This interview with Dr. Claire Dunning, Assistant Professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park, was conducted on May 5, 2023 by Russell Star-Lack, MS Student, MLIS/Urban Studies Programs, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM).
Dr. Dunning was the featured keynote speaker at the Urban Studies Programs’ 25th Annual Student Research Forum at UWM. She is the author of Nonprofit Neighborhoods: An Urban History of Inequality and the American State (University of Chicago Press, 2022).
Star-Lack:
OK, so first I have to say that I loved your book! I think it resonated with me in part because I worked as a grant writer at a housing counseling agency on the West Side of Chicago for a fairly large chunk of the pandemic handling the rent-relief program. This organization, like many you write about, began as an activist community-based group in the 1960s and 1970s and is now a social service agency. Since then, I’ve been really curious about how this happened, and I think this is a piece of scholarship that is really needed in the nonprofit world to address these questions.
Dunning:
Thank you! That’s interesting — I came to this book’s topic through my work at a community foundation during the financial crisis, which was a moment when organizations and people were struggling, and that led me to ask why this is our way of solving public problems. The pandemic was a similar moment of crisis in people’s lives where they needed more services, and the organizations who were supposed to help them were also struggling. We want aid to go up when need goes up, and yet in both crises there was a race to the bottom, and this led to periods of absolute disruption in the social safety net.
Star-Lack:
How did your experiences in the nonprofit sector lead you to this story?
Dunning:
I graduated from college and wanted, as one does, to save the world. I completed a senior thesis on the history of public housing in Boston, and I landed a job at this local community foundation in Boston called The Boston Foundation. My role was to support the housing and community development docket, which meant that my boss was making all the grants, and I got to schedule her meetings with grantees and do the initial read of applications, but I also got to sit in on a lot of those meetings. This was during the financial crisis, so we had this moment where the extent of people’s needs was increasing, and the community development corporations that we were funding were also struggling because they had invested their assets so heavily in the real estate market. As a result, they owned a lot of housing in the city of Boston, and the value of that housing was beginning to evaporate as it did for individual families. It felt like a moment where something wasn’t working right, and it felt like it wasn’t a local story, it was something bigger.
There also were other things about philanthropy that I found frustrating. We were talking about intergenerational poverty and systemic racism, and yet were also talking about three-year grant cycles. Again, there’s this mismatch between the scale of the problem, and the tools that we had to address it. This approach to these problems didn’t make sense to me. My colleagues were working really hard. They were doing valuable work, and despite that, something didn’t quite seem to be addressing these conditions at a structural level. This really made me think, not just about individual nonprofit organizations, but the sector as a whole, how we solve public problems in the United States, and why we keep relying on these small, private organizations to solve big structural problems.
We need to understand the structural relationship between the nonprofit sector, government, and policy, particularly when we’re thinking about cities, particularly when we’re thinking about racial and economic inequality.
Star-Lack:
You write in your conclusion that the lack of structural change should neither disparage the past half century of work by neighborhood nonprofits nor discourage their ongoing work, but at the same time a part of your argument is that these nonprofits have been used by the growth machine and politicians to legitimize policies and actors which have delayed and obfuscated discussions around structural inequality and at times made it worse. So, I’m curious how you reconcile these two sides to neighborhood nonprofits and the work that they do.
Dunning:
It’s really hard, and it’s one of the things that I’m struggling with intellectually and politically after the book has come out, regarding how to invite us to ask big questions about why we rely on nonprofit organizations without fueling an argument that they should be defunded, because that’s a risky proposition, and not one that I nor the research supports.
It’s a fine line, talking about the inadequacy of this approach without doing further harm of undermining the patchwork system that we have, while also designing something stronger. One of the things I think a lot about is that there’s very little in this book that is new, (which isn’t a very good way to sell books, nor is it a good way to build reputation!). But your comments speak exactly to what I hope is that this is deeply familiar to people who work in the nonprofit sector. People who know this inadequacy can’t say it because they have to keep their clients sheltered, fed, and accessing the limited benefits they can.
