Giving Compass' Take:

• Cyndi Suarez explores the evolution of nonprofit infrastructure and its' potential trajectory to engage community members and tackle inequity.

• How can philanthropists increase civic engagement to gain participation in solving public issues?

• Learn about the potential of philanthropy in civic society.

The issues that plague the adequate development of nonprofit infrastructure revolve around a core tension about what the infrastructure is supposed to do. The nonprofit sector started out as a vehicle for voluntary civic engagement. Nonprofit organizations are organized to advance the public, rather than private, good. But as the sector grew and professionalized, the focus quickly shifted from the people, or civil society, to the organizations themselves as the key constituents of the sector. So, when we talk about infrastructure for the sector, is the infrastructure there to support civic engagement, or nonprofit and philanthropic organizations?

In a 2004 article for NPQ, “The Future of the Nonprofit Infrastructure,” Jon Pratt, Executive Director of the Minnesota Council on Nonprofits, points out that the sector, which “was created in the last 25 years,” was just then entering “its middle stage of development.”

For Pratt, there was a pressing need at the time for the sector to “enter a second, more organized, focused, and coherent stage.” For him, the first stage evolved from a hub-and-spoke infrastructure model to a distributed network and the next stage needed to reduce fragmentation and increase the its “public-policy muscle.” Key to this was the need to “identify and focus on the primary constituency for infrastructure support—and to be responsive and accountable to it.” But by then we were also noting that nonprofits were moving away from engaging the public.

All of this gets a bit more complicated when we layer on issues of race and how the racism that underlies social challenges plays out in the sector. As Wilnelia Rivera tells NPQ: "Funders and donors historically are afraid to fund ideas that are led by people of color."  She points out, we need to drop whatever conventional forms we have of what leadership is.

Read the full article about rethinking nonprofit infrastructure by Cyndi Suarez at Nonprofit Quarterly.