Building Stronger Nonprofits Through Better Financial Management: Early Efforts in 26 Youth-Serving Organizations

Outlines the Financial Management in Out-of-School Time initiative to improve nonprofits' long-term financial management capacity and reform funding practices that weaken it, challenges participating nonprofits faced, progress to date, and early lessons

Indiana Nonprofit Employment: Historical Trends in Arts, Entertainment and Recreation, 1995-2009

Nonprofit organizations make significant contributions to the quality of life for the residents of Indiana. In particular, arts, entertainment, and recreation organizations play an important role in preserving culture, enriching the lives of children and adults, fostering creative expression, and providing sport and entertainment. These organizations may also serve as a powerful economic force for the state by attracting not only tourists, but also a young, educated workforce that can have a major positive impact on regional output and productivity. This report from the Indiana Nonprofits: Scope and Community Dimensions project presents new data on the size, composition, and distribution of paid arts, entertainment, and recreation employment in Indiana's private nonprofit sector over the 1995-2009 time period. All dollars are adjusted for inflation and are reported in constant 2009 dollars. Note that there are too few government employees in the arts, entertainment and recreation industry to allow for separate analysis of public sector employment

Social Networks and Civic Participation and Efficacy in Two Evangelical Protestant Churches

This research note examines the proposition that participation in church—particularly the social interaction that accompanies church participation—is an important source of social capital that promotes civic activity and efficacy. Employing survey data from over 600 attendees of two evangelical Protestant churches, we tested hypotheses linking churchgoers’ social networks to their levels of civic efficacy and participation. Three key findings emerged. First, the number of friends in church was positively associated with churchgoers’ civic efficacy, religious civic activity, and secular civic activity, while the number of friends outside of church was unrelated to these outcomes. Second, the association between in-church networks and secular civic activity was partially mediated by civic efficacy. Third, church attendance moderated the association between in-church friends and secular civic activities such that high attending churchgoers with few in-church friends were far less likely to participate in secular civic activities. Taken together, these findings illustrate the importance of in-church social networks for Evangelical Protestants’ civic participation and feelings of civic efficacy, in contrast to out of church social networks which had little overall impact on these factors