Organizational Resilience of Intimate Partner Abuse Nonprofits During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Nonprofits often function as a key part of the social safety net by providing services to vulnerable populations and strengthening communities. Despite their essential nature, research on organizational resilience (OR) among nonprofits tends to focus on surviving financial distress, while other organizational aspects of resilience are less emphasized. Finding few nonprofit OR models that address our research context, we adapt and extend a model of OR from the for-profit sector. Our model adaptation includes technical, social and financial resources and expands each category to cover unique aspects of nonprofits that the for-profit OR model does not contain. We also borrow concepts from social-ecological resilience (SER) to enhance our nonprofit-adapted OR model, which we test using a case study of intimate partner abuse (IPA) agencies. We examined eight IPA nonprofits in a Midwestern state during the COVID–19 pandemic, interviewing both managers and frontline staff. We hope our adapted model can be used by researchers and practitioners to better understand and evaluate OR not only in IPA agencies, but all nonprofits.