Friday October 4, 2024
12:30-1:30 p.m.
Meeting Both In-Person and by Zoom
Dampeer Room, Second Floor of Kelvin Smith Library*
Case Western Reserve University
Dear Colleagues:
It’s a great pleasure to welcome one of our eminent emeritus faculty members and early participants in the “Friday Lunch” back to talk about his fascinating current research.
One of the distinctive facets of the Cleveland or northeastern Ohio area is the strong presence of the “nonprofit sector.” This was recognized here at CWRU by creating one of the first Master of Nonprofit Organizations programs in 1984. As the current explanation of the MNO program states, Cleveland “has a long history of nonprofit innovation as the birthplace of the Community Chest (predecessor of the United Way), home to the oldest community foundation in the United States (The Cleveland Foundation), and the location of the first healthcare conversion foundation.” Legally nonprofit hospitals are the main remaining engine of the local economy. And even now, much of local social welfare work is done by nonprofits, often affiliated with some part of religious communities, such as Lutheran Metropolitan Ministries, Catholic Charities of Cleveland, and Jewish Federation of Cleveland.
After a vibrant start, the separate Mandel Center on Nonprofit Organizations suffered from competition from hundreds of programs created around the country and from the budget shocks nonprofit organizations faced in the Great Recession. So the Center was shuttered and the MNO was moved into MSASS and Weatherhead in 2012. Yet the nonprofit sector, what it can do, and how it is governed remain a crucial part of how social issues are addressed in our community. In fact, around the country many government programs operate with versions of “third-party” delivery, for example with federal money funding state or local agencies that then contract with those nonprofits.
In Cleveland especially, the history of social policy is a story of over a century of development, first of a robust nonprofit sector and then of its transitions as both the economic base for philanthropy and the activity of the federal government changed. As David Hammack emphasizes, this is not just a story of private and public sectors but also of the informal processes of community governance, especially the relations among different religious communities and between religious and business communities. In important ways, what we might think of as government social welfare activities were performed less by local governments and more by the informally coordinated efforts of business and religious leaders.
Professor Hammack is one of the nation’s leading historians of the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors, and was one of the founding faculty members of the Mandel Center. His first book, however, was on Power and Society in Greater New York, explaining much of the informal and formal structures of power at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and using that to discuss the broader issues about urban politics and policy in the first half of the 20th century. His current research combines both his main lines of work, urban governance and the nonprofit sector, in ways that should be interesting to anyone interested in either topic in general and our own community in particular.
Best wishes for safety and security for you and yours,
Joe White
Luxenberg Family Professor of Public Policy and Director, Center for Policy Studies
About Our Guest
David C. Hammack has written extensively on the history of America’s civil society, nonprofit organizations, and philanthropic foundations, and on the history of cities, the built environment, and education. His most recent books include a general history, A Versatile American Institution: The Changing Ideals and Realities of Philanthropic Foundations (with Helmut K. Anheier, 2013); American Foundations (edited with Helmut Anheier, 2010), and Globalization, Philanthropy, and Civil Society: Projecting Institutional Logics Abroad (edited with Steven Heydemann, 2009). Ideals and Visions, Leverage and Self-Help: Foundations in America’s Regions, edited with Steven R. Smith is to appear from Indiana University Press in 2016. Power and Society: Greater New York at the Turn of the Century (Russell Sage Foundation, 1984) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; Making the Nonprofit Sector in the United States: A Reader (Indiana University Press) has been adopted in many courses. He has also contributed extensively to HistPhil.org, the blog on the history of philanthropy.
David Hammack chaired the board of Community Shares of Greater Cleveland, 2005-2008, and has advised many nonprofits, including the Council on Foundations and Cleveland’s United Way, Foundation Center, Jewish Community Federation, Sight Center, Western Reserve Historical Society, and David Shimotakahara’s GroundWorks dance company. For his writing on the economic history of Northeastern Ohio, see Cleveland From Startup to the Present. He has also played a strong role in two documentary films about New York City’s history, The City of Greater New York: The Story of Consolidation, and River of Steel, and with his wife Loraine he was a lead consultant to The Struggle for Integration in Shaker Heights, a documentary film on the Cleveland suburb, broadcast nationally on PBS. |
