Abstract
Nonprofit organizational sustainability is increasingly framed in terms of fiscal expediency. This framing of sustainability has led nonprofit organizations to increasingly adopt for-profit innovations, at times at the expense of core organizational values or nonprofit mission. Drawing on ethnographic field methods and semi-structured interviews, I examine how one anarchist-run homeless shelter resists and challenges current trends in nonprofit sustainability. I argue that by drawing on a personalist organizing model, this shelter offers a refutation of the necessity of adopting business-like organizing practices to maintain organizational sustainability. The findings from this paper highlight how this organization has used personal connections and anarchist organizing practices over more than 30 years to continue organizational operations in a shifting market economy. The results have implications for how nonprofit sustainability may be accomplished, and more broadly offers an alternative to the idealized marketized nonprofit organization.
Introduction
The influence of neoliberal ideology in the United States has led to mounting pressure for nonprofit organizations (NPOs) to turn to market practices and quantifiable metrics (e.g. amount of services rendered in relation to fiscal resources) to ensure continued operations. With this market orientation, sustainability for NPOs has been redefined to emphasize their ability to navigate an unstable financial landscape (Omura and Forster, 2014). Unfortunately, this framing of sustainability threatens commitment to social mission or values as many nonprofits seek greater financial stability through the implementation of market practices that violate or distort social mission.
Although marketization provides one avenue through which NPOs can maintain their operations, other possibilities do exist. In this project, I examine how one anarchist homeless shelter challenges the dominant market sustainability narrative in the United States. To frame this analysis, I first examine the institution of corporate governance and social entrepreneurship (SE) and their links to the neoliberalization of the nonprofit sector. Second, I review the relevant literature on anarchist organizing as an alternative to the corporate nonprofit model. Third, I provide an overview of my research site and methods. Next, I explore how one NPO has resisted normative trends towards more businesslike methods of organizing by drawing on anarchist organizing practices. Finally, I discuss how this organization’s practices offer an alternative to neoliberal and corporatized methods of organizing in the nonprofit sector, specifically around the social problem of homelessness.
Neoliberalism and the Corporatization of the Nonprofit Sector
A discussion of the marketization of the nonprofit sector and SE should first bring into focus the specter of neoliberal politics, which valorizes the entrepreneurial spirit as an extension of the belief in human capital (Ferguson, 2007). Neoliberalism idealizes individual responsibility, free market fundamentalism, and the expansion of capitalist rationality into new realms (such as the nonprofit sector) (Harvey, 2007). The neoliberal push under Reagan in the form of New Public Management (NPM) saw the privatization of a massive number of social programs that had previously been the purview of the federal government. NPM meant that vast financial resources were shifted from the federal agencies to local nonprofits under the belief that local organizations could use the resources more efficiently. However, these funds came with an increased burden for NPOs to show they were a ‘smart investment’ for government agencies. Under the rationale of making tax-payer dollars stretch further, new standards were raised for NPOs that wished to receive funding from federal grants, leading to the growth of many SE practices in the United States. In this section, I provide a brief overview of the manifestation of market SE practices in the nonprofit sector by examining the move towards corporate structure and practice.
A market orientation in the nonprofit sector serves as an organizational heuristic that utilizes ‘business thinking to structure and organize activity’ (Dart, 2004: 294). To adhere to the neoliberal driven values of NPM, many NPOs have shifted towards a hybrid form of corporate management in an attempt to make their organization more transparent and efficient (Harrow and Phillips, 2013). Many of these governance efforts have emphasized the use of ‘lean’ market bureaucratic practices to serve as the avenues for accountability in the contractual relationship between NPOs and government funding agencies. Where classic liberal bureaucracy was meant to reward technical expertise and rational decision-making, market-efficiency bureaucracy embraced only those aspects concerned with eliminating organizational ‘waste’ and promoting particular forms of accountability (Clegg et al., 2006). Although the goal of efficiency is not necessarily destructive, the implementation of these practices has led to troubling trends in the nonprofit sector, especially when business measures and outcomes become the only ways to judge organizational effectiveness (Alexander, 2000).
The attempt to ‘eliminate waste’ necessarily limits the kind of impact NPOs can have. A need to tangibly demonstrate effectiveness can lead to service providers removing many of the supportive elements of their work in order to display better quantitative measures. In effect, these governance and accountability practices may lead to helping a larger population but with much-reduced services (Dart, 2004). Furthermore, these bureaucratic accountability practices limit organizational flexibility by disempowering workers (Baines, 2008), which ironically may stifle the innovation that is encouraged by an SE orientation.