I think about the role of academic research as amplifying the lived experience and contextualizing it in a broader pattern. The conversation in the nonprofit space is often, “this organization is better than that one” or “we need to trim the accounting budget.” We need to have a bigger conversation, and that’s a really hard thing to do. This is a familiar message to the people who actually do this work in nonprofit organizations. Where it’s potentially an unfamiliar conversation, and where I’m really trying to push it, is on the funder side. We need to convince both public and philanthropic funders to recognize that it’s not about picking between good and bad nonprofits, it’s not about creating these competitions between organizations. It’s about thinking more broadly about what we expect nonprofits to do and what we expect, or could expect, the government to do. It’s about reimagining what the role of government could or should be, not just from a funding side. We need to be more transparent about what nonprofits can’t do and what we need the government, which has a larger capacity, larger institutional power, and more democratic legitimacy, to do.
When we’re thinking about solving structural problems and recognizing the role of policy, from a funder perspective, it means providing general operating support. It means funding social movements, advocacy, and justice work. Those are really hard things to get funded, because funders don’t see them as being measurable. If you can’t measure it, you can’t fund it. There’s this logic that change has to be evaluated and measured, and yet historically, we know that social movements are our most powerful tool for social change, and organizing is the power that builds movements. It’s about pushing funders to think about movements and not just programs and to push them to accept that this is fundamentally political work. It’s not political in the partisan sense, but we’re talking about change, which means we’re talking about power and we’re talking about political issues. We have to be ok with that.
There’s such a quieting pressure from government and from for-profit and foundation funders, and so I’m trying to push my message upstream that we need to be comfortable with this discomfort and recognize what nonprofits can do and what is beyond the scope of their action, through no fault of their own.
Star-Lack:
In urban governance, we talk a lot about how the only way to get stuff done is to be part of the governing coalition. So, I think it’s fascinating how we can find alternative ways to give community groups power that doesn’t necessitate compromising with systems of oppression.
Dunning:
It means holding tension and contradiction, and we have to be ok with that. I think nonprofits do really important work amplifying the concerns of those who have been structurally excluded from government. The recognition of that role when we’re thinking at the neighborhood level is really important. People have fought incredibly hard for a seat at the table. We don’t want to roll that back. But we need to recognize that the revolution is not quite finished. We haven’t quite gotten to where we want to go. We haven’t addressed the underlying critiques that activists have raised when they first challenged us to support them. We’ve accepted nonprofits as supplements to conventional urban governance rather than addressing the underlying cause. We need to keep pushing.
Star-Lack:
I do feel like in the discourse of some circles, there is a greater awareness of structural issues, especially in the last three or four years.
Dunning:
I totally agree. I think things are changing, and nonprofits and community groups have been pushing that conversation, and they’ve been doing it through social movement organizing-again, the thing that never gets funded but has persisted thanks to community buy-in and grassroots support.
Star-Lack:
As a historian, when you’re in the archive and trying to get inside the minds of your subjects, is it hard to have empathy for the concessions that a lot of the actors make over the course of your narrative?
Dunning:
It’s not hard to have empathy. But I found the hardest part was making sure that the writing invited the readers to feel empathy as well. Reading these organizational papers, you see people battling with needing to pay their staff against not loving the terms of a certain grant. Those are really hard choices, and I can’t say I know what it’s like to have staff whose rent, mortgage, and childcare payments depend on dollars coming through the door. But how do I communicate this while also maintaining a degree of analytic clarity, which sometimes involves criticism? How to do that as a writer was really hard.
Mel King passed away a couple of weeks ago at the age of 96. He had an incredibly storied career, and I really struggled at times with how to write about King and his accomplishments, because he did really important work in the Massachusetts state legislature, passing important bills that directed public capital to community development corporations. Something I write about is how some of those bills ended up attaching CDCs to market-oriented principles. There’s a subtle line I am trying to weave by saying that Mel King was not a neoliberal, but he did mimic some of neoliberalism’s broader tenets by seeing the market as an emancipatory vehicle. That’s not to dismiss his work or criticize it, but to say that there have been some unintended consequences. Let’s look beyond what these laws and the broader notion of financialized CDCs have done. What was the underlying critique, such that this policy seemed like an attractive vehicle? King was levelling a powerful critique on government grantmaking during the 1960s by saying that these community organizations are still under the control of the funder. He thought maybe the market, through the expansion of private banking in the nonprofit sector and the development of lines of revenue through these housing programs, was going to get us the self-determination and freedom that we need. It didn’t fully work out that way, but let’s not lose the vision that inspired it.
