Sustainability of Rural Nonprofit Organizations: Czech Republic and Beyond

Abstract

Sustainability of nonprofit organizations is a key concern for today's nonprofit scholars and practitioners. Building upon the nonprofit economics literature, the present paper introduces the distinction between the demand-side and supply-side determinants of nonprofit sustainability and makes the case for the discrepancy between them. This discrepancy presents not only a generic conceptual explanation of the nonprofit sustainability problems but is also applicable to the context of the European rural nonprofit sector. Three arguments are advanced. First, the notorious implementation problems of LEADER partnerships can be explained as a manifestation of the above discrepancy. Second, and related, the rural context implies the tendency of the supply-side determinants of nonprofit sustainability to undermine the demand-side ones. Third, recent empirical findings from the Czech Republic show that this tendency does not necessarily imply the possibility of a clear classification of the demand-side and supply-side sustainability determinants. Rather, those features of rural areas and communities that significantly affect the size of the local nonprofit sector exhibit a controversial entanglement of demand-side and supply-side identities.

The Rise of the Food Risk Society and the Changing Nature of the Technological Treadmill

“…Balmann et al [33] refer to civil society and corporate social responsibility; Thompson [25] sees a role for community-supported agriculture, food activism, and rural cooperatives [38][39][40]. The important point here is the acknowledgment that the agricultural knowledge envisioned by the industrial philosophy of agriculture is not the only possible type of such knowledge.…”

Sustainability Perceptions in Romanian Non-Profit Organizations: An Exploratory Study Using Success Factor Analysis

“…Sustainability of organizations, both for-profit and non-profit, have become a prominent theme in the literature in the last decades [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. Various studies have examined the reasons why some organizations have better results than others or, in other cases, to understand why they fail [8][9][10].…”

Profitable Nonprofits? Reward-Based Crowdfunding in the Czech Republic

“…While the private for-profi t and public sectors have clear and strong institutional identities, the same is not necessarily true for the nonprofi t sector, which still has to establish its institutional autonomy and independence to secure, inter alia, its fi nancial stability and sustainability (Valentinov and Vaceková 2015;Svidroňová 2013). Much of the work that needs to be done toward this goal involves the scientifi c analysis and reconstruction of the policy framework of the Czech nonprofi t sector.…”

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