In many cases, the implementation of SE may mean adopting practices that are not aimed at providing a social service but are rather instituted solely for the generation of income (Maier et al., 2014). Although nonprofits, by definition, cannot distribute their income to shareholders, the use of ‘profit’ metrics to judge nonprofit effectiveness and worthiness of donations manifests in the standards to which these organizations adhere. For example, some NPOs have begun to charge for previously free services, which may keep marginalized groups from accessing their support (Jones, 2007). Balancing between these competing demands represents an everyday challenge for NPOs in the United States.
Organizing influenced by SE can also encourage NPOs to view themselves as ‘in competition’ with other community nonprofits. As the number and amounts of potential donations in any given community are necessarily finite, NPOs view their ability to be perceived as impactful as necessary to give themselves a competitive edge over their counterparts (McDonald, 2007). Thus, while NPOs have and continue to collaborate effectively (MacIndoe and Sullivan, 2014), the nature and tenor of this collaboration is threatened by SE attitudes.
Nonprofit organizing in the United States and in the West, in general, has long been a tension-filled exercise as socially conscious organizations seek to make their way in a market economy (Sanders and McClellan, 2014). With the rise of SE, there is an increased risk of the tension resolving via the loss of focus on mission to meet financial expediency. The next section of this paper details some of the basic principles of anarchist organizing, which I position as an alternative to the corporate model of nonprofit organizing.
Anarchist Organizing
Anarchism provides one alternative to the neoliberal organizing that manifests in the adoption of SE practices in the nonprofit sector. However, the use of the term anarchism is not without its tensions. Often, the legitimacy of the concept of ‘anarchist organizing’ is challenged. However, anarchy is not ‘disorganization’ but rather an understanding of human and organizational agency when external coercion (whether in the form of governmental authority or the coercive power of capital) is not allowed undue influence (Parker et al., 2014). Anarchy is a philosophy that values individual human agency and believes that violence is done to individuals when their freedom is unduly limited.
Critics of certain forms of radical anarchism have pointed out that the emphasis on individual agency may leave the ‘weak’ to suffer rather than offer them aid, or may result in anarchists being unlikely to impact social structures (Shantz, 2010; Ward, 2004). Feminist anarchism, however, emphasizes individual responsibility to care for others (Brown, 1993), which shifts from neoliberal understandings of individual responsibility and the need to seize opportunities to commodify (Wacquant, 2009), to a notion of coresponsibility that emphasizes the need to care for others (Vieta, 2014). Likewise, other ‘ways’ of doing anarchy acknowledge the need to work within current systems to make meaningful change (Shantz, 2010; Ward, 2004). A blending of feminist (Goldman, 1969) and constructive (Shantz, 2010) anarchism offer an alternative to neoliberal SE practices that I examine in this project. I argue that orientation means that anarchist organizations are able to not only exist but thrive as affective ties draw passionate individuals to particular causes (Clough, 2012).
When discussing the application of anarchist values to organizing, Ward (1966) argued for four characteristics of anarchist organizing. First, anarchist organizations should be based on voluntary labor. Second, they should adopt an orientation where resources are directed towards the goal instead of the organization. Third, anarchist organizations should remain small. Finally, Ward argued that anarchist organizations should be temporary. These four prescriptions for anarchist organizing, while neither absolute nor without their own complications, provide a starting point for discussing the fundamental differences between anarchist and SE ways of engaging in nonprofit organizing in the United States. In the next section, I describe the specific anarchist organization that serves as the basis for this case.
Assisi House
Assisi House (AH) is the pseudonym for a Catholic Worker hospitality house that was founded in 1983 and is located in a small Midwestern city. The Catholic Worker movement was founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin during the Great Depression as a radical religious alternative to the atheist communist movement in the United States. Members of the movement often identify as Christian, pacifist, anarchists, but the level of engagement with any one of those terms varies greatly from person to person. The Catholic Workers are best known for their ‘houses of hospitality’ where they serve marginalized populations (often, but not exclusively, homeless men and women). However, in keeping with their anarchist roots, most Catholic Worker houses do not register as nonprofits with the federal government 501(c)(3) organization, meaning they do not have tax-exempt status.
