If academic nonprofit centers are to be sustained, they need to address issues of institutional stability and academic credibility. Institutional stability refers to a center’s ability to sustain itself as an organization within the university. Academic credibility relates to the center’s ability to meet faculty and disciplinary expectations. These two attributes parallel the core administrative and academic functions and traditions associated with higher education institutions.

For nonprofit centers, stable funding, leadership support, organizational fit, and community connections appear to be requisite conditions for institutional stability.

Funding

A critical component of institutional stability is financial stability. One nonprofit center director told us that "a major challenge for each director is how to keep the place afloat financially." This sentiment is shared by another director who said that his nonprofit center has always been "a soft money program and I’ve always had to generate 50 percent of my salary, and the salaries of all my staff. Even though we generate considerable money from the program I’m not going to get institutional support. I have to be self-supporting."

Many nonprofit centers and departments are funded through a mix of internal and external funds. A stable internal line of funding from the university to the center provides security in terms of maintaining an ongoing program. Internal funds may come from the university’s general operating budget or from student tuition and fees. Another type of internal financial support is waiver of overhead-head costs or in-kind contributions such as faculty and secretarial time. Internal funds may also be necessary for a center to generate financial support from federal and state agencies and foundations as many external funds are predicated on some level of internal funds. Yet, even when a center receives external funds it is unlikely that most centers will ever be completely self-sufficient and operate without internal funds (Wodarski, 1995). Simply put, some ongoing commitment of internal funding appears to be necessary if a center is to be institutionally stable.

External funding for nonprofit centers may come from foundations, private donations from individuals or organizations, state or federal agencies, or through the sale of products or services to external constituencies. Many of the nonprofit center directors we talked with had received foundation funds but few mentioned seeking funds from federal agencies or private corporations. One of the critical challenges regarding the acceptance of external funds is the interest of the funding source. External funding should support the mission or vision of a program rather than direct it. This requires developing relationships with funding agencies to encourage them to support the mission or vision of the center (Wodarski, 1995) or limiting grant proposals to those that fall within the mission or vision of the center. Wodarski as well as Stahler and Tash (1994) caution centers against "chasing dollars." In such a game, a center may respond to a funding source where the funders’ expectations are a poor fit with the center’s mission (Young, 1998). Thus, the center’s mission is eroded and internal support may be weakened.

The funding of nonprofit centers may have a symbolic component to it. Staff at nonprofit centers comment that internal funding encourages others in the university to have expectations of the center and that external funding is a form of external validation and a way to improve the center’s prestige.

Leadership Support

The higher the reporting authority of an academic center, the more the center may be considered a university priority by central administrators (Stahler and Tash, 1994). Thus, a center that reports to a dean, provost, or president may be more of a central priority to the institution than a center that reports to a department chair. We found that administrative support was often associated with the initiation of nonprofit academic centers and that lack of support by a key administrator could stifle the development of the nonprofit center. One nonprofit center director said that commitment from someone "high up" will lead to less resistance to center actions and goals:

You need a president or a provost or a dean that really understands what is going on and what the value of this is and why you want to do it, because then there is going to be less resistance.

 

Another center director told us:

Even though the funding doesn’t come from the university by and large, your future in a center that has a mission outside of the university depends very much on the main university administration, even though the funding doesn’t.

 

Nearly all nonprofit center directors report that the president of the university supports their work and such evidence can be found in speeches where the president specifically mentions the center, direct contact with the president, and assurances by the president for continued financial support. Presidents, and other top administrative leaders, often support these centers because they view them as an important link with the community and as performing an important service function.

Support by university leadership means more than financial support. When presidents, provosts, and deans uphold the need for and existence of nonprofit centers they legitimize the field and symbolically elevate the standing of the center within the university.

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Organizational Fit

The institutional stability of a center may also be a function of how and to whom centers are interconnected–that is, how they network or link with other units on campus. Centers that are centrally located within the formal organizational structure are more likely to receive higher levels of external and internal financial support (Stahler and Tash, 1994), and to be perceived as having an administrative and programmatic commitment by higher administration (Friedman and Friedman, 1984) than centers located on the periphery of the organization.

Ebata (1996) states that collaboratives, such as centers, can be connected through "lines and boxes" on an organizational chart, but the success of a center may depend on the links among people and the kinds of relationships that they establish. These linkages enable the center to draw on the expertise of other departments for collaboration on grant development and proposal preparation. Informal linkages with university administration, such as involvement in governance and university committees, are also important to maintain (Stahler and Tash, 1994).

