Band 14, Heft 3 - Lester M. Salamon Memorial Issue, Part I

Lester Salamon first characterized nonprofits in the United States as “the resilient sector” in 2003. He based this characterization on the sector’s growth, its ability to adapt to new economic and political conditions over time and its increasingly adaptive entrepreneurial culture. The view of nonprofits as resilient institutions has been reinforced since by their performance in recent crises including the COVID pandemic beginning in 2020 and the financial crisis of 2008–2009, though not without exception or assurance that nonprofits would necessarily be resilient in future crises. This paper examines some of the strategies nonprofits have employed to navigate recent crises and prepare themselves for less certain futures. It also teases apart the nature of resilience, asking how resilience at the organizational level differs from network level and sector-level resilience. Such differences have important implications for public policy vis-à-vis nonprofits. In particular, policies that would strengthen nonprofits at the organizational level may differ from, even conflict with, those that would strengthen the nonprofit sector as a whole.

Lester Salamon’s interdependence theory has held up over time and across dozens of national contexts. However, the theory has largely been developed through data on government partnerships with nonprofits for providing social services. While government-nonprofit partnerships exist in various service areas and policy contexts, the theory has rarely been applied in less “traditional” service settings. We apply a mixed-method sequential research design – empirical analysis followed by a comparative case analysis – to understand the descriptive and explanatory power of Salamon’s interdependence theory and to differentiate its applications from other theories of government-nonprofit partnerships. Our analysis shows that nonprofits are extensively engaged in public service delivery at the local level, partnering with county and municipal governments to carry out essential public services well beyond the scope of social welfare functions and human services. Expanding the concept of interdependence theory, our findings further show that in local service delivery settings, there is a unique balancing of aspects of both voluntary and government failure that can be achieved.

This paper examines government and nonprofit relations in the context of federal homeless policy with specific attention to Continuum of Care (CoC) homeless networks during the COVID-19 pandemic. Applying Salamon’s voluntary failure theory, we conduct a qualitative study answering the following question: How, during the COVID-19 pandemic, did government address the voluntary failures of the nonprofit sector? Results expand Salamon’s work by offering a more robust picture of what happens after federal funds are allocated to support the failures of the nonprofit sector. Government funds both help and generate their own limitations, which are further alleviated by nonprofit solutions.