Initially, AH sought to serve as many homeless men as they could fit in the house. However, as the workers (the label used to identify the volunteers who lived in the shelter and/or made decisions at the house) became more familiar with the needs of the homeless in the area they realized there was a need to better serve those individuals struggling with mental illness. To address the problem, Assisi House reduced the number of men it served to a group of no more than 13 so they could provide the best hospitality possible to those men. Although not all the guests (the term used to describe the men that make use of the services) at Assisi House struggled with severe mental health problems, many of whom did became long-term guests and lived at the house for more than ten years. To better understand how a nonprofit organization can remain focused on mission and resist adopting SE practices leads to my research question:
RQ: How does Assisi House challenge dominant rationalities for nonprofit sustainability?
Methodology
To collect data from Assisi House, I engaged in 162 hours of activist participant-observation (Tracy, 2013). Activist orientation involves a higher level of participation in the research site, providing opportunities to experience the site in a manner that privileges embodied experience and provides tangible benefits to the researched community (Conquergood, 1991). An activist orientation seeks to bridge the gap between researchers and participants by establishing more meaningful relationships. To this end, I participated in meetings, attended religious services held at the house, cooked, served, and ate meals, cleaned, ran the house for a few shifts, and helped with a roofing project. Embedding myself in the organization as an activist researcher provided me with a familiarity with the organization that enriched my project while also providing opportunities to ‘give back’ to the organization and my participants.
I also conducted 15 semi-structured interviews with five guests, four volunteers, and six workers. Interview participants were asked questions about their experiences in the organization and how Assisi House differed from other shelters in the area. Prior to each interview, I offered participants the opportunity to select their own pseudonym. While some participants chose to use nicknames that a long-term guest had given them, most elected to have a pseudonym assigned to them. Interviews were recorded and transcribed, with the exception of one guest who asked to not be recorded. Finally, in addition to observations and interviews, I collected organizational newsletters from the previous five years for analysis. In total, I collected over 250 pages of single-spaced data.
Analysis
To analyze the data, I opted for an iterative reading (Tracy, 2013). An iterative analysis alternates between emergent readings of the data and the application of pre-existing concepts. Initial coding of the data was descriptive and focused on emergent action and process at Assisi House (e.g. joking with volunteers, hating paperwork, communicating by word of mouth). My second cycle of coding focused on how the emergent codes from the initial round of coding related to issues of organizational sustainability (e.g. stakeholder relationship maintenance, resisting nonprofit bureaucracy, non-traditional advertising). For example, during the earliest part of my data collection, I noticed the lack of written rules or paperwork at the organization. When I asked about this, I was informed that because they were anarchists they ‘hated paperwork’, which I coded in the first cycle as hating paperwork. This initial code shifted to include the emphasis on personal interactions that dominated the organization. Eventually, as I examined what this meant for organizational sustainability, I reframed the code to examine how AH and its members actively resisted bureaucratic structures. This led to the second level code resisting nonprofit bureaucracy.
By using an iterative approach, I was able to examine the aspects of my data that spoke directly to how Assisi House challenged the dominant narratives of nonprofit sustainability that fit within the existing sustainability literature. Also, I was able to read the multiple ways in which Assisi House engaged in activities that are not accounted for in most nonprofit theorizing. The next section details the results of my analysis.
Remaining Socially Conscious in a Market Economy
To answer the question of how Assisi House maintained its mission and organizational values while resisting the trend to conform to SE methods of organizing, I argue that Assisi House adopted several alternative organizing practices based on its anarchist roots. In this section, I discuss how Assisi House’s resistance to bureaucracy, and the ways it created and maintained relationships with a broad network of donors allowed it to resist the compulsion to become more business-like.
Resistance to Bureaucracy through Personalist Organizing
In the course of demonstrating organizational impact and improving accountability, nonprofit organizing has become an increasingly bureaucratic affair. For example, upon entering a shelter those who are seeking services will fill out several different intake forms. However, the paperwork used by homeless shelters can be used to distort or ‘game’ the system. For example, several guests at AH reflected on how they might be asked to leave one of the other shelters in town with assurances that they could come back the same day (even when their stay wasn’t up) as a way to ‘pad numbers’ for the shelter. Although the direct consequence of the shelter engaging in this ‘padding’ is not known, many of the guests complained of the inconvenience of the practice.
However, while the paperwork associated with bureaucratic forms of organizing is often simply inconvenient, it also created a barrier to receiving services. All other shelters in the area near AH required that individuals seeking services submit to a background check at the police station. At best, this practice often created a delay in receiving shelter, as many did not realize they needed the check performed until it was too late in the evening. However, these checks also meant that many individuals of the homeless community, particularly undocumented immigrants or those convicted of certain crimes, could not receive shelter.