So again, the challenge for me was not seeing that tension in the archive, but making sure that my readers saw it too, and that the narrative held some of that nuance. I had a senior colleague when I was at Stanford who read a draft of the manuscript and said “Claire, I don’t know who the good guys and the bad guys are.” And he mentioned that as a critique, and I said that I took it as a compliment. Because history is not that flat. There are just people making choices in a constrained set of circumstances.
Star-Lack:
I also agree that it would be too broad of a strike to label King as a neoliberal. But I do think that his story serves as a fascinating link between Black Power, Black capitalism, and neoliberalism, and I’m curious what you think the implications of your work are for the historiography of neoliberalism and its relationship with communities of color.
Dunning:
I definitely found it challenging to write about the neoliberal angle, in part because I think it’s important to recognize that nonprofit organizations are legally private entities. What I find so interesting is that they’re private entities with a public obligation. Outsourcing the distribution of public goods addressing inequality to nonprofits is, to put it crudely, a form of privatization. It is part of a broader project of hollowing out, of shifting both activity and power from the government to the private sectors and pushing the responsibility for addressing structural problems downstream. In this manner, we can view grantmaking as a quintessential neoliberal program. It’s based on competition, scarcity, and choice for the funder.
The nonprofit sector isn’t the only space where neoliberalism is happening, but it is one of the spaces, and I wanted to elevate that dynamic. This isn’t just a project of elites, bankers, and politicians, but of people who are pushing this from the grassroots. That’s an uncomfortable truth to name, but I think a really important one.
Star-Lack:
I also think it speaks to attitudes and outlooks that are still very much prevalent in a lot of communities of color and low-income communities, in addition to affluent ones, which are anathema in contemporary humanities scholarship. In my work, I have certainly seen this tension.
Dunning:
I think it’s very present, and it’s ok to name it. These dynamics are present in communities of color and continue to be advocated, and we can talk about why these policies or programs or approaches seemed attractive or are still attractive. That doesn’t necessarily hold people fully responsible. That’s one of the things I really struggled with. The neoliberal project was forwarded by a variety of different places and sectors. How do we broaden our understanding of who’s participating and think about why these ideas are attractive? That needs to be part of the discourse if the ultimate goal is to move beyond the liberal political economy. The nonprofit sector is not solely responsible for neoliberalism, but it’s part of it, and the idea that the logic of business applies to the nonprofit sector shows up in so many places. So, it was important for this book to invite others to think about the nonprofit sector as a site of neoliberal practices and ideologies.
Star-Lack:
I was also wondering about the dynamics of the Black Power movement in Boston during the 1960s, and how middle-class oriented organizations, like Freedom House, react to the critique of past civil rights and welfare efforts exemplified by Mel King?
Dunning:
In some ways, they’re quite skeptical of it. Particularly Freedom House, which pioneered these public-private partnerships and saw urban renewal, as well as an alliance with government, as holding the keys to equality. They saw their role as being a broker, as being an intermediary and a facilitator of participation in local governance. One of my favorite images in the book is a series of urban renewal maps hung on the walls at Freedom House.
Instead of thinking about how a government grant from the renewal administration enables this nonprofit to become a space of governance and to hold these bureaucratic maps and invite participation, the organization was quite critical of a separatist, Black Power-oriented political ideology. When it came to the activism of movement, of being critical of government, of wanting complete self-determination, there was debate and tension over what that should look like, and what the role of a nonprofit organization should be in those spaces.
I think one of the things your question highlights, and I try to make clear in the book, is that there’s wide disagreement. There’s no single vision of a nonprofit in Black communities or white communities, or from government or the nonprofit sector. They’re heavily debated at the broad intellectual level and at the organizational level. Those views are sometimes aligned, sometimes in tension, but this is happening very actively at this time.