Community Connections

Nonprofit center staffs frequently interact and work with external constituents or community groups. These connections with external audiences can help garner support from university administrators. A nonprofit center may be one of the few ways that a university reaches out to the public and is, therefore, important to the image of the university held by the community. One center director noted that "the center’s linkages with the community provide the university with community connections it would not otherwise have." Community connections can also lead to internal and external funding of the program. Internally, these connections may result in more student tuition and fees as community groups encourage employee involvement in educational programs provided by nonprofit centers. In addition, ties with community organizations may result in external funds to support research and outreach activities.

In addition, most nonprofit center directors personally enjoy the interactions with the community and are committed on a professional and personal level to maintaining and expanding community-center linkages.

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Center sustainability requires more than institutional stability, it requires recognition by and association with the academic core of the institution. The need for nonprofit centers to be academically credible should not be surprising given that they are located on university campuses and directed by academicians. As stated earlier, academic credibility concerns the center’s ability to meet faculty disciplinary and institutional expectations. We link a nonprofit management center’s academic credibility to the centrality of the center’s mission to the university’s mission, to faculty involvement in the center, and the visibility of the field.

Mission

Most universities define their mission in terms of research, teaching, and service. Some universities, however, may stress one function over another. A university may focus its attention more on research activities than on service activities. In practice, one function may be more highly valued by faculty in the tenure and promotion process, as often is the case with research. For university administrators and faculty to view a center as academically credible, its mission must be consistent with the university’s mission and goals and it must represent a logical initiative within the university’s over-all research program (Friedman and Friedman, 1984; Stahler and Tash, 1994). In addition, the mission of the center needs to be conceptually stable–that is, while programs may change to reflect opportunities or needs external to the center, the mission or central purpose of the center must not change if the center is to be viewed as academically credible (Wodarski, 1995).

Faculty Involvement

If nonprofit centers want to be part of the academic core they must involve faculty in fulfilling the mission of the center. Faculty members are needed to develop and teach courses, to conduct research, and to provide technical assistance and outreach. How faculty are employed varies among nonprofit centers. Some faculty are adjuncts, paid for teaching a single course. Other faculty are university faculty who have a portion of their time supported by a center while their academic department continues to be their organizational home. Some nonprofit center directors support the creation of faculty lines in the centers, indicating that this helps to stabilize the funding base and elevates the credibility of the program. Other directors told us that centers are better served when faculty have tenure appointments in other departments because this adds to the prestige of the field of nonprofit studies, adds to the interdisciplinarity of the field, and helps centers become more institutionally stable by linking them with other parts of the university.

Faculty members associated with nonprofit centers are often attracted to the problem focus and interdisciplinary nature of these centers. These faculty members may see their involvement in center activities as part of their research, teaching, or service responsibilities. Faculty may also find affiliation with a center to have certain advantages not necessarily found in departments. For example, through involvement with a center, faculty may gain access to community groups, to collaborative projects, to external funding opportunities, and to applied research projects involving community groups. In addition, affiliation with a center may also provide faculty with valuable experience in working with more seasoned researchers and access to better research support (Stahler and Tash, 1994).

Perhaps the most pervasive barrier to faculty involvement in centers is the academic reward system. Involvement in interdisciplinary center research by faculty may limit or at least challenge their ability to receive tenure or promotion (Sharp-Pucci et al., 1995; Stahler and Tash, 1994; Wodarski, 1995; Dooris and Fairweather, 1992). Faculty within departments, acting as a group, typically control tenure and promotion, and their decisions are often made on the basis of single-author, peer-reviewed publications. However, the product line of a center is more complex, consisting of peer-reviewed publications, technology transfer, multicenter collaboration, governmental reports, review panels, and industry consulting. According to Sharp-Pucci et al., evaluation of a center’s members solely on the basis of single-author, peer-reviewed publications is neither valid nor accurate. One nonprofit center director said:

I think the major challenge is to how you build a center at a university where faculty have to teach and do research and service is shunned...How do you build up and do research and technical assistance and get faculty to do that when the reward system is not there to support it?

An additional concern that faculty may have is that center affiliation may alienate faculty from their disciplinary colleagues (Dooris and Fairweather, 1992), or at least limit the time available to build relationships with departmental or disciplinary collaborators.