Some of the members of the Assisi House used the example of the background checks to contrast the freedom that their organization had in regards to whom they helped. One worker, a white male in his mid-20s who had been at the house for three years named Nature Boy, pointed in particular to their ability to help sex offenders as being significant:
I would say the biggest reason we’re not nonprofit is because it allows us to do what we want. We don’t have the freedom, or the restrictions, if you’re working at [another shelter] there’s some like, we’re within distance of a school … We wouldn’t be able to even host sex offenders you know! But … you know that could be something, there’s a lot of different reasons that people are sex offenders! And you know it’s not like … it’s easy to paint with a broad brush, and it allows us some nuance to make things personal.
In this passage, Nature Boy emphasizes his belief in the importance of dealing with people on an individual basis instead of generalizing. This emphasis on dealing with the guests on an individual basis was central to how AH sought to fulfill its mission.
Robert, a white man in his 60s, who had helped found Assisi House in 1983, explained the personalist model as contrasting market or government methods of addressing social problems. Reflecting on the values of Dorothy Day, Robert described the personalist model as being rooted in a familial way of addressing the needs of a community:
Rather than paying someone from the government to take care of poor people, or pay some … nongovernmental organizations to do it … you know … and she saw everybody as a family, part of the human family rather than a client. So she always refused to uhh … register her Catholic Worker as a 501(c)(3), as a charitable organization with the government. Because, she said, you know, ‘As anarchists we don’t need a government to tell us what to do, we know what to do.’
Robert dismissed what he sees as an orientation among NPOs to deal with homeless and housing insecure people as clients and embraced what he viewed as a more compassionate and flexible organizing model. For Robert, this was also tied to his religious beliefs and he later summarized the personalist model by arguing that the founders of AH ‘didn’t feel like Jesus would make you fill out a form before he’d help you’.
While the decision to not register as a 501(c)(3) was acknowledged as presenting its own set of problems, organizational members identified the choice as one that fit with organizational ideals. When I asked Esther, a white female worker who had been helping with the organization for almost 15 years, about the decision to not become a 501(c)(3) organization she told me:
The idea of getting permission from the government to operate was something that was problematic. For some Catholic Workers, including Dorothy, the idea that … the idea that people would give you money because they could take it off their taxes was another issue … Because a lot of Catholic Workers, because they voluntarily reduce their income at the level where they don’t have to pay taxes, because they don’t want to pay taxes to support war.
Esther’s comment reveals a deeper problem that many Catholic Workers have with the government and the idea of being ‘endorsed’ by the government in becoming incorporated. As pacifists, Esther told me, the tax system is seen as a mechanism by which the military was supported. Thus it would be difficult for them to reconcile benefitting from a system that was used to fund violence at home and abroad.
However, while the decision to not become a 501(c)(3) presented a barrier to larger gifts being given to Assisi House, it was not an insurmountable one. Many members of the organization acknowledged that some of the donors may want to write-off their donations on their taxes, and in regards to smaller donations this was not an issue. However, should anyone wish to donate more money they had the option of donating the funds to one of the local churches that supported the shelter. In turn, these churches would earmark the donation for Assisi House. While this earmarking did not exist as part of a formal relationship, it was one that was known and used by some supporters of the organization to receive a tax exemption for their donation.
Although there were potential workarounds for private donations, there were other resources that remained out of reach due to Assisi House’s refusal to organize in a more bureaucratic manner. Assisi House did not qualify to receive funds from most government grants, or from agencies like United Way. Linda, a white female volunteer who had been volunteering at the house for 14 years, expressed her own feelings of tension around Assisi House’s refusal to seek external support. When I asked her what she liked about her experiences at Assisi House she responded: ‘I like the fact that it’s not … receiving funds, but I think it could be so much better if they relied on something like United Way. You know, they could make more improvements.’ On the one hand, Linda acknowledged the level of freedom that is provided by eschewing aid from funding organizations. However, on the other she believed that the organization could ‘be so much better’ if they were provided with more stable and generous funding than their current donor network provided. Linda also noted though that bringing in external help from agencies like United Way would mean increased monitoring of AH.
Some organizational members believed that taking money from the government and other funding organizations would mean adopting bureaucratic practices that would erect a barrier between the workers and the guests. One of the workers, a white middle-aged man named Abe who had been at the house for less than a year, expressed his belief that AH differed from traditional ‘charity’ models of working with the homeless by trying to break from the ‘service provider and client’ relationship that occurs in more bureaucratic NPOs. As Abe expressed, the relationships that were built at Assisi House couldn’t happen ‘across a desk’. Another worker, Jimmy, a white man in his mid-20s who had been at the house for five years, discussed the fact that at AH they had the freedom to do many things that no government authority would ever approve.
