The Philanthropy Tree of Community Foundations from Ancient to Contemporary Times. Roots and Branches of US and Italian Foundations

Transacting Business and Transforming Communities: The Mission Statements of Community Foundations Around the Globe

“…Mission statements are appropriate for this analysis because they publicly demonstrate how a CF portrays itself to its myriad stakeholders and articulates its purpose for existence (Bryce, 2000; Klemm et al, 1991 4 ). Mission statements have been used in empirical studies to help assess nonprofit organizational self-description (Chandra et al, 2016) and performance 5 (Besana et al, 2018; Kirk & Nolan, 2010; Koch et al, 2015; Palmer & Short, 2008; Pandey et al, 2017) and can also serve as an indicator of rhetorical leadership (Antonakis, 2012). Although most extant research on mission statements focuses on firms rather than nonprofits (Alegre et al, 2018), Fyall et al (2018) find that mission statements are more accurate representations of the nonprofit organization subgroup than the oft-used National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE) codes.…”

“…6 This database houses demographic information regarding 1,938 CFs around the world along with the results of a proprietary survey. Using the Atlas database addresses a deficiency and U.S. bias in mission statement research noted by Alegre et al (2018) and Besana et al (2018). After removing all organizations that did not contain a mission or purpose statement as part of their profile, duplicates, and organizations which only listed funding interests (e.g., education and health) in their mission or purpose categories, the final data set included 1,420 observations from 58 countries.…”

“… 12. Precedent exists in the literature for comparison of country-level community foundation trends (Besana et al, 2018), and some community foundations are pursuing national collective action (see Phillips et al, 2016). …”