In turn, nonprofit center directors expressed concerns or reservations about faculty involvement in centers. Directors mention that faculty can exploit the relationships nonprofit centers have with the nonprofit community. They are concerned that faculty research may represent only the interests of the faculty member and not consider the needs of the practitioner. As one director said of faculty and the community, "It’s not just what faculty need, but what they can also offer–it’s a concomitant relationship."

Faculty members are not the only staff that can add academic credibility to the center. Friedman and Friedman (1984) state that the leader or director should possess valid scholarly credentials and have a reputation commensurate with that of the ranking senior members of the departments from which the center hopes to draw faculty members. A center, because of the hierarchical nature of the unit, usually succeeds or fails as a result of the director’s leadership, and changes in the leadership of a center may change the character of a center more markedly than would be true for any comparable change in a department (Stahler and Tash, 1994).

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Visibility of the Field

Many nonprofit center directors talked about the challenges of convincing people, particularly faculty and university administrators, that nonprofit and philanthropy is a legitimate area of study. One director said he struggled with articulating the "idea" of philanthropy and nonprofit studies to university administrators. He said their response was "What is this thing?" and that he had to "make it a subject." Another builder said he had to make the program and the field "visible" to the senior university officials – "they didn’t understand it and, therefore, it wasn’t considered a flagship program or a significant kind of new venture."

The field also needs to be visible to students. One nonprofit director said:

Visibility was a very big issue and challenge, especially with regard to tracking and recruiting people for our own master’s program. Prospective students would raise a very legitimate question: ‘What if I spend all of this time and get this degree and then I go and try and get a job with it and people say, I’ve never heard of this degree – good-bye?’

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"Finance is not the significant barrier to sustainability. Infiltrating degree structures, faculty structures, permeating the culture—these are the significant barriers."

• Center sustainability requires more than institutional stability–it requires academic credibility. To be academically credible, a center’s mission must be central to the university’s mission, faculty must be involved, and the field must be visible or known to faculty and administrators.

• The mission of a nonprofit center must align with the mission of the university and it must be conceptually stable.

• Faculty involvement is key to a center becoming and maintaining academic credibility. Faculty involvement may vary from teaching an occasional course to faculty having tenure lines in or affiliated with the center.

"To institutionalize centers, we need core faculty."

Looking ahead, we see application of these findings for current and future center directors or leaders and for external funders.

For Center Directors and Leaders:

Funding

Directors of nonprofit centers offer several strategies for addressing funding issues. For one, create a more stable funding base by diversifying the center’s resource base. Several centers have negotiated for a return of tuition dollars to the center. Others charge fees for technical assistance programs. Most nonprofit academic centers also raise external funds from foundations and, to lesser degrees, from nonprofit partners, corporations, and government agencies. One center director said much of his job was "constantly shaking hands, going out, fundraising, and everything."

Educating key administrators about the importance of the work of the center and how the center helps the university to fulfill its mission can help secure a more stable line of internal funding. One nonprofit center director said she educates foundations’ staff "about the importance of building the educational knowledge infrastructures of the field."

Another point raised by nonprofit center directors and the literature is not to let the mission of the center drift to follow a funding source. Eroding the mission of the center can lead to weakened internal support and a loss of organizational identity.

Involving Faculty

Nonprofit center directors often seek out faculty on their campuses that have an interest in nonprofits and/or philanthropy. Sometimes the directors convene monthly brown-bag lunches where faculty can present their work and ideas to others. This is an important avenue for involving faculty and graduate students with little, if any, cost to the center. This is also one of many ways that nonprofit centers can inform the larger university community about the mission, goals, and focus of the center. After all, faculty can’t become involved with a center if they don’t know about it.

Centers can recruit faculty by offering research funds that can be used to collect data, buy-out a course, or support summer salaries, among other options. Teaching funds can also encourage faculty involvement in a center. These funds can support overload instruction pay, be used to upgrade courses, or to enhance the faculty’s own understanding of pedagogy. The grants do not have to be large and can be publicized on campus through a variety of venues.

One nonprofit center director said he used the excitement of the field to attract faculty. He went to untenured or junior faculty and said, "You can get ahead in your own discipline by working here because there are all kinds of interesting things going on here. There are frontiers here."