The difference between Assisi House’s personalist model and more traditional shelters was noted and appreciated by guests at the house. Paz and Jose, two guests at the house who had been staying for a few months, remarked that the rules of Assisi House were more like those in a family (for good or for ill). Paz, a white man in his 20s, in particular, contrasted the tone set by the intake process at Assisi House in comparison to other shelters in the area:
So, over at [the other shelter], they require you to get a … police pass before you can go up there. So you call, they tell you go get a police pass, and I mean, show that you’re not a violent person, not a pedophile or anything … and then you go up there, and … they just read you rules, and tell you, okay so you have this many days to find a job, if you don’t find a job then you’re out. But if you do find a job you can be part of our, you can get in on our 120-day program … And so at another shelter, I mean, it’s very similar … and … at Assisi House, it’s just like … ‘Hey! Can I stay here?’ ‘Yeah, okay!’ or, ‘Nah!’
Paz and Jose expressed an appreciation for the more intimate and personal nature of not only the intake process at Assisi House, but also for the way they were treated and the possibility of creating relationships with other guests, workers, and clients in the house. Paz discussed his recent realization that during his current stay at Assisi House he had developed a sense of community that he’d never had before. Another guest, Sonny, said that other shelters were ‘just a place to lay your head, and Assisi house is more of a … uh … community’.
Like Paz, Jose, a white man in his 20s who had recently moved to the area, voiced an appreciation for the less formalized nature of relationships within the house, and he even expressed interest in becoming one of the workers. He told me that he appreciated the sense of connection in the house and that it provided some structure, but it also gave him a lot more freedom than he’d experienced both in other homeless shelters or treatment facilities.
It’s like, you know, there’s this community and it has these ideas of like dignity, and, uh … respect, and I feel like that’s something that really comes through. You know, you see how they [workers] are with each other and, uh, us, and like, Walter [a long-time guest], and it just feels really different from the places I’ve been before.
Jose continued that he believed that one of the biggest differences was in how the relationships manifested in the individualized treatment of each guest.
Paz and Jose, while not long-term guests, were still given an opportunity to stay for much longer than they would have been at other shelters. In fact, there was no definitive rule about how long any individual could stay (though being given an initial period of two weeks was common); rather, the decision was made through community discussions. The planned length of Jose’s stay was thoroughly debated after his initial two weeks.
Robert, while discussing Jose, suggested that he should be given an additional week and then asked to leave. Jimmy argued that due to Jose’s addiction and based on their conversations, they should give him at least five weeks to get everything together and get him stabilized. In the end, Jose stayed at Assisi House for nearly four months, and when he left he had a full-time job and an apartment. Paz was also given the opportunity to stay for an extended period of time to finish his undergraduate degree.
Sonny, a Native American guest who had been at the house for more than a year, provided another example of different possibilities of the personalist model for addressing homelessness. While Sonny was initially admitted as a temporary guest, his willingness to contribute to the house (often in the form of maintenance), and his earnest investment in the community, led to him becoming a worker. The relationships that Sonny formed within AH led to a number of changes for him. When I asked Sonny about the relationships he’d formed after being at Assisi House for a year he claimed:
They’re all … each and every one of them is different. But they’re all based on that same quality we’ve been talking about. It’s treating people good with respect, and that’s something that I’ve learned while I’ve been here. See, before now, I mean, I probably didn’t do that so much. But I’ve learned to be that way, and it’s a good thing, and all my relationships here are based upon that, you know … they’re good solid relationships because of their basis, you know, it’s not because somebody’s cool or something like that you know … It’s more of a personal thing.
Sonny exemplified the potentially transformative nature of creating a community based on the humanity of individuals in a more flexible, less bureaucratic or rules-driven manner. Although the desired end result is not always achieved, Assisi House created an opportunity for change for many individuals.
The personalist model used to guide decisions at Assisi House, rather than a more bureaucratic model of the impartial enforcement of rules, sharply contrasted with the experiences that guests and volunteers at other shelters related. What is particularly worth noting is that very little of what Assisi House accomplished translated into evidence of ‘success’. Also, the personalist model impacted not only how Assisi House conducted itself with its guests, but also in its interactions with those who provided support. The next section of this paper examines how personalism manifested in Assisi House’s method of gathering financial, material, and volunteer support from the community.
Personalism and External Support
While many NPOs under NPM have become increasingly reliant on government funds to maintain or expand operations, Assisi House relied on a larger volume of smaller donations from individuals and organizations with which they had developed longstanding relationships. This section covers how those relationships were created and maintained through interactions with individual members of the AH community.
Creating support
When creating new relationships with potential supporters, AH relied heavily upon interpersonal interaction and a loose word-of-mouth network. For example, during my observations Assisi House undertook a reroofing of a sister organization. Sonny contacted multiple roofing businesses seeking a discount on materials. After making several calls, the owner of one company suggested that Sonny meet with him in person to discuss the project. After the discussion the owner, who was from the area but had never heard of AH, chose to donate all of the supplies for the roof and committed to doing one project for AH each year. Sonny told me that interactions like this weren’t uncommon. However, relying on such an intimate network for NPO survival runs counter to common assumptions, and Sonny joked that when he tells people that Assisi House doesn’t take money from the government or have nonprofit status, their response is that ‘People can’t believe we exist!’
Rather than using advertising campaigns, AH found it was able to find sufficient volunteers and resources through informal communication networks. All of the workers, volunteers, and guests told me that they had heard of Assisi House through a friend or from someone else on the street. This sort of networking had the effect of snowballing, where new volunteers would bring in other volunteers, and those newer volunteers would bring in more. For example, Jack began volunteering after he heard about Assisi House from a Catholic Worker in another city. After his second visit, Jack brought Laurel, who he had met through school. Laurel, in turn, brought Beth, one of her roommates.
Jack and Laurel expressed that they loved the ‘vibe’ in the house, which led to them wanting to share the unique community with their friends, roommates, and colleagues. They both expressed a preference for what they saw as the Catholic Worker model, which provided more opportunities for interaction with guests, and when I asked Jack what he liked about Assisi House he told me:
I love the sense of community, not just among the volunteers, but also among the volunteers and the guests, among the guest themselves … it seems that people really do genuinely care about each other, and they … I love how much fun people seem to have with each other here.
Jack’s sense of the affection that members of the house held for one another was reflected in comments by a colleague of mine, who remarked that upon entering Assisi House she felt immediately that the house was different from other shelters. She stated that the positive energy and laughter that suffused the organization was unique, and that she hoped to find time to volunteer there as well.
Assisi House’s location in a small community, albeit one with an ever-shifting college-aged population, meant that opportunities to gain new long-term volunteers and supporters were relatively rare. This lack of new committed members created extra emphasis on the maintenance of relationships with individuals and organizations that did come to support Assisi House. The next section of this paper details how Assisi House worked to maintain its relationships with organizational supporters.
Maintaining support
Much like the creation of new supporters, the maintenance of current organizational supporters occurred through personal connections. Jimmy, reflecting on why people supported AH even though they didn’t get a tax exemption, shared with me that:
You know, for the most part we just get our donations from, like, people who just kind of have experience with us … or know about us through friends. You know, they don’t have these demands of us. They like, know exactly what we believe, they know the type of person we take in and that’s why they give money to us too.
Once the relationship was established it was often deliberately cultivated. Jimmy told me that when you have volunteers that are ‘really good’ or seem to be interested in being more active at AH, that he tries to build a personal relationship.
Assisi House’s sustainability was tied to its connections throughout the community. One volunteer, a white man in his 60s who had been involved at AH for almost 30 years named Ross, remarked how over the years AH had ‘trained’ the city where to bring their leftovers. In several instances, members of various organizations like the Rotary Club brought trays of food leftover from an event they were having. Likewise, the local Operation Food Rescue chapter brought hundreds of pounds of leftover food from the nearby university.
Other relationships were more regular and important to AH maintaining its operations. For example, AH received regular donations from the local Catholic church (where many of the volunteers and workers regularly attended or had attended mass). However, while those donations were important to the organization, they did not prevent AH and its members from clashing with the church. Most notably, Robert and other members of the organization elected to bring a self-identified female priest to the house to conduct a service. This decision put a great deal of strain on the relationship between AH and the church, but Robert stated in a meeting that, as an organization, they had committed to female ordination as an important issue and that he didn’t want to ‘hide my light under a bushel’ about the issue.
