The Civic Life of Cities Lab explores how nonprofit organizations contribute to their local communities
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:
- What value do nonprofit organizations bring to their communities, beyond the much needed goods or services they provide for constituents?
- How do local spatial and political contexts influence the vitality of associational life?
- How does the adoption of practices from other sectors alter the character of nonprofit work?
- How does technology change the way nonprofit organizations connect with and serve their constituents?