Abstract: For many years the nonprofit sector has known what it is not, but not what it is. In this article, the author describes the nonprofit sector as part of a public benefit economy that operates in Canadian communities on principles that are fundamentally different from those of the commerce economy. The two economies are…
Introduction Community service organizations are at risk—of failing their mandates, failing their communities, betraying the public trust, and fading away as viable organizations. We now have a significant body of Canadian research that documents the vulnerability of community social service organizations. New funding practices, widely adopted by governments and others in the early 1990s, have…