While there was a strong preference for maintaining relationships through interpersonal and direct interaction, the members of the Assisi House community realized that this was not always sufficient. To supplement these interactions Assisi House used Facebook and biannual newsletters to, as Esther put it, ‘remind people we exist’. Newsletters and Facebook served as a medium to communicate with a broader network than was immediately accessible through other means. However, this method of communication was rarely discussed as a manner to attract new donors and was rather seen as a way to either communicate specific needs (through Facebook) or to provide a political platform and update and the goings-on at Assisi House (through newsletters). These avenues were used as opportunities to tell individual stories and reflect on the social conditions that created poverty, not as an attempt to demonstrate AH’s effectiveness. Attempting to quantify the impact AH was having in the community to promote the organization would have violated AH’s values in two important ways. First, the recordkeeping that would have been required to engage in this kind of self-promotion would have distracted from the work of caring for the poor. Second, documenting their impact in that way could have violated the dignity of the men who took shelter with them by commodifying them.
Overall, organizational members and the organization itself drew on personalist commitments as both a way to practice hospitality in its service to the marginalized members of the community and to create and maintain relationships with supporters. Maintaining a personalist commitment rooted in an anarchist ideology challenges dominant assumptions about the necessity of adopting corporate and SE nonprofit organizing practices. Assisi House demonstrates through its continued existence the possibility of organizing around difficult social problems without succumbing either to mission drift or adopting more market ways of doing nonprofit organizing.
Discussion
In this project, I have examined Assisi House as an organization that challenges increasingly common beliefs in the necessity of adopting market and SE ways of doing nonprofit organizing. Much of the current theorizing on nonprofit organizing would suggest that AH, and other organizations like it, should be unable to survive in a world of large marketized nonprofits. I argue that AH’s anarchist leanings provide both motive and method for refuting the push to organize like a more normative NPO. The anarchist organizing practices at AH allow the organization to sustain the organization without compromising its mission.
Ward (1966) argued that in addition to emphasizing the dignity of individuals, anarchist organizations should be: (1) small, (2) voluntary, (3) goal-driven, and (4) temporary. While anarchist organizations take different forms, these four components begin to explain how AH resisted market influence while sustaining its operations. First, AH deliberately remained small and kept much of its focus on helping a small number of people to the best of their ability. Rather than seeking to expand and add more beds, which would require more labor, Assisi House emphasized providing the best hospitality it could to a relatively small community. By remaining small, Assisi House both limited its expenses and was able to build much closer relationships with many of the guests. The decision to remain small runs counter to a market orientation that often emphasizes a logic where ‘more’ is the same as ‘better’. Moreover, remaining small allows organizations like Assisi House to operate autonomously and prevents interference from external agencies that may impact the social mission (Jensen and Meisenbach, 2015).
Second, as Robert pointed out, the Catholic Workers did not believe that the way to address social problems was to pay someone to take care of them. Rather the workers embraced an ideal that treated those in need as part of a human family. From a pragmatic perspective, having an entirely voluntary workforce also reduces the costs for the organization. Furthermore, the reliance on voluntary labor further differentiated AH from NPOs that had adopted more corporate and hierarchical forms of organizing. Since all of the workers were volunteers, there was greater capacity for collective ownership of the organization and thus greater opportunities for productive collaboration and dissent (as in the case of the debate over Jose).
Finally, Ward’s argument that anarchist organizations should be temporary and goal driven is interlinked in how they create a governing rationality for choices made by the organization. While organizing is often described as a goal-driven activity, for Ward the ‘goal’ of an anarchist organization should be clear and all organizational energy and resources should be directed towards that goal. This commitment was key in AH’s resistance to engaging in more bureaucratic practices. Not only would these practices interfere with the organization’s ability to act flexibly, but they would also shift the labor of the workers and volunteers from their work with the guests.
Reframing Sustainability and Resistance to Social Entrepreneurship
The shift to SE practices in the nonprofit sector has come about from a desire to create sustainable, efficient, and innovative organizations (Morris et al., 2011). However, the focus on sustaining organizations has often come at the expense of sustaining missions. While some will argue that the adoption of SE enterprises is necessary, or even good for the nonprofit sector, some evidence suggests that the adoption of these practices can result in the neglect of those populations whose need is the highest. By focusing on sustaining organizations instead of sustaining missions NPOs are at risk of losing sight of their original purpose. Anarchist organizing, which emphasizes organizational goals and the acceptance of the organization as temporary, provides a counterpoint to the adoption of SE practices and an avenue through which mission drift can be resisted.
