Volume 15, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Papers from the 2022 Nonprofit Public Policy Symposium; Issue Editor: Alan J. Abramson

To offer guidance to nonprofit leaders desiring to leverage diversity for inclusion, performance, and equity, we develop a framework for a comprehensive, mission-enhancing policy. The policy fits nonprofit organizations’ distinctive characteristics of shared mission attainment and values focus among members. The framework proceeds from an extensive transdisciplinary review and synthesis of empirical literature. It focuses on lived actions in the form of organizing practices that leaders can institute and sustain. Through a combined lens of practice theory, intergroup contact theory, and systems dynamics, we identify everyday workplace practices that undermine inclusion, performance, and equity. We detail how these anti-inclusive practices produce systemic resistance to current diversity policies by operating in vicious cycles that continually reproduce organizational and social problems. We specify a combination of practices for accountability, inclusive interactions, and personalized socialization that address the anti-inclusive practices and produce virtuous cycles of inclusion among organizational members. Illustrative cases demonstrate how the combination of practices has been effective in producing inclusion and attitude change in nonprofit organizations. To overcome policy resistance, these cases and other evidence suggest nonprofit diversity policy should emphasize inclusive values and mission-attainment rather than legal compliance.

Forty years of neoliberal policies and protocols, such as privatization, austerity measures, and managerialism, has pushed the U.S. human service sector to the brink of collapse. This commentary delineates the impact of neoliberalism on nonprofit human service agencies. Specific attention is paid to the untenable working conditions of professional frontline staff, who are tasked with providing much needed programs and services to often vulnerable populations. Worker strategies for coping with and fighting against neoliberalism, both individual and collective, are delineated. This piece concludes with some suggestions for more systemic responses to ameliorate and challenge neoliberalism’s impact on the human service sector workforce, although additional strategies are also needed.

Nonprofit scholars and practitioners alike adhere to a long-held assumption that nonprofit work is, and will remain, inherently meaningful work. The long-term marketization of the nonprofit sector coupled with the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic has undercut this narrative. Our research on meaningful nonprofit work indicates that while many nonprofit workers do find their work meaningful, pay, flexibility, and work/life balance are increasingly important to them. This commentary suggests that nonprofit leaders can no longer presume that workers motivated by prosocial values will seek out and stay with nonprofit work, satisfied with the “psychic income” that comes from doing good work. Nonprofits must be managed and led differently such that they center workers’ contemporary needs and desires. Organizational and public policy initiatives around pay equity and flexible work can support such a transition for the nonprofit sector.

A significant amount of nonprofit work happens on the “frontlines”—interacting directly with clients and developing relationships with them in unpredictable and complex social service settings. As a result, frontline work tends to result in high degrees of burnout among staff, manifesting in emotional exhaustion and cynicism towards clients, as well as poor health for workers and ongoing turnover for organizations. How do frontline workers avoid burnout and attrition while doing effective work with clients? Informed by an inductive qualitative research study of frontline workers across 10 social service organizations, this policy brief first presents two approaches to frontline work that I witnessed, both of which have negative impacts on staff and clients. These approaches align with extant scholarship on street-level bureaucracy. I then present a third approach, drawing from a practice of compassionate accompaniment I observed in my research, and which avoids the commonplace negative outcomes. This approach aligns with literature from liberation theology, as well as abolitionist organizing, decolonizing approaches, and feminist theory. Inspired by the practice of compassionate accompaniment, I propose four policy suggestions involving novel processes of training, selecting, managing, and regulating frontline workers to reduce staff burnout and increase their effectiveness with clients.