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Publications on Civil Society

As the nonprofit sector's role providing services and programs grows, the relationship between tax-exempt organizations and government becomes more complex. At times adversarial and at times symbiotic, the dual forces of government oversight and nonprofit pressure can have wide-ranging implications for public policy. Nonprofits and Government: Collaboration and Conflict, 2nd edition, edited by Elizabeth T. Boris and C. Eugene Steuerle, offers a framework to assess the influences on the nonprofit sector and its relations with government.

The past several decades have seen unprecedented growth in the scope and complexity of relationships between government and nonprofit organizations. These relationships have been more fruitful than many critics had feared and more problematic than many advocates had hoped. Nonprofits and Government is the first comprehensive, multidisciplinary exploration of nonprofit–government relations. The second edition of this important book is fully updated and includes two new chapters. The authors address a host of important issues, including nonprofit advocacy, direct regulatory and tax policy, the conversion of nonprofits to for-profits, clashes in government interaction with religion and the arts, and international nonprofit–government relationships. Practitioners, researchers, and policymakers alike will benefit from the authors’ wide-ranging discussion.

This brief presents the first wave of findings from the Urban Institute's National Survey of nonprofit governance. The study--the first national representative survey of nonprofit governance--probed a variety of governance issues and includes responses from over 5,100 nonprofits. This brief explores a subset of findings related to the potential impact of extending some Sarbanes-Oxley provisions to nonprofits. It confirms the importance of acknowledging the potentially different impact, cost, and value of applying provisions to nonprofits of different size.

Applying the Sarbanes-Oxley Act's audit committee provisions to nonprofit organizations would test the administrative mettle of two-fifths of America's charities, according to initial findings from the Urban Institute's National Survey of Nonprofit Governance.

This brief provides an overview of the report, The International Charitable Nonprofit Subsector in the United States. It provides a snapshot of the international subsector through an analysis of trends in their size, resources, and scope from FY 2001 to FY 2003 in three major areas of operation: international development and assistance, international understanding, and international affairs. The brief confirms the central role of private support and financing for foreign aid and provides a window into the financial health of these organizations. It also gives an overview of the geographic concentrations and the depth of U.S. international nonprofit activities and enumerates the importance of small organizations.