In this introductory essay to the special issue of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly on diversity, we begin by reviewing management research on diversity in nonprofits. The preponderance of this research focuses on demographic representation. While more contemporary approaches emphasize inclusion in decision making, even this approach falls significantly short because group categorization and identity have become increasingly complex and fluid. We ultimately explore a values approach to diversity, where the fact that people are inherently diverse is recognized and valued in all organizational activities. The final section of this introduction reviews articles included in the special issue. We conclude that the diversity concept must move well beyond a managerial approach to include broader social theories, giving deep consideration to concepts of identity, power dynamics and hidden interest conflicts in diversity efforts, and the ways that societal diversity affects the dynamics of volunteering and the structuring of nonprofit organizations. Keywords diversity, inclusion, nonprofit, voluntary sector, social actionReaders of this special issue of the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly will find a variety of articles representing approaches and conceptualizations of diversity that seem unusual. This partly reflects the way special issues are built. We editors had to work with the materials that were submitted. But the diversity of topics, approaches, research-article2015 4S Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 45(1S)and national contexts that are included in this issue also is intentional and reflects the approach we editors wanted to promote when we first got together to plan the issue and lay out our perspective on diversity. We were impatient with approaches to the topic that focused on essentialist properties of individuals that privileged certain underrepresented groups compared with others and that also did not deal with issues of identity in a careful or complex way. Rather than emphasizing an approach that asks whether organizations "are" or "are not" diverse, we wanted to build and emphasize an approach in which diversity would be a value concern, incorporated continually into all activities of organizations. Such a perspective allows for an intersectional view of diversity, recognizing that most of us are diverse in some way and that our diverse qualities might include a number of different personal and identity aspects-we might be Black, female, and disabled (Schalk, 2011), for example. Articles in this special issue reflect this kind of complexity in identities and diversity perspectives.While this is where we want to come out, in terms of writing an editors' introduction, we recognize that it is important to provide an intellectual roadmap that discusses the history of diversity scholarship and explains the steps we have taken in moving from a perspective that moves from a representational view to the values perspective we prefer. The preponderance of research on diversity re...
The term resilience has saliency in the scholarship and policy on post-disaster management and disaster-risk reduction. In this paper, we assess the use of resilience as a concept for post-disaster reconstruction in Puerto Rico and offer a critique of the standard definition. This critique focuses on the primacy of Puerto Rico’s colonial relations with the United States meshed with decades of political mismanagement of the island’s economic and natural resources by local authorities and political parties. For resilience to be a useful conceptual device, we argue for decolonizing resilience and show the relevance of such an argument through a case study of the island’s coffee-growing region. Decolonizing resilience exposes power inequities and the individuating nature of post-disaster reconstruction to illustrate how collective action and direct participation of local actors and communities carves out autonomous spaces of engagement. Decolonizing resilience necessitates a contextualized analysis of resilience, taking into account “the politics of resilience” embedded in the island’s colonial history and the policy bottlenecks it creates.
Between 1950 and1994, the pace of deforestation in Costa Rica was one of the most rapid in the western hemisphere. This is a case study of FUNDECOR (Fundació n para el Desarrollo de la Cordillera Volcá nica Central/Foundation for the Development of the Central Volcanic Range), an NGO created to stop deforestation and to promote alternatives for sustainable forest development. FUNDECOR emerged when Costa Rica was undergoing a process of structural economic adjustment as a result of the 1980s debt crisis. The Costa Rican state was reducing its intervention in many policy areas, especially in agricultural production, and re-assessing its natural resource management policies. Such a volatile context explains FUNDECOR's decision to challenge the conventional wisdom regarding NGO participatory practices in community forestry. It decided not to "organise first" its constituency as a prerequisite for stopping deforestation. Rigid organising would have jeopardised the take-off and development of the anti-deforestation initiative. The results have been positive since FUNDECOR has contributed to stopping deforestation.
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