A bold and provocative look at how the nonprofit sphere’s expansion has helped—and hindered—the LGBT cause What if the very structure on which social movements rely, the nonprofit system, is reinforcing the inequalities activists seek to eliminate? That is the question at the heart of this bold reassessment of the system’s massive expansion since the mid-1960s. Focusing on the LGBT movement, Myrl Beam argues that the conservative turn in queer movement politics, as exemplified by the shift toward marriage and legal equality, is due mostly to the movement’s embrace of the nonprofit structure. Based on oral histories as well as archival research, and drawing on the author’s own extensive activist work, Gay, Inc. presents four compelling case studies. Beam looks at how people at LGBT nonprofits in Minneapolis and Chicago grapple with the contradictions between radical queer social movements and their institutionalized iterations. Through interview subjects’ incisive, funny, and heartbreaking commentaries, Beam exposes a complex world of committed people doing the best they can to effect change, and the flawed structures in which they participate, rail against, ignore, and make do. Providing a critical look at a social formation whose sanctified place in the national imagination has for too long gone unquestioned, Gay, Inc. marks a significant contribution to scholarship on sexuality, neoliberalism, and social movements.

Provides a multi-disciplinary survey of nonprofit organizations and their role and function in society. This book also examines the nature of philanthropic behaviours and an array of organizations, international issues, social science theories, and insight.

A trillion-dollar industry, the US non-profit sector is one of the world's largest economies. From art museums and university hospitals to think tanks and church charities, over 1.5 million organizations of staggering diversity share the tax-exempt 501(c)(3) designation, if little else. Many social justice organizations have joined this world, often blunting political goals to satisfy government and foundation mandates. But even as funding shrinks, many activists often find it difficult to imagine movement-building outside the non-profit model. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded gathers essays by radical activists, educators, and non-profit staff from around the globe who critically rethink the long-term consequences of what they call the "non-profit industrial complex." Drawing on their own experiences, the contributors track the history of non-profits and provide strategies to transform and work outside them. Urgent and visionary, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded presents a biting critique of the quietly devastating role the non-profit industrial complex plays in managing dissent. Contributors. Christine E. Ahn, Robert L. Allen, Alisa Bierria, Nicole Burrowes, Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA), William Cordery, Morgan Cousins, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Stephanie Guilloud, Adjoa Florência Jones de Almeida, Tiffany Lethabo King, Paul Kivel, Soniya Munshi, Ewuare Osayande, Amara H. Pérez, Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide, Dylan Rodríguez, Paula X. Rojas, Ana Clarissa Rojas Durazo, Sisters in Action for Power, Andrea Smith, Eric Tang, Madonna Thunder Hawk, Ije Ude, Craig Willse

This volume addresses the need to revisit the very economic theories that in the past two decades have contributed so much to the development of a concentrated research agenda on nonprofit organizations. Long neglected as a topic of theorizing and empirical investigation by mainstream economics in particular, these initial theories of nonprofit organizations, introduced by Burton Weisbrod (see Chapter 3 by Kingma and Chapter 4 by Slivinsky) and Henry Hansmann (see Chapter 5 by Ortmann and Schlesinger and Chapter 6 by Hansmann) and others in the late 1970sand early 1980s, continue to shape theoretical and conceptual efforts. Importantly, their influence extends beyond economics and informs sociological and political science approaches to the set of organizations and institutions located between the market firm and the state agency as well (see Chapter 10 by Wolpert, Chapter 11 by Salamon, and Chapter 12 by Wolch; also Anheier & Ben-Ner, 1997; DiMaggio & Anheier, 1990). While the theoretical map of nonprofit research has expanded beyond these early attempts and now includes several other major theories such as stakeholder approaches (Chapter I by Ben-Ner and Gui, and Chapter 7 by Krashinsky), supply-side or entrepreneurial theories (Chapter 8 by Badelt and Chapter 9 by Young), institutional theories (Chapter 17 by DiMaggio), and comparative approaches (Chapter 15 by Anheier; see also Salamon & Anheier, 1998), we nonethelesssuggest that it is time to takestockand reexamine some of the very basics from which these economic theories operate. This is the main purpose ofthe book.

A Brookings Institution Press and the Aspen Institute publication The Resilient Sector makes available in an updated form the concise overview of the state of health of America's nonprofit organizations that Johns Hopkins scholar Lester Salamon recently completed as part of the "state of nonprofit America" project he undertook in cooperation with the Aspen Institute. Contrary to popular understanding, Salamon argues, America's nonprofit organizations have shown remarkable resilience in recent years in the face of a variety of difficult challenges, significantly re-engineering themselves in the process. But this very resilience now poses risks for the sector's continued ability to perform the tasks that we have long expected of it. The Resilient Sector offers nonprofit practitioners, policymakers, the press, and the public at large a lively assessment of this set of institutions that we have long taken for granted, but that the Frenchman Alexis de-Toqueville recognized to be "more deserving of our attention" than almost any other part of the American experiment.

Nonprofit organizations are all around us. Many people send their children to nonprofit day-care centers, schools, and colleges, and their elderly parents to nonprofit nursing homes; when they are ill, they may well go to a nonprofit hospital; they may visit a nonprofit museum, read the magazine of the nonprofit National Geographic Society, donate money to a nonprofit arts organization, watch the nonprofit public television station, exercise at the nonprofit YMCA. Nonprofits surround us, but we rarely think about their role in the economy, or the possibility of their competing unfairly with private enterprise. Burton Weisbrod asks the important questions: What is the rationale for public subsidy of nonprofit organizations? In which sectors of the economy are they of real importance? Why do people contribute money and time to them and why should donations be tax deductible? What motivates managers of nonprofits? Why are these organizations exempt from taxes on income, property, and sales? When the search for revenue brings nonprofits into competition with proprietary firms—as when colleges sell computers or museum gift shops sell books and jewelry—is that desirable? Weisbrod examines the raison d’être for nonprofits. The evidence he assembles shows that nonprofits are particularly useful in situations where consumers have little information on what they are purchasing and must therefore rely on the probity of the seller. Written in a clear, direct style without technicalities, The Nonprofit Economy is addressed to a broad audience, dealing comprehensively with what nonprofits do, how well they do it, how they are financed, and how they interact with private enterprises and government. At the same time, the book presents important new evidence on the size and composition of the nonprofit part of the economy, the relationship between financial sources and outputs, and the different roles of nonprofits and for-profit organizations in the same industries. The Nonprofit Economy will become a basic source for anyone with a serious interest in nonprofit organizations.