Event Recap: Community and Governance in Boston: Understanding the Role of Non-Profits in Politics and Policy

Held on Thursday, October 6, 2022

Watch a full recording of the event, or scroll down to read a recap and watch event highlights.

On Thursday, October 6, 2022, the Boston University Initiative on Cities (IOC), the BU American Politics Seminar Series, and the Leventhal Map & Education Center hosted a discussion titled “Community and Governance in Boston: Understanding the Role of Nonprofits in Politics and Policy.” The event featured authors Claire Dunning, assistant Professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Jeremy Levine, Assistant Professor of Organizational Studies and Sociology at the University of Michigan.

Throughout the event, Dunning and Levine shared insights from their recent books, Nonprofit Neighborhoods and Constructing Community respectively, on the nonprofit sector’s increasing impact on urban development and policy. The event concluded with a panel Q&A including Dunning, Levine, BU Professor of Political Science Katherine Levine Einstein, and Marvin Martin, the Executive Director of Action for Regional Equity and the former Executive Director of the Greater Four Corners Action Coalition.

Nonprofit Neighborhoods

Dunning began her presentation by outlining Nonprofit Neighborhoods, which describes the changing landscape of local governance as a result of the inclusion of neighborhood-based organizations. Dunning argues that, while these entities make governance more diverse and participatory, they also uphold racial economic inequalities. “When we think about the history of the nonprofit sector, this is also a history of public policy and politics, and the history of race and racism,” explained Dunning, “and these stories cannot be disentangled.”

Throughout the presentation, Dunning highlighted the City of Boston’s tumultuous history with local nonprofits, and the politically-convenient narrative that local governments should pawn off the responsibility of community engagement and participation to nonprofits for the sake of efficiency. According to Dunning, this phenomenon started in 1961 with the City’s working relationship with the Freedom House, a nonprofit aimed at uplifting Black residents in the greater Boston area, during the city’s urban development projects. This propped up and falsified “success story” motivated future Mayors and city officials to rely on nonprofits as a means of working with marginalized communities and representing their interests in local policy. However, according to Dunning’s research, nonprofits are also self-motivated actors that take on work which appeases government officials, rather than community needs, for guaranteed grants and a better seat at the table.

“The nonprofits have proved a really poor counterweight against the broader shifts in the political economy of American cities,” concluded Dunning, “As cities continue to face profound challenges, I think we might want to interrogate [past] solutions to understand their origins and grapple with what that consequences means moving forward.”

Constructing Community

Levine introduced Constructing Community by outlining his work’s three central arguments, which seek to define “community control” and its relevance to local democracy and inequality in cities. Firstly, Levine argues that “community control really means nonprofit control,” in which the nonprofit sector, including community-based organizations, foundations, and consultants, have become central players in urban governance and govern more than their legislative counterparts. Secondly, Levine argues that the inclusion of the nonprofit sector in local governance has unintentionally undermined democratic representation and introduced new mechanisms of inequality. Thirdly, and more theoretically, Levine asserts that there is no such thing as “the” unified and singular community, an assumption that serves as the basis for community control.

During his presentation, Levine recounted anecdotes of community meetings hosted by both nonprofits and local governments which took place along the Fairmount Corridor, a 90 mile corridor in the greater Boston area. These disjointed and fractured meetings, which often related to community concerns about top-down development projects, demonstrated that “the community process did not reveal a singular community position for them to elevate against potential developers or city governments.”

He concluded his presentation with a summary of Constructing Community’s key takeaways. “Elevating nonprofits as community representatives and institutionalizing community participation did not lead to community control,” stated Levine, “nonprofit leaders supersede elected politicians and can be made as the political representatives for neighbors.” Levine’s second takeaway built on Dunning’s findings regarding nonprofits’ selfishness, arguing that nonprofit expansions to the most volatile neighborhoods are often seen as a strategically risky bet, often leaving the most marginalized communities with fewer resources and more vulnerable to gentrification. The last most overarching takeaway was a stark one, stating that no organization or participatory process can ever fully empower the community because there is no such thing as a singular community.

Panel Q&A

Einstein opened the panel discussion by asking nonprofit and community leader Marvin Martin about the best approach to representing Black and Latinx voices in the future. Martin immediately asserted that nonprofits are needed to represent marginalized voices. Martin continued, disagreeing with the previous presenters’ framing of rivalry between elected officials and nonprofits, especially in the context of representing Black and Latinx voices in development projects. “[In other cities], organizing leads to development,” said Martin, “here [in Boston], development leads to organizing.”

The Q&A concluded with an audience member asking the panelists how they would coordinate these competing pillars of community if they were advising the Wu administration. Martin answered first, highlighting Mayor Wu’s unique political positioning when she entered office. “[Mayor Wu] did not come in beholden to developers,” said Martin, “and that has created a blank slate [in which] she can build bridges between community and these institutions.” Levine added on, advising Wu to use her political muscle to “push private funders to give more money toward the places that may not show success” and “abolish public meetings as we know them.”

“Building people power is the only way to change things,” concluded Dunning, “grant-making and one-off solutions are not going to do much at the structural level and we [should be] thinking about reinvesting in public institutions at a much bigger scale.”