It is also possible that faculty involvement in a center can be secured by having a faculty tenure line in the center or having a tenure line in a department with the funding for that line originating in the center. Though neither are common practices, nonprofit center directors indicate that both are happening more now than in the recent past. At one center, the director used external funding to leverage within the university for tenure-stream faculty lines focused on nonprofit studies.

Finally, center directors need to be mindful of the faculty reward system. Center directors can try to influence tenure and promotion criteria to be more in line with the work of a center. Faculty can also encourage committees to include practitioners who can "peer" review for promotion and tenure the outreach, technical assistance, applied research, and service often associated with centers.

Increasing the Visibility of the Field

Increasing the visibility of the field takes effort and time. One nonprofit center director talked with university leaders and said, "Look, this isn’t crazy. Yale has been doing research for years on this. There is a growing center at Case Western, San Francisco and Duke." Being able to make a connection to other programs–externally validating the center–can be an important strategic move to increase a center or the field’s visibility. External funding may also address issues of visibility. One director said:

The vigorous participation by the Kellogg Foundation and a handful of other major foundations provides very useful funding. It is also a tap from a prestigious foundation stating that this is a topic of high priority concern and, in a very interesting way, addresses the academic legitimacy concern.

Centers also need to publicize and make visible their work–publications should be forwarded to administrators and departments, and media on campus should be used to disseminate center work (Wodarski, 1995). Centers need to market their achievements in procuring funds, scholarly publications, community programs, clinical outcomes, and even management style. Centers that have been successful have taken this proactive approach to visibility, attention, and accountability (Sharp-Pucci et al., 1994). Such efforts also serve to inform the local community of the center’s activities and to promote future relationships with constituent groups.

Building Relationships and Networking

The successful initiation and sustainability of a center may be a function of how and to whom center directors are connected–that is, how they network or link with other units and people on- and off-campus. Ebata (1996) indicates that center directors need to play a boundary-spanning role. Friedman and Podolny (1992) refer to boundary-spanners as those who work with people outside their own groups and have influence between constituents and their opponents. According to one center director, developing and sustaining a center requires "slowly building support among those faculty at the university who can be influential and those administrators that can be influential. But buying in takes a long time."

Meeting the challenges of building and sustaining not only nonprofit academic centers, but also a field of study, is not something that the center directors do in isolation. In addition to building relationships within and external to the university, center directors are purposeful about constructing a network among fellow center directors.

An informal support system among nonprofit center directors emerged when the initial centers were developing. This network, now formalized as the Nonprofit Academic Centers Council (NACC), has been sustained and augmented out of the need for center directors to connect and interact with colleagues facing similar challenges and working on similar issues. NACC, as well as informal networks of personal relationships among the center directors, provides directors the opportunity to exchange ideas, to come up with solutions to common challenges, and to know that they are not alone in meeting their mission. One nonprofit center director spoke about the "satisfaction of just knowing a lot of people to call on for advice. Gee, you know, being able to call up this one and that one and say, ‘Hey, can you help us out here?’" Another center director said, "The directors work pretty well together as a group. We enjoy our informal personal working relationships and communications. And we also enjoy working together to make a difference in the field." One nonprofit center director nicely sums up the value of working together:

I think the ability to find and work with other people doing similar things to what I was doing in this growing field of nonprofit sector studies was a very important contributor to what it is I do now. I was able to identify people in other universities who were also trying to start new programs and build institutions within their university settings. As we began to meet and communicate in formal and informal ways, a support group grew up among us. So we learned from each other by sharing experiences about what was happening in our own institution while learning what was happening in other institutions. That sort of external collection and sharing of information turned out to be a powerful tool that we all used to help us do what we were trying to do in our home institutions.

The network and relationships among nonprofit center directors supports more than the individuals and their centers–it also builds the field of study. Consider this comment from a center director:

We felt really dedicated to building the field. That was what was special. It wasn’t that we were just building some unit or part of some program in our own universities. We were building a brand new field. We all felt that we had common problems. We were all fighting for our place in the sun and in our own universities and there was a lot of similarity.

Formal organizations such as NACC, the Association for Research on Nonprofit and Voluntary Association (ARNOVA), Independent Sector, and the International Society for Third Sector Research (ISTR) play an important role in the growth and sustainability of nonprofit centers.2 These professional organizations provide connections to research and venues for discussion. Says one nonprofit center director, "These organizations are not just about building the community, this is legitimization of the field, of a theoretical framework. These professional organizations have a tremendous impact."

