We are thinking of our global community as we grapple with both the spread of COVID-19 worldwide and the ongoing fight against racial injustice. We are grateful and humbled to be part of a community that is making extraordinary efforts to support civic life and all of its beneficiaries during these challenging times. Thank you for all that you do. As a research center dedicated to producing and sharing knowledge to strengthen civil society, we are undertaking a series of activities that we hope will contribute to better awareness and action to combat these crises. Our work on these crises can be found here.
Across the world, nonprofit organizations are part of the social fabric. They cultivate creative expression, spur support for environmental preservation, provide a safe sanctuary to live, care for the sick, build recreational spaces – their work is embedded into daily life. NPOs serve as mirrors to their communities, revealing the needs and priorities of their local constituents. At the Civic Life of Cities, we explore relationships between nonprofit organizations (NPOs) and their communities, creating a framework that helps us understand how NPOs tackle challenges, search for solutions, and address global issues at a local level.
Our Civic Life of Cities work grew out of the Stanford Project on the Evolution of Nonprofits (SPEN) which studied 200 randomly sampled NPOs from the San Francisco Bay Area over the course of nearly two decades. The SPEN research team studied how nonprofits do their work, the legal and cultural contexts in which they operate, and how they engage with one another, as well as the public, to achieve shared goals. This lens has now been extended to seven metropolitan regions across the globe: the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle (the Puget Sound Region, including Tacoma and Olympia), Shenzhen, China, Sydney, Australia, Taipei, Taiwan, Vienna, Austria and Singapore.
Our comparative research seeks to provide insights into questions that are central to associational life: