Community Diversity and Donor Control: An Empirical Analysis of Contributions to Donor-Advised Funds at Community Foundations

This study examines the relationship between community ethnic-racial diversity and contributions to donor-advised funds (DAFs) held by community foundations. Unlike general contributions, DAFs allow donors to retain advisory control over their fund distribution based on individual preferences. In contrast to prior research that generally finds that diversity dampens private provision of public goods, we show that greater ethnic-racial diversity is significantly associated with higher levels of contributions to DAFs at community foundations but not with general contributions. The findings contribute to the literature on diversity and public goods provision and have practical implications for the policy role of private philanthropy.

Community Foundations as Network Conveners: Structuring Collective Agency for Child Education & Development System Impact

The resource investment and flexibility necessary to support the development of collective agency among autonomous organizational actors can be substantial. Public agencies, with their rigid budget cycles and regulatory burdens, often struggle with providing the resources needed to forge this type of system building to address complex community issues. Community foundations, as anchor institutions in communities, exhibit financial and social power, flexibility, and a reputation for broad community interests that position them to be such conveners. Framing our examination with structuration theory, we conducted a longitudinal mixed methods action research project from Fall 2015 to Spring 2019 to document how a community foundation dislodged schemas and convened a purpose-oriented network to forge collective agency. Data collection included surveying 40 system providers before the launching of the network and 49 providers three years later, interviews with 10 network participants and field observations of 21 network meetings. Network analysis was employed to examine the changes to the system while qualitative methods were used to analyze the processes behind those changes. The implications of this study are that emphasizing the resources and processes that contribute to building collective action broadens perspectives about which organizations may be well suited to convening networks in the public sphere.

The number but not the variety of nonprofit organizations affects donations: evidence from an experiment

We provide experimental evidence on the total and the per-capita amount of collected donations at the increase of the number and variety of organizations available for donations. We vary the number of organizations, their type (nonprofit associations and community foundations) and their charitable purposes (to help people with economic difficulties or disabilities). We show that the number, but not the variety, of nonprofit organizations positively affects the total collected donations. Moreover, we find that, when the number of organizations increases, the inelasticity of total donations to the increase in the number of organizations leads to a reduction in the average amount of collected donations.