Editor’s Note, Issue 10:1

Welcome to the tenth volume of Nonprofit Policy Forum. Much has happened since we first identified nonprofits and public policy as a critical research niche that was receiving insufficient attention. Nonprofit Policy Forum began as a conventional subscription journal competing for readers and authors in an increasingly crowded marketplace of nonprofit, civil society and social enterprise journals, many of which included policy-related content within the context of some other focus, such as general social science research, management or social entrepreneurship, but did not give special emphasis to this field. We emerged from our first decade as a singularly focused, rigorous, open-access research journal, funded by five prestigious institutional sponsors who themselves support the development of policy-relevant nonprofit sector research both to inform policymaking and to provide more opportunity for researchers to publish in this field. Let me take this opportunity to thank our sponsors, editorial board members, our managing editor and our publisher who conspired with us to reach this milestone and continue to underwrite our further advancement as a first class research journal. These parties are identified elsewhere in these pages, and let us not forget the many other authors and reviewers who have become a part of the NPF family over the past ten years.

Nonprofit Policy Forum has been open to experimentation over its lifetime, with a variety of special issues and features such as case studies, policy briefs, research reports, interviews and book reviews. The present issue is no exception, born of both necessity and innovative orientation. I am not a chef or a craftsman per se, but as an educator, researcher and author, I do understand that good things sometimes take more time than one hopes. Presently, NPF has a substantial number of exciting full scale research articles and special issues in the cooker, but none are quite ready for publication right now. I think it is most important not to rush things. Fortunately, we do have ready some very insightful and provocative short pieces that we have gathered for this issue. These papers signal research opportunities for the future, as much as definitive current findings. We have published a number of issues composed of such “policy briefs” in the past, so this is not a radical departure except that we have no single theme for this issue. Nonetheless, I think these pieces will more than sate the appetites of our readers, as we look forward to publishing more conventional research papers later this year.

The first paper here, by Suyoung Kim, is a case study of the development of the welfare regime in South Korea since 1945, with special emphasis on the evolving and changing role of voluntary organizations. The author argues that traditional analyses of East Asian regimes using models developed for advanced western countries have neglected the important place of voluntary organizations. Prof. Kim shines a new light on South Korea’s welfare regime, using an alternative framework, identifying the prominence of four separate types of voluntary or nonprofit organizations, and suggesting that other East Asian countries be reexamined as well. The paper opens up a new line of welfare system research in South Korea that can easily extend to other countries in the region, and can be contrasted with other developing countries around the world.

The second paper, by Rikki Abzug, is an analysis of content of a nonprofit practitioners’ chat board sponsored by the National Council of Nonprofits, focused on the U.S. Federal Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. The piece is interesting not only for the content it reveals but also the analysis tools it applies to such an on-line conversion among a national sample of nonprofit practitioners. Although the Act contains many parts relevant to the sector, the analysis reveals a heavy concern about the issue of compensation of top nonprofit executives. The analysis also highlights differences in perspective between policy experts who emphasize the multi-faceted impacts of the Act, and the particular concerns of the practice community. The paper points not only to a rich source of data on issues facing the sector derived from such forums, but also a way of developing policy-relevant research that can be based on the perceived needs of sector leaders.

The third paper, by Fredrik Andersson, opens a new avenue of nonprofit policy research by investigating the phenomenon of fiscal sponsorship of smaller, younger nonprofits by larger and more well established nonprofit organizations. Andersson finds that fiscal sponsorship is not well reported in tax forms or on organization websites. The result is that sponsoring nonprofits are not fully accountable for their sponsoring arrangements, and smaller and newer nonprofits may not be aware of opportunities for the help they can get with their administrative functions from more experienced organizations. All this suggests that changes in reporting and regulations may be in order, and that further research should focus on assessing the efficacy, integrity and scope of nonprofit fiscal sponsorship arrangements.

Finally, we present a book review and analysis by Tobjorn Einarsson and Filip Wijkstrom of the new handbook, Satellite Account on Nonprofit and Related Institutions and Volunteer Work, published by the United Nations Statistical Division. This new edition of the handbook is aimed at improving the way countries report on their civil society sectors within the System of National Accounts. Among other innovations, the handbook provides an expanded set of criteria for documenting nonprofits, so that it becomes easier to compare one country to another, given the variety of institutional forms that constitute civil society in different countries. The authors of this review recount the historical development of this data, pioneered by the Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project at Johns Hopkins University under the leadership of Lester Salamon, and they point to the importance of the handbook in promulgating uniform data on the sector over time and worldwide for purposes of policy and research.

We hope you enjoy this unusual, and yes “special” issue. Please let us know if you find worthwhile such “leading edge” pieces as a way to signal both important policy developments and future research opportunities.

Dennis R. Young

Editor