By Anne-Marie Boyer Conversations around social issues are regularly punctuated with the term “systems change.” Systems change recognizes that problems are unconstrained, dynamic, and continually evolving. Education disparities, climate change, public health, women’s rights, and poverty are entwined; Addressing any one of these issues unravels moving parts in the other.  The Rockefeller Foundation states that systems change requires collaboration. Individuals and organizations, from across sectors and areas of expertise, collaborate

View the Resource By Reyhaneh Maktoufi, Amy O’Connor, Michelle Shumate This study unpacks the complex relationship between corporate–nonprofit partnerships, corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication, and stakeholder evaluations of fit. We move beyond the fundamental question of whether partner fit matters to questions about what types of messages matter, under what conditions, and to whom. We conducted an online experiment (N = 966) to test created fit messages’ ability to influence

View the Resource By Sophia Fu, Michelle Shumate Capacity-building initiatives are popular among nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) worldwide. In response to a lack of valid and reliable capacity measures for NGOs working on various social issues, Shumate and colleagues developed an 8-dimension, 45-item NGO capacities instrument, based on data from U.S. NGOs. However, the proliferation of international research on NGO capacity raises questions about the degree to which such an instrument

View the Resource By Katherine R. Cooper, Rong Wang, Anne-Marie Boyer, Jack L. Harris, Joshua-Paul Miles, Michelle Shumate Collaborative networks in response to social problems are a common area of research, but questions of who manages these networks and how they organize cross-sector partners represent new challenges for nonprofit organizations and their partners. This study draws upon interview data from 26 community-based education coalitions across the United States in which

View the Resource By Amy O’Connor, Michelle Shumate, Rong Wang Using an experimental design with non-fictitious organizations, we examine how stakeholders (N = 845) describe corporations and nonprofits. We interrogate the types of words stakeholders include in their mind maps of corporations and nonprofits prior to receiving information about a partnership. Descriptive results indicate that nonprofits received more concepts than corporations the three most popular categories were product or service,

View the Resource By Yannick Atouba, Michelle Shumate Human services nonprofits increasingly provide a social safety net through interorganizational collaboration, and the effectiveness of these partnerships has important implications for the quality and sufficiency of those services. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether partner selection is related to partnership effectiveness and, if so, how. More specifically, the study examines the impact of partner selection on partnership effectiveness