Searching For Solutions: Reactions in the Irish Nonprofit Sector to Financial Crisis and Altered Conditions of Support

1. Searching For Solutions:Reactions in the Irish Nonprofit Sector to Financial Crisis and Altered Conditions of Support Gemma Donnelly-Cox Centre for Nonprofit Management School of Business Trinity College Dublin

2. A Metaphor for the Crisis in Ireland?

3. Pre-Crisis: A Shifting Landscape • What was happening anyway? • Charities Act 2009 • Increasing Heterogeneity • Role tensions • National Partnership • ‘Value for Money’ • Public sector promotion of and support for philanthropy

4. What is the crisis? How are nonprofits affected? • The simple answer • It is all about money (there isn’t any) • Decline in public sector finance • Fundraising challenges (2009 CNM research) • The complex answer • Legitimacy (lack of it) • Information (lack of it) • Treatment of dissenters

5. Organisational Responses What Are they doing? What Should they be doing?

6. What are organisations doing? • Nonprofit Organisation Responses • Economising • Doing more with less (but for how long?) • Harmonising • Align activities with unserved national priorities • Diversifying • New strategies for bringing in resources • Operate in new geographic areas • Monopolising • Expanding activities to control an organisational field • Philanthropic Organisation Responses • A limited number of targeted responses

7. What should organisations do? What Funders want organisations to do • Collaboration (do funders collaborate?) • Specialisation Calls from the sector for • Strategic Leadership But…challenges to all of these…

8. What does NPO theory tell us? • Start with the distinctiveness of the nonprofit form: • Values – deeply embedded religious, political, humanitarian, moral, artistic values – create a more complex means-goal relationship between operational and ultimate objectives • Politics – multiple stakeholders’ – trustees, staff, volunteers, users / clients, state agencies, grantees - claims on the organisation make it ultimately political. Management becomes a complex task of creating and coordinating coalitions around a common purpose • Multiple revenue sources – contracts, donations, various forms of transfers from the state, membership, market activities, sponsorship • Price mechanisms are frequently absent in fields where nonprofits operate, making performance assessment . • The more similar to other organisations they become, the more likely they can be substituted by or merged with governmentt or business firms • But as value-based organisations with multiple support streams under performance uncertainty, management is challenging at the best of times Source: Helmut K Anheier, 2009a 2009b

9. Short-term solutions • If values are central to the organisation, make all decisions explitly on values rather than econonic rationality alone • Align stakeholders around mission-critical, resource attractive programmes • Cooperate around mission central organisations • Consider merger, franchise models • Diversify earned income options • Run a public information campaign about organisational plans are and how they will be achieved Source: Anheier 2009a Implications for disability organisations?

10. Implications in Disability Organisations Some current concerns for disability organisations: • Impact of Charities legislation for disability organisations? • Impact of service delivery mandate without secure funding of services? • Implications for advocacy function?

11. What is the the Role of Academic Centres? • Research and Education • ‘Secretariat’ support • Provision of a safe space • ‘Bringing the sector back in’ • Platform for development of policy response

12. A final thought… Historically in Ireland, industrial domains without serious academic attention have fared badly in times of crisis. Without adequate information, analysis, development and support, will this apply to the Irish nonprofit sector?