Star-Lack:
This is kind of a weird aside, but I just realized that maps feature heavily in this story. You mention that in your acknowledgements that this project would not have existed if you hadn’t seen a series of maps distressed neighborhoods presented by James Jennings, and I’m just curious if you have any thoughts about the role of mapping in your narrative?
Dunning:
One of my book’s secrets is that all the images are either maps or people looking at maps! They’re thinking about these tools. The book makes the argument that the nonprofit sector is spatially located, it is grounded in urban neighborhoods, and we miss that sense of place and space if we just look at housing or education or health. But when we look at these funding programs which turn to nonprofit organizations at the neighborhood level, they’re thinking about a spatial dynamic-here’s a place, here’s a neighborhood where we’re trying to solve the huge issues of segregation and income inequality, and we’re going to fund nonprofit organizations to address it.
So visual mapping, both for communities who are trying to understand their neighborhoods and for those outside, is paramount for making place legible. Spatial awareness is essential for laying out community needs and blanketing nonprofits with dollars and programs.
Star-Lack:
Gentrification comes up a few times in your narrative, and I was wondering if you could discuss how neighborhood nonprofits managed the political confrontations in gentrifying neighborhoods which occurred in the 1980s and 1990s.
Dunning:
A lot of the effort in the housing sector relates to how do you attach a neighborhood to growth. Rising values in a neighborhood are beneficial to property owners, which could include members of the community. In a declining or under-resourced neighborhood, you want the resources to come in, and you want to benefit from that. When nonprofits became real estate owners, some of them, but not all of them by any means, were looking to attach themselves to this growth. This meant advocacy through protests, recognizing that they weren’t going to hold back the wider tide.
I write about the Tent City housing development, and this came about because activists pushed to get a CDC. This huge project in the 1970s and 1980s was coming in to redevelop what had been the Copley Place Mall, a very upscale mall in Boston, and had leveraged significant millions of dollars in investment. Local housing groups had been protesting to get affordable housing in this neighborhood for decades, and they finally won a slice of the broader development. That’s community organizing at its best and its most limited. These groups get a share of affordable units in this new building, thanks to financialized mechanisms which enable this housing to get built. On the day the building opens, 2000 people line up for the handful of affordable units.
We can see in this example both the power of organizing to demand and win control of a share of the development in what is now a very gentrified neighborhood in the South End of Boston. The existence of affordable units in the Tent City Court building is really important. But it’s also inadequate.
Star-Lack:
Do you see CDCs during this period as caught between the growth machine and the prioritization of affordability?
Dunning:
Totally. CDCs are fascinating because they’re landlords, but they come out of this real activist tradition, and in some ways, they continue this activist tradition of trying to get more affordable units built. But housing development is an extraordinarily complex and capital-intensive endeavor. A lot of talk about the professionalization of CDCs goes way over my head. Personally, I don’t have a complete understanding of the financial aspects of this process-which isn’t to say that I’m representative of who should or could understand it-but it’s extraordinarily complex. When a CDC has achieved its aims and owns this housing, they’re incentivized to keep the value of the asset high and to keep residents who can best maintain their units over the long term. It ends up creating this set of conflicting incentives. To be both landlord, manager, or realtor and represent the needs of working class and poor families, there is an inherent tension here.
Star-Lack:
Absolutely. This is made more difficult by the fact we haven’t figured out a way to have development without this displacement past a certain amount of investment in a given neighborhood. There’s a tipping point, and then it seems like there’s very little CDCs or anyone else can do.
Dunning:
Something I came to appreciate in the archives is how slow these processes go, both for formal and informal displacement. I was looking at a few documents yesterday from Freedom House, and in the early 1960s, they were anticipating urban renewal coming to their neighborhood of Washington Park, and they kept telling residents to not move out yet, because they would not be able to access the limited displacement benefits that existed at the time. But that’s a really hard thing to ask a family if your water is being shut off, or the heat is broken, or you have a leak in your roof. How do you navigate this level of development while keeping people in place or keeping people adequately or safely sheltered?
Star-Lack:
I was also interested in your discussion of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, as you mentioned that it had a land trust component. To what extent was it successful in the long term?
