Erykah (they/them) is currently a 2nd Year PhD student within the American subfield of the Government Department. They are interested broadly in community organizing, Black politics, interest groups and social movements, and qualitative methods. They are a past recipient of the APSA Diversity Fellowship and have forthcoming work in the Oxford Handbook of Lobbying and Its Regulation.
Nonprofit Organizing: Servicing vs. Organizing and Its Impact on Black Community Organizations
Community organizing has become an increasingly common way for disempowered communities to engage in the political process (Orr 2007). Often these community organizations are situated within nonprofit structures, in large part to ensure a steady stream of income and attain some form of legitimacy and access (Jenkins and Eckert 1986; Meyer and Rowan 1977; Staggenborg 1988). However, for organizations looking to orient themselves more toward social action, these nonprofit structures can actively hinder efforts to engage in more oppositional and direct actions, instead incentivizing work more focused on community building, collaboration, self-help, and community service (Fisher and Shragge 2007; Staggenborg 1986). What impact do nonprofit structures have on Black organizations specifically in their orientation toward service, organizing, and mobilization? Exploring this question only becomes more important once accounting for the growing economic and political conservatism of the national government landscape – especially as government funding is often a large revenue source for nonprofit organizations (Kearns et al. 2014; Lu 2015). The proposed project seeks to explore how Black nonprofit organizations perceive and make meaning of their internal organizational structures and how these perceptions impact their ideas around servicing, organizing, and/or mobilizing their members. I take a largely qualitative approach to answering these questions (using interviews and participant observation). The goal of this approach is to understand how advocates of Black organizations themselves perceive and experience the impacts of their internal structure.