On some level, there may be competition among and between the centers, perhaps over external funding opportunities or the hiring of faculty. But overall, nonprofit center directors work closely with each other—sharing ideas and strategies for meeting organizational challenges based on their own experiences. They provide moral support to each other, helping to frame the issue at hand as not just the survival of any one center, but of the emergence of a field of study. It seems as if nonprofit management academic centers were built collectively and not individually.

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For External Funders:

External funders can play, and indeed have played, an important role in the development, expansion, and on-going support of academic centers.

External funders can provide financial support for the on-going organizational development needs of centers as well as funding the development of new centers. External funders can also aid centers in developing sustainable internal financial support by funding endowed faculty positions. Providing student scholarships is another way that external funders can help support nonprofit centers.

As we have described in this publication, the development of professional and informal networks among center directors is important for center sustainability. We encourage external funders to support the convening of center directors and staff to share and exchange ideas. This support could include funding travel to professional conference, development of and travel to regional meetings, and electronic linking. In addition, external funders can invite and support academicians from other fields to engage in the study of nonprofit management.

External funders can also advocate to their foundation colleagues and academic peers the importance of the work of these centers. Funders can meet with university administrators to build internal institutional commitment to these centers. Funders can meet with educational association directors to stress the importance of and need for nonprofit management education and, in particular, the role that centers play in moving the field forward. And funders can share the excitement of this field and the need for its continued support with fellow funding officers in the foundation world.

The findings and recommendations presented in this publication are intended to highlight some of the challenges that still exist in developing and sustaining nonprofit academic centers, as well as successful strategies that center directors have employed over the years to overcome these challenges. Our findings and recommendations are based in large part on work funded for over fifteen years by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. On behalf of the nonprofit sector, thank you for your generous support.

We hope this booklet provides information to help you build, expand, and support nonprofit academic centers and, in so doing, add to the vitality and viability of the third sector.

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At-Twaijri, M., and Montanari, J.R. (1987). The impact of context and choice on the boundary-spanning process: An empirical extension. Human Relations, 40(12),
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Dooris, M.J., and Fairweather, J.S. (1992). The organization of academic research: Faculty behavior and perceptions. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, Minneapolis, MN. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 352 897).

Ebata, A.T. (1996). Making university-community collaborations work: Challenges for institutions and individuals. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 6(1), 71-79.

Friedman, R.S., and Friedman, R.C. (1984). Managing the organized research unit. Educational Record, 27-30.

Friedman, R. A., and Podolny, J. (1992). Differentiation on boundary spanning roles: Labor negotiations and implications for role conflict. Administrative Science Quarterly, 37(1), 28-47.

Geiger, R.L. (1990). Organized research units: Their role in the development of university research. Journal of Higher Education, 61(1), 1-19.

Larson, R.S., and Barnes-Moorehead, S. (2001). Building philanthropy and nonprofit academic centers: A view from ten builders. (Available from Applied Research, P.O. Box 4434, E. Lansing, MI 48826 and online at www.centerpointinstitute.org/bridges/papersreports/BuildersStudy.htm).

Mirabella, R., and Wish, N. (2001, in press). University-based educational programs in the management of nonprofit organizations: An updated census of U. S. programs. Public Performance and Management Review, 25(1).

Sharp-Pucci, M., Gamelli, R.L., Filkins, J., and Freeark, R.J. (1994). Anatomy of an institute. SRA Journal, Fall, 9-19.

Stahler, G.J., and Tash, W.R. (1994). Centers and institutes in the research university: Issues, problems, and prospects. Journal of Higher Education, 65(5),
540-554.

Wodarski, J.S. (1995). Guidelines for building research centers in schools of social work. Research on Social Work Practice, 5(3), 383-398.

Young, D. (1998). Games universities play: An analysis of the institutional contexts of centers for nonprofit study. In M. O’Neill and K. Fletcher (ed.), Nonprofit Management Education: U. S. and World Perspectives, p. 120-136. Praeger: Westport, Connecticut.

R. Sam Larson, Ph.D., is Director and Partner of Applied Research, a consulting firm dedicated to the improvement of practice through research and evaluation. She can be reached at (517) 337-4412 or larsonrs@msu.edu.

Sonia Barnes-Moorhead, M.S., is a management consultant specializing in nonprofit and philanthropic organizations. She can be reached at (340) 776-3293 or sbarnes33@compuserve.com.

Part 1 - How Centers Work

Part 2 - How Centers Work