Dunning:
Yes, so the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative is one of the most famous examples of community development in the country, and it was the first nonprofit to win the power of eminent domain and to build a community land trust. It is an extraordinarily important moment. Eminent domain is the biggest legal threat able to cause displacement there is. It is the reviled word in urban governance after the 1950s. It was the mechanism of urban renewal. And yet, here was a locally driven organization which arrested control from a group of funders who started this initial process. They are as grassroots as they come, they demand the power of eminent domain, and they get it. They continue to hold the land trust, and they’ve built housing on it. There’s a new school, they’ve renamed it Nubian Square instead of Dudley Square. But it’s still an area of extreme gentrification and extreme poverty. So, we can think about the community land trust model as a really powerful tool for extending ownership and control of development to the community level. But a land trust cannot alter things outside its borders. It is, by definition, a bounded set of powers, and I think it also needs to be recognized as a limited set of powers. On its own, it’s not enough, because it can’t hold off the political and economic trends happening around it.
Star-Lack:
I think that’s a really interesting critique that doesn’t get voiced often in housing policy circles. The pushback I usually hear is that land trusts are too powerful, but as you’ve said, we can’t fully address a single aspect of housing inequality without addressing broader issues with the market.
Dunning:
Which I’ll admit is a very easy thing to say in my academic armchair, since I don’t have to be on the ground doing this work. There are political calculations people have to make around pushing for a land trust and acknowledging its limitations. I don’t have to make those choices, and I don’t have to sit and evaluate the pros and cons of each case. Land trusts are important, but they also can’t displace a conversation about policy beyond the neighborhood level.
Star-Lack:
For me, the most heartbreaking scene in your book was in the 1990s when the Boston Foundation got all of the major Bostonian community activists in a room together. They write a report on the state of economic inequality in the city, and they get it right. They describe the structural issues you point to throughout your narrative, but when it came to solutions, in your words, “the report depoliticized questions of power into ones of process and steered clear from proposing actual policy-based solutions.” This stuck with me because I think this is pretty much where the nonprofit sector is today. We care a lot about diversity, and we talk a lot about structural inequalities, but when it comes to policy, it’s the same solutions. So, I’m curious about what you think happened in that room.
Dunning:
I don’t know, and I also don’t know if the critiques that I levy were very much part of the discussion. This is the place where the archives get a little quiet on the process of internal deliberation. I don’t know if they decided that they had to put forward solutions that were seen as politically palatable; I don’t know if there was a quieting or sanitization of what they offered, or if these were the only solutions that they could reach consensus on. They may have also felt that these solutions were the most important set of tools they would need in the near future. These are people who have been doing the work for far longer than I have. At the same time, we often assume that people who work at or lead nonprofits are “representative of their constituencies,” but in actuality they may not live in the neighborhoods they represent, or their income class may be fundamentally different. I don’t know what happened, but I agree with you that it is both a moment of triumph to recognize the centrality of these leaders and one in which these actors are operating in a system they have helped build over previous decades rather than questioning it or working outside of it.
Star-Lack:
You write in your introduction that you hope this work serves as a methodological guide for studying grantmaking in the nonprofit sector. What are some of the questions regarding this subject that you feel you didn’t get a chance to fully explore in this work?
Dunning:
When I started this project, urban historians were not thinking about the nonprofit sector as a whole organism. They wrote about individual nonprofits. You can’t tell the story of cities in the twentieth century without talking about individual nonprofits, but few had thought about their level of organization, their resources, or their organizational dynamics. So, I’m hoping that urban historians take this sector not just as atomized, individual organizations but recognize these broader governing dynamics as a whole. I think we have a lot more to understand when we think about contextualizing this sector. We know how to talk about government, we know how to talk about capital. But the notion of this entire set of organizations that do significant amounts of work is really underexplored at the structural level. I think there’s a lot more to be understood on the funding side. I write a lot about government money, but the philanthropic side has lots of room for exploration.
I teach at a policy school where most of my colleagues are political scientists and economists, and they keep asking me about these dynamics in other cities. My work was just a case study, so we need examples about what these dynamics look like in Milwaukee, Chicago, Oakland, or El Paso. One of the things I write about and stand behind is that what’s happening in Boston is in some ways representative of what’s happening elsewhere. These are federal programs that are playing out in cities across the US, and Boston is on the leading edge for a variety of reasons, but they are happening nationally. What the local dynamics of these programs look like in other cities is really important, and we don’t know yet. I hope urban historians and other researchers interested in the nonprofit sectors think about what these dynamics look like in other places.
