“WE LOST THE PLADO”: Tracing privileged school literacies in one kindergarten classroom

Drawing from a network case study, this article traces enactments of a letter writing enquiry in one Kindergarten public school classroom in New York City, and in doing so, explores both the affordances and limitations of sociomaterial approaches employed by the researcher towards school literacies. Looking down at one morning meeting revealed rotting pumpkins, playdough, pocket charts and cheese sandwiches, doing the work of environmental nonprofits, DOE officials, and cafeteria staff, all becoming entangled with the teacher and students in solving the problem of food waste at lunch, and ultimately to students writing letters to their school administrators. Yet, in looking out from this same data, I reconsider how the curriculum was not only constituted by networks of circulating materials, but also by networks circulating students' bodies into unequal school spaces, fuelling changes in the school’s enrolment and funding through neighbourhood gentrification. I propose ways in which sociomaterial accounts of literacy curriculums may contribute bridgework along with accounting for structural inequalities mobilized in and through schools.

Volunteer Urban Environmental Stewardship, Emotional Economies of Care, and Productive Power in Philadelphia

Recent efforts to increase urban forests and greenspaces rely on the volunteer labor of individuals and environmental nonprofits. The estimation of market values has often justified urban greening. These neoliberal approaches to urban environmental governance have been heavily critiqued, revealing the uneven power relationships and urban environments that result. This paper aims to move beyond such critiques by exploring how the reproduction of urban nature can be valued outside of the market. Fieldwork with volunteers participating in environmental stewardship in Philadelphia revealed their participation was motivated by intense emotional attachments to their neighborhoods, other participants, and nonhuman others, leading me to propose emotional economies of care as an alternative framework. The circulation of emotions and affects between participants, places, and nonhuman others forms an emotional economy. The generative power of this circulation makes emotional economies of care collective bodies or multiplicities. Furthermore, these multiplicities produce power from below, in counterpoint to the top down power of neoliberal environmentalities. However, just as these multiplicities come together, they can come apart or change directions. I close with ideas on how emotional ecologies and economies of care can be brought into being and processes of change within them shepherded in progressive ways.

The Transparency Challenge in Environmental Organizations: Factors Influencing Whether Institutions Collect and Reveal Diversity Data

In recent years, diversity advocates have organized a national campaign aimed to get environmental organizations to reveal data on the demographic characteristics of their institutions publicly. Environmental organizations are urged to be more transparent and put their data on GuideStar (renamed Candid). Past research indicates that as of 2018, less than 4% of the organizations have done so. Still diversity and transparency campaigns focus on the disclosure of data on Candid. Despite the push to get environmental nonprofits to disclose their demographic data, scholars and diversity advocates have not investigated if and how organizations are collecting and revealing demographic and other types of diversity data. This article addresses this gap in our knowledge about the collection and disclosure of diversity data by environmental institutions. The article reports the findings of a national study of 516 environmental organizations that analyze the following questions: (a) To what extent do environmental nonprofits collect diversity data? (b) What kinds of diversity data do organizations collect? (c) Why do organizations collect or refrain from collecting diversity data? (d) Where do organizations disclose their diversity data if they collect any? The data reported here was collected in 2018. The study assessed if organizations collected data on 12 different diversity metrics. The study found that 31.4% of the nonprofits collected or tracked data on at least one metric. The nonprofits are also more likely collect data than to divulge them. That is, 25.8% of the organizations said they shared data on at least one diversity metric. The results show that a much higher percent of organizations collect and reveal data than are currently disclosing such data on Candid. The research also found that organizations are more likely to collect data on their boards than on their staff and the nonprofits are more likely to share diversity data with funders and their boards than any other kinds of external or internal sources. The findings suggest that in crafting diversity and transparency campaigns, more attention should be paid to the kinds of data that organizations do collect, as well as where and how they reveal such data.

Organizational Factors Affecting Charitable Giving in the Environmental Nonprofit Context

Nonprofit organizations operating in the environmental protection and conservation sector face challenging fundraising issues in collecting from individual donors the money needed to accomplish their goals. The purpose of this study was to investigate which organizational factors can play a role in influencing the ability of these organizations to collect charitable contributions. By applying an extended version of the economic model of giving to a sample of 142 environmental nonprofits from the United States, the results of the regression analyses show that the following factors allow these organizations to attract more donations: devoting a high percentage of donations to programs, promoting the organization’s image through fundraising activities, having a large amount of assets that ensures a sustainable financial structure, and providing online information that demonstrates how the organization has dealt with its mission. Moreover, the study reveals that providing high amounts of disclosure on the organization’s website can have a conditional effect on fundraising expenses by boosting the positive effect of these expenses on donations. The results of this study contribute to the debate on the effectiveness of organizational factors in attracting funds from donors willing to support environmental nonprofits.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and the Salience of Publicly Disclosing Demographic Data in American Environmental Nonprofits

There has been a scholarly interest in the demographic characteristics of American environmental organizations since the 1960s, but until recently there was no readily available way of knowing the composition of the staff or board of these institutions as few revealed any of their demographic data publicly. For the past five years, there has been a high-profile campaign to get environmental nonprofits to disclose their demographic data. This paper examines 12,054 small, medium-sized, and large environmental organizations to find out how many of them have released diversity data on GuideStar. The article also examines how the state in which organizations are located, region of the country, urban or rural setting, organizational typology, amount of revenue, size of the staff, size of the board, gender of the chief executive officer (CEO), race of the CEO, and the year of completion of the GuideStar profile influenced the disclosure of diversity data. The researchers collected financial data from Internal Revenue Service tax forms and diversity data from GuideStar. The study found that 3.7% of the nonprofits studied divulged diversity data. However, organizations in the Pacific and Mid-Atlantic regions were most likely and nonprofits in the South least likely to report diversity data. Urban nonprofits were more likely to divulge diversity data than those located in the suburbs or in the rural areas. The highest level of reporting was in Washington, D.C. In addition, environmental justice organizations were more likely to disclose diversity data than other types of organizations. The larger the staff and the higher the revenue, the more likely it is that the organization divulged its diversity data. Organizations with female CEOs were more likely to reveal diversity data than male-headed nonprofits. Environmental organizations with ethnic/racial minority CEOs were also more likely to disclose demographic data than organizations with white CEOs.

The Influence of Radical Environmentalists on Reputation and Communication Practices of Advocacy/Collaborative Nonprofits

The article focuses on features, activities and communication practices of environmental nonprofits / groups to demonstrate the importance of studying how negative reputation of the environmental sub-sector created by radical environmentalists can influence advocacy / collaborative environmental nonprofits. First, it reviews some relevant literature related to environmental organizations / groups and their external communication. Additionally, it provides some examples of radical environmentalism that have been recently discussed in the news. Finally, it describes directions for future research. It is important to understand the influence of the actions of radical environmentalists on advocacy / collaborative nonprofit organizations because it might impact the success of such nonprofits.