Nonprofit Collaboration: Building Relationships Across Sectors

Abstract

Discussions about nonprofit organizations often portray a very unique sector with a specific set of values, goals, and norms. And yet, there is a lot of diversity among nonprofit organizations in role, purpose and structure. Recognizing the role that collaboration plays in nonprofit service delivery is important, because foundations and government agencies are increasingly requiring that nonprofits collaborate in order to qualify for grants and contracts. There has been a significant growth in the literature on collaboration which has helped us understand the determinants of successful collaboration and raised questions about how organizations choose partners and the effect of collaborative arrangements on organizational capacity. This dissertation examines nonprofit collaboration in three contexts: across the nonprofit sector, in the child welfare field, and in disaster response and recovery. Drawing on three unique data sources, this dissertation addresses the following questions: 1. Do substantive differences in purpose affect the frequency of nonprofit collaboration with organizations in the public and private sectors?; 2. How does the extent of relationships with government agencies affect the capacity and effectiveness of child welfare nonprofits?; and 3. How do nonprofit organizations collaborate with each other, with private businesses, and with government agencies following a disaster? The findings indicate that frequency of collaboration is determined more by resource dependency than differences in the substantive focus of nonprofit organizations. However, differences in substantive areas do affect the type of collaboration – informal v formal – in which nonprofit organizations engage.