Out of the shadows: exploring contemporary geographies of voluntarism

Fyfe, Nicholas R.; Milligan, Christine

doi:10.1191/0309132503ph435oa

Cited by 157 publications

(112 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…Human geographers have also looked at the macro-context of the shift of the nonprofit/voluntary sector from one of grassroots advocacy up through the 1970s to one predicated on public service delivery (Wolch 1989;Wolch 1990;Fyfe and Milligan 2003;Milligan and Conradson 2011). A dominant concern has been about the possibility of nonprofit organizations being captured by public funders as the contract regime tips the balance to the interests of government over the interests of the community.…”

Section: The Geography Of Public Servicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moving to Need: The Effect of Federal Contracts on Service Provider Location

Never

Westberg

2017

Nonprofit Policy Forum

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Place matters, particularly when one considers human services. Proximity to individuals served is particularly important in those human services dedicated to people with low mobility or elevated fears of difference. Our project aims to explore the location decisions of job placement and training nonprofits at a national level. Relying on four separate data sets -990 data from the National Center of Charitable Statistics, federal contracting from the Federal Audit Clearinghouse, and American Community Survey data at the census tract level -we analyze nonprofit movement from 2008-2012 and assess the impact of federal contracts on the prevalence to move. This analysis finds that federal contracts played a powerful but double-edged role in redistributing job placement and training agencies. First, federal contracts seem to have helped nonprofits move to 'better' neighborhoods post-recession. Second, and somewhat contradictory, we also find that post-recession these same agencies were located in far worse neighborhoods than non-contracted counterparts that also moved during the recession.

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Section: The Geography Of Public Servicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moving to Need: The Effect of Federal Contracts on Service Provider Location

Never

Westberg

2017

Nonprofit Policy Forum

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“…These processes are increasingly carried out through purported partnerships of actors from the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. Emphasis on lean, efficient state structures has furthered this handoff of governance responsibilities to so-called shadow state institutions (Wolch 1990) and has led to an overall reduction in funding for planning, problem solving, and services (Peck 2001;Brenner and Theodore 2002;Fyfe and Milligan 2003). Widespread attention has been given to this transformation of the roles, responsibilities, and institutional configurations of state and civil society in urban spatial politics, with particular focus on the implications for local-level institutions, such as neighborhood associations, community-based organizations, community development corporations, and other nonprofit community agencies.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond Cooptation or Resistance: Urban Spatial Politics, Community Organizations, and GIS-Based Spatial Narratives

Elwood

2006

Annals of the Association of American Geographers

179

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The roles, relationships, and strategies of state and civil society institutions in urban planning, problem solving, and service delivery are in flux. In trying to understand how these changes affect community organizations, grassroots groups, and local-level institutions of civil society, existing research has tended to conceptualize these roles through a series of oppositional dialectics, such as cooptation or resistance. This article shows instead that community organizations shift their technological, institutional, and spatial approaches to urban planning and problem solving in creative and multifaceted ways. They produce a variety of spatial narratives to advance their agendas by strategically enacting multiple roles vis-à-vis a diverse set of actors and institutions. Information technologies such as geographic information systems (GIS) can play a central role in this approach. Community organizations apply their own interpretive frameworks to GIS-based maps and images to produce spatial narratives of local needs, conditions, and assets that may be adapted to the diverse roles and relationships they negotiate in urban spatial politics. These arguments are developed from ethnographic research carried out with two inner-city Chicago community organizations pursuing a range of neighborhood improvement activities.

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“…While it is not the purpose of this paper to review these works (though see Fyfe and Milligan, 2003), notable areas of activity include: international comparisons of the voluntary sector (e.g. Ragin, 1998;Salamon et al, 2000); the changing political context of voluntary activity (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Putting the Voluntary Sector in its Place: Geographical Perspectives on Voluntary Activity and Social Welfare in Glasgow

Milligan

Fyfe

2004

J. Soc. Pol.

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The growing political and social significance of the voluntary sector in contemporary welfare reform is reflected in a wide body of research that has emerged in the political and social policy literature since the mid-1980s. While this work adds considerably to our understanding of the changing role of the voluntary welfare sector, these accounts are largely aspatial. Yet, geographical perspectives offer important insights into the development of the voluntary sector at both micro-and macro-levels. The purpose of this paper is thus twofold: first we wish to draw attention to what it is that geographers do that may be of interest to those working in the field of social policy; and second, we illustrate why such perspectives are important. Drawing on recently completed work in Glasgow, we demonstrate how geographical approaches can contribute to a greater understanding of the uneven development of the voluntary sector across space and how voluntary organisations become embedded in particular places. By unravelling some of the complex webs of inter-relationships that operate across the geographical and political spaces that extend from national to local we reveal some unique insights into those factors that act to facilitate or constrain the development of voluntary activity across the city with implications for access, service delivery and policy development. Hence, we maintain, that geographical approaches to voluntarism are important for social policy as such approaches argue that where events occur matter to both their form and outcome.

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Out of the shadows: exploring contemporary geographies of voluntarism

Cited by 157 publications

References 49 publications

Moving to Need: The Effect of Federal Contracts on Service Provider Location

Moving to Need: The Effect of Federal Contracts on Service Provider Location

Beyond Cooptation or Resistance: Urban Spatial Politics, Community Organizations, and GIS-Based Spatial Narratives

Putting the Voluntary Sector in its Place: Geographical Perspectives on Voluntary Activity and Social Welfare in Glasgow

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