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This article recognizes that institutional survival alone is an important, but ultimately insufficient, goal for public and non-profit organizations. Instead, the article approaches organizational sustainability as a two-level concept that includes both institutional survival, as a baseline for sustainability, and intergenerational or longer term sustainability, understood as the ability of public institutions to persist and fulfill their purpose in the long run. The article is based on the findings of research conducted on a variety of public and non-profit cultural organizations, including museums, music and performing arts, and literature. However, the case of museums is used to illustrate two narratives of intergenerational sustainability: institutional resilience and institutional distinctiveness. The article notes that these narratives co-exist, although at times they contradict each other. It is the task of museum managers to reconcile the tensions embedded in these narratives via sustainable management practices. The broader implication of the study is that truly long-term sustainability, which secures the rights of future generations, requires sustainable stewardship today, and organizational sustainability should be viewed not as an outcome but rather as a process and an ethic.

Drawing on perspectives from several academic traditions, we argue that sustainability is best understood as intergenerational social equity. When viewed thusly, it is possible to determine what socially responsible organizations look like in practice. After reviewing historic claims and evidence of sustainability, we turn to modern applications of institutionally based sustainability. We then describe sustainability in the framework of an intergenerational social equity model, claiming that the legacies of social and cultural institutions are evidence of sustainability in action. We conclude with a discussion of what it means for an organization to be socially responsible given our understanding of sustainability.

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This article investigates the relationship between several elements of organizational strategy and arts and culture nonprofits perceived contributions to community sustainability. We ask the following research question: What are the drivers of arts and culture nonprofits’ engagement in community sustainability? Drawing on data collected from a survey of 175 nonprofits in the state of Michigan, this article reports the findings about arts and culture organizations perceived engagement in community sustainability and factors that may foster or inhibit such engagement. The study advances our understanding of the role that nonprofit organizations play in fostering local sustainable development, and it also informs broader scholarly discourse on the role of arts and culture organizations in a society.

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This article argues that current democracy promotion strategies relying on rightsclaiming advocacy NGOs are falling short of their democratization goals, as authoritarian regimes are closing the space through restrictions on the NGOs that attempt to carry them out. In response, we suggest a reexamination of earlier approaches to involving civil society in democratization efforts by shifting the focus back on service-providing civil society organizations that have largely become sidelined in democracy-building agendas. Specifically, service providers tend to be more capable of functioning "under the radar" thus contributing to democracy in both direct and indirect ways, and thus escaping closing space restrictions. The key concerns about their independence from the state, as well as under what conditions the state may be less successful in coopting the independent service-providers, however, remain unresolved and warrant future research.