The current articulation of organizational sustainability, the ability to maintain operations in a shifting financial landscape (Omura and Forster, 2014), has resulted in a divorcing of mission and organization. Although mission plays a central role in nonprofit organizing (Lewis, 2005), the desire to be viewed as a sustainable market entity has resulted in organizations abandoning missions and core organizational values. Assisi House counters this trend by ignoring quantitative measures and finding means to get by without being compelled to ‘sell out’ its mission. In fact, the workers and volunteers at Assisi House acknowledged that they could help more people than they currently do, but they resist the belief that helping more individuals is the best way to accomplish their mission. Although helping more homeless individuals could make Assisi House a more attractive target for private donations, workers and volunteers resisted a quantitative measure of the work they performed. Rather, they sought to offer the best quality of care possible while avoiding the external oversight that would come with most government grants.
Theoretical Implications
The empirical findings from this paper have implications for an understanding of how nonprofits function within a market culture. As such, this paper speaks to discussions around the nonprofit organizing process itself. Recently, there has been some debate regarding whether NPOs are truly unique organizational forms from their for-profit counterparts (e.g. Harrow and Phillips, 2003). Much of the debate has centered on the increasingly common use of market logics and practices within the nonprofit sector, and whether the adoption of these practices has distorted the unique nature of nonprofit organizing practices.
Additionally, this paper hopes to bring the discussion of alternative organizing, and in particular anarchist organizing, further into the academic view. Assisi House’s 33-year existence, along with the more than 80-year existence of the broader Catholic Worker movement, undercuts arguments of impossibility. More scholarly work on anarchist and other alternative organizing emphasizing sustainability will serve to strengthen critical arguments against the impossibility of alternatives to capitalist forms. More work around organizational forms that function as both ‘means’ and ‘end’ may lead to an opening of possibilities that undercut neoliberal sentiment. Discussions of possibility that demonstrate the sustainability of alternative organizational types are vital to making progress towards fundamental systemic changes and to combat and challenge assumptions in the nonprofit sector and beyond that lead to further marginalization of oppressed populations.
Finally, this paper reflects Lewis’s (2005) belief on the links between communities and NPOs. The irony of large nonprofits is that they often serve local communities but are largely governed and constrained by legislators and administrators that have little familiarity with the communities and populations being served. The lack of familiarity increases the likelihood that organizational policies made at upper levels of administration will not reflect the needs of those the organization is meant to serve. As large NPOs become less dependent on direct support from local communities they also become less connected and responsive to the needs of those communities (Toepler, 2003). Assisi House offers an alternative that reemphasizes the notion of directly established social capital (Bourdieu, 1986), and challenges assumptions about how NPOs can build that capital.
Practical Implications
Regarding organizational practice, this study offers some possible alternatives to marketization in the nonprofit sector. In particular, I highlight in this paper the possibilities of organizing around personal connections and resisting external coercion. While I acknowledge some issues of scale in how Assisi House versus other shelters in the area was able to address issues of homelessness from a strictly quantitative standpoint, the model that Assisi House presents offers at least an opening point for a discussion around alternatives to corporate nonprofit organizing practices. Furthermore, the need that Assisi House fills, helping individuals with mental illness, people with certain convictions, and undocumented immigrants, spotlights shortcomings in how we as a society address homelessness in smaller communities in the United States.
Conclusion
In this project, I have sought to show how at least one alternative to the corporate nonprofit might function as a possibility for nonprofit sustainability that runs counter to the dominant narrative of marketization. Adopting business practices in the nonprofit sector is not, in and of itself, negative. However, it has become clear that under NPM the push to engage in business-like forms of organizing has brought with it a host of unintended consequences. Rather than simply making nonprofits more efficient, or more easily accountable, the push to SE has resulted in many NPOs losing their way.
By framing sustainability as simply based on fiscal health, the sustainability of organizational mission is left by the wayside. I argue that any conversation of nonprofit sustainability should start first with mission, not with fiscal responsibility. Although anarchist organizing practices bring with them their own sets of assumptions and challenges, AH provide a compelling counterpoint to the neoliberal ideology that has become embedded in how organizing practices are evaluated and understood in the nonprofit sector. Ironically, by refusing to adopt many of the SE practices now associated with NPO sustainability AH is best able to maintain its operations. I argue that Assisi House demonstrates the possibility to remain committed to organizational mission and values by emphasizing personal connections and a commitment to the local community.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the reviewers for their help in bringing this article to its present form. Also, I am grateful to Dr. Rahul Mitra and Dr. Alisa Moldavanova for putting together this important special issue, and providing this opportunity to share this article.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.