Nonprofit Organizations, Government, and the Welfare State

Abstract

Since the early decades of the American republic, nonprofit organizations have played a critical role in helping people in need by providing education, training, residences, counseling, and in-kind and cash support. Moreover, President George Bush has followed Ronald Reagan in calling upon nonprofit agencies to take the leading role in American society in addressing social problems. Their belief in the efficacy of nonprofits (President Bush's thousand points of light) combined with the current political and financial constraints on government spending, suggests an even larger service role for nonprofit organizations in the future. Nonprofit organizations invoke the images of community, voluntarism, civic dependability, and neighbor-helping-neighbor that have always exerted a powerful impression on American public consciousness.1 However, largely as a result of this expanded role in providing services for government, these images are at variance with the contemporary reality of nonprofit service organizations. Rather than depending mostly on private charity and volunteers, most nonprofit service organizations depend on government for over half of their revenues; for many small agencies, government support comprises their entire budget. In contrast to the