises. And I think I continue to surprise people by thinking about, we have -- we have this myth in the United States, right, of the independent nonprofit sector, the charitable realm. We call it the "third sector" -- ... as if it is completely independent from state and market, right. And that's no accident that people are invoking and coming up with this term, right? Government money supports nonprofit organizations more than private donations. That fact -- I teach it to my students, I write about it and talk about it with regard to my book. It's a shocking fact. We are so invested in this notion, pro or con, right, that the nonprofit sector is its own thing. But it is constituted by law, right, by political and policy underpinnings. The IRS regulates who is or who is not a nonprofit organization. And the notion that nonprofits are independent, right, the historical record shows us no, not at all, right. Federal policies are creating government programs that are funneling dollars from government pockets into nonprofit organizations and with dollars, right, if you've ever had a grant or applied for one, you know that that grant relationship is one of power and authority, but also of data sharing, of information, of budgets and control, right. So when the policy is coming down, or coming out of Washington, saying all of you community organizations, please apply for funding -- it's a level of surveillance and insight that the government gets to local organizations and the government gets to set priorities around who the recipients are and sort of what cities, what the kinds of programs they're running. Some of the strings attached to these set by government policy include things like representation on boards of directors, who gets hired in what kinds of staff roles. And these administrative strings, they can cut in both directions, right. So in the 1960s, under the War on Poverty, the phrase maximum feasible participation, which under law constituted a requirement that recipient organizations had to employ and hold on their board of directors, people whose lives were directly impacted by the programs that were being funded, right. So primarily, this means people who are low income and people of color. And this requirement is a huge shift in terms of who's getting to make decisions and people on the ground had to fight dramatically for representation on boards. Sometimes these rules increased, in a few occasions, they decreased the role that local folks had over organizations in their own neighborhoods. But all of this is structured by the state, by policy. So what's happening in Boston is a hyperlocal story. But Phil, as you said, right, it's happening all across the country, because organizations like the ones I write about in Boston, are being held to the same standards, are operating under the same sets of guidelines, right, the same kinds of programs and expectations, feedback mechanisms, budgetary requirements, reporting expectations, all of the reams of paperwork that are flowing between nonprofits and their funders, government funders, right, largely that I'm talking about, that's a level of sort of standardization that is enveloping the nonprofit sector at a particular moment of its growth, right. And so in many ways, the policies that are coming out in the 1960s, and then continue to expand in the 1970s, 80s, 90s, etc., are a standardizing precedent that is actually encouraging the growth of the nonprofit sector.
Phil Rocco 10:21
... I think moving to a new city, I'm always like, okay, trying to understand politics. And it evidently is really difficult, not just because journalism has been sort of like hollowed out, which it has been, but also because the journalism that does exist, it's really hard to report on things that go on behind closed doors, with no public meetings, of a very decentralized set of nonprofits, right. And I think that trying to understand sort of why that is, and why, you know, if you look at like the local government's tax rolls in whatever city you're in, you're gonna see tons of exemptions, and the list of exemptions, that tells you where power lies, really. But, you know, I think you historicize that as something that didn't emerge directly because of machinations at the local level, but really, is the product of federal government strategies to try to respond to various iterations of what people called, with various meanings, like "the urban crisis." And so I wonder if you could talk about like, you know, this is really a story about the role of the state in reshaping the role of like the "voluntary" sector to do things the state might otherwise be doing, and where power might otherwise be concentrated in government agencies, the state is actually doing things to change kind of where power lies. So I wonder if you could talk about like, what's the role of the federal government in changing the political landscape of cities?
Claire Dunning 13:10
Thank you for all of that. I think that was one of my biggest surprises. And I think I continue to surprise people by thinking about, we have -- we have this myth in the United States, right, of the independent nonprofit sector, the charitable realm. We call it the "third sector" -- ... as if it is completely independent from state and market, right. And that's no accident that people are invoking and coming up with this term, right? Government money supports nonprofit organizations more than private donations. That fact -- I teach it to my students, I write about it and talk about it with regard to my book. It's a shocking fact. We are so invested in this notion, pro or con, right, that the nonprofit sector is its own thing. But it is constituted by law, right, by political and policy underpinnings. The IRS regulates who is or who is not a nonprofit organization. And the notion that nonprofits are independent, right, the historical record shows us no, not at all, right. Federal policies are creating government programs that are funneling dollars from government pockets into nonprofit organizations and with dollars, right, if you've ever had a grant or applied for one, you know that that grant relationship is one of power and authority, but also of data sharing, of information, of budgets and control, right. So when the policy is coming down, or coming out of Washington, saying all of you community organizations, please apply for funding -- it's a level of surveillance and insight that the government gets to local organizations and the government gets to set priorities around who the recipients are and sort of what cities, what the kinds of programs they're running. Some of the strings attached to these set by government policy include things like representation on boards of directors, who gets hired in what kinds of staff roles. And these administrative strings, they can cut in both directions, right. So in the 1960s, under the War on Poverty, the phrase maximum feasible participation, which under law constituted a requirement that recipient organizations had to employ and hold on their board of directors, people whose lives were directly impacted by the programs that were being funded, right. So primarily, this means people who are low income and people of color. And this requirement is a huge shift in terms of who's getting to make decisions and people on the ground had to fight dramatically for representation on boards. Sometimes these rules increased, in a few occasions, they decreased the role that local folks had over organizations in their own neighborhoods. But all of this is structured by the state, by policy. So what's happening in Boston is a hyperlocal story. But Phil, as you said, right, it's happening all across the country, because organizations like the ones I write about in Boston, are being held to the same standards, are operating under the same sets of guidelines, right, the same kinds of programs and expectations, feedback mechanisms, budgetary requirements, reporting expectations, all of the reams of paperwork that are flowing between nonprofits and their funders, government funders, right, largely that I'm talking about, that's a level of sort of standardization that is enveloping the nonprofit sector at a particular moment of its growth, right. And so in many ways, the policies that are coming out in the 1960s, and then continue to expand in the 1970s, 80s, 90s, etc., are a standardizing precedent that is actually encouraging the growth of the nonprofit sector.
This is a moment when new organizations are being founded to take advantage of government programs that are offering to foot the bill. And that's a significant, sort of in many ways, a radical opportunity, that here is a chance for government dollars to reach communities that have traditionally been excluded from it. And on the one hand, that's a deeply radical moment. But it's also one that quite purposefully hides the presence of government in these private organizations. It's a way of circumventing white supremacist tiers of government by getting around exclusionary political systems, but it's also a way of masking government, by sort of emphasizing the notion that private is better, private is more responsive, in ways that it absolves the government of responsibility, even as they're really present in it.
And it's that sort of complex landscape, I think, of where public and private are intersecting in ways that are both democratic and anti-democratic, and the presence of the state with these private organizations. It's messy and complicated. And to me, that's what makes this work fascinating and important to sort of tease out those various lines of, there's no immediate good guys and bad guys, if we will, right. It's sort of these complex processes responding to an unequal landscape. But the state is so deeply present here. And nonprofit organizations are both simultaneously expanding state capacity, right, the ability for local groups to implement programs of their own design on public dollars, is an absolute game changer, particularly in marginalized communities. And these relationships, right, they are appended to the state, and they lose a lot of control when they accept these kinds of grant dollars. So it sort of cuts both ways.
by Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Phil Rocco, Jules Gill-Peterson, Claire Dunning, Death Panel | Read more:
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