Steven Rathgeb Smith

David C. Hammack

Once largely confined to the biggest cities in the mid-Atlantic and Great Lakes states, philanthropic foundations now play a significant role in nearly every state. Wide-ranging and incisive, the essays in American Philanthropic Foundations: Regional Difference and Change examine the origins, development, and accomplishments of philanthropic foundations in key cities and regions of the United States. Each contributor assesses foundation efforts to address social and economic inequalities, and to encourage cultural and creative life in their home regions and elsewhere. This fascinating and timely study of contemporary America's philanthropic foundations vividly illustrates foundations' commonalities and differences as they strive to address pressing public problems.

Regional Difference and Change

American Philanthropic Foundations

Jennifer E. Mosley

This volume offers empirically based insights and findings on the question of how human service organizations are reacting to the increasing need for greater impact, effectiveness, and performance. As demand for increased impact outstrips our knowledge of how best to achieve these goals, the book’s contributors discuss the innovative strategies being used to ensure that multiplex goals are being met and the degree to which client and staff concerns are being sacrificed for the organizational bottom line. Taken together, these discussions demonstrate that specific management strategies and collaboration based on trust and consideration of mission may help improve the quality of some services; however, many of the pressures which organizations and managers experience are resulting in lower staff morale, compromised missions, and inefficiencies. This book will be of interest to those researching human service agencies, as well as those with a broader concern for how organizations react to doing more with less. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Human Service Organizations journal.

Human Service Organizations and the Question of Impact

Helen Ingram

A fundamental rethinking is under way about the roles of government, citizens, and community organizations in public policy. Can government be reconstructed to make public policies more responsive to citizens and thus more effective? This challenge is apparent in the activist policy agenda of the Clinton administration, which supports national service programs, government-voluntary collaborations, and community-based development projects. Public Policy for Democracy is an important and timely contribution to the current discussion of how to get people more involved in their own governance. In this book, contributors urge policymakers and policy analysts to promote a more vigorous and inclusive democracy by incorporating concerns about citizenship in their craft, rather than strictly emphasizing efficiency and effectiveness. The authors provide insight into how the social construction of politics affects the recipients of the policies and the public in general. They call attention to how policies reinforce negative stereotypes of some groups, such as welfare recipients, and often lead to political alienation and withdrawal. In addition, they discuss how polices using "clinical reason"—a term borrowed from medicine and used as a way to classify people—are increasingly applied to nonmedical situations, such as domestic violence, to restrict individual power and legitimacy. The authors argue that much needs to be done by the government itself to improve policy design and empower all citizens to participate in the democratic process. They identify concrete strategies for policymakers to enhance the role of citizens without sacrificing program effectiveness.

Public Policy for Democracy

Robert J. Pekkanen

Yutaka Tsujinaka

The research is relevant for policymakers involved in cross-sector public policy initiatives as they strive to provide more efficient public-private solutions to challenging governance issues.

Steven Rathgeb Smith

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