Star-Lack:
How do you think Boston’s experience of these trends could be unique compared to other cities?
Dunning:
Boston has a reputation for being a place with very liberal values. It’s still a deeply segregated city, but they did well in these competitive government grantmaking programs. The city’s liberal values may be exaggerated, but there is some truth there. City leaders, instead of the corporate elite, to a degree take on these issues of poverty and segregation, although often for their own self-interested reasons. But I think there’s a lot of energy in Boston around this. There is a faith in the nonprofit sector which may come from the region’s puritan, voluntaristic ethos. Boston is also unique in the extremes of wealth inequality in the city. It is a very rich place, and so to see such a robust nonprofit sector alongside rampant inequality might set the city apart, though it is by no means on its own in that respect.
Star-Lack:
Did you see any neighborhood nonprofits engage at all in discussions relating to policing or mass incarceration?
Dunning:
Thank you for the question. Yes, one of the big government programs that emerged from the Johnson presidency is the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, which would go on to build up the carceral state in the following decades. I love talking about that program because it’s massive, and there’s a slice of funding for community nonprofits, which were very much leveling critiques of the Boston Police Department and policing more generally. When a young man was shot by the Boston Police Department, the Roxbury Multi-Service Center takes out an ad in the newspaper saying that the Black community was being targeted by the department, and they use nonprofit funds to pay for the add, even though the organization’s board was worried about this choice. Policing is also very present during the busing crisis. The police are showing up with shotguns and dogs at school drop off and school release, which escalated violence rather than reduce it. Parents started organizing and showing up at community nonprofit meetings to discuss alternative measures. They also start being present at school dismissal, and they’re doing the job better than the police, since the police do not have the same level of investment or authority.
These groups are holding in tension the need for a greater police presence and the recognition that the police force is perpetuating some of the violence. Their neighborhoods are both over and under-policed places at the same time. So, they put forward the idea of community patrols as an alternative, and they experimented with some really interesting approaches, but these efforts were only sustainable in the short term. The history of the carceral state and mass incarceration shows that when government invests in things it cares about, we can build really robust, powerful, public institutions. The policing sector in the United States owes much of its strength to the LEAA, and those dollars operated fundamentally differently when they went to a public institution than to a local community group. The Boston Police Department has much longer-term funding. They’re able to pay for staffing and other resources, like equipment, in ways that a local community group cannot.
Star-Lack:
You mentioned earlier that many of the people you’ve talked to in the nonprofit space already know this history and the limitations of the sector. What has the reaction to your work been like from other actors in urban governance whom you have encountered?
Dunning:
I’ll share that I wrote an op-ed for the Boston Globe in the fall, which was a response to a local CDC winning a fight to convert a church into affordable housing and to not have it be sold to a for-profit developer. This was a really important victory which garnered a lot of celebratory coverage. In my piece, I said this was great as well, but I also argued that we should talk about why we’re relying on CDCs to do this work. I received a lot of pushbacks from CDC directors saying that I didn’t know what I was talking about and that I was being really dismissive of community victories. That was hurtful to hear, but it made me ask why they took away a different argument from this work than I had intended. They are also understandably invested in making sure CDCs remain powerful actors in urban governance, and I’m invested in that too. But striking that balance is hard.
There have been a lot of people who have read this book and said that this is really familiar. Others have said that this is really dismissive of a much longer tradition, and that’s a valid critique I want to disagree with. I’m finding some traction among funders, and I’m still trying to get the message out where I can spur a broader conversation around how we could rethink funding programs more broadly and what that could look like. As historians, we need to communicate the victories of local activism while not taking our eyes off the structural inequalities these groups are responding to and who ultimately bears responsibility.
Thank you again for this conversation!
Link to the book: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo159872695.html
Interview conducted and transcribed by Russell Star-Lack , one of the editors of the e.polis and Graduate Student in the Urban Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.