August 7, 2003 | Read Time: 4 minutes
One of the diseases of this age is the multiplicity of books; they doth so overcharge the world that it is notable to digest the abundance of idle matters that is every day hatched and brought forth into this world. (Barnaby Rich, 1613)
Befitting the vast stretches of the nation’s nonprofit universe, two prestigious organizations — the Brookings Institution and the Aspen Institute — have brought forth the 563-page The State of Nonprofit America. Edited by a distinguished scholar of the field, Lester M. Salamon, the book consists of 17 chapters on the key nonprofit arenas, such as arts and culture, civic participation, and health, and on what the book calls “major challenges,” such as accountability and commercialization. The chapters are written by heavyweights in the field, some with the help of members of their staffs.
The book is certainly worthwhile, especially with its long introduction by Mr. Salamon.
Even so, how much more energy and money should be devoted to producing books about the nonprofit world?
In the last five years, according to the Foundation Center, a dozen books analyzing the field have been published, not including books on fund raising and on nonprofit boards, management, evaluation, and so on. One of them is Mr. Salamon’s excellent America’s Nonprofit Sector: A Primer. Another collection of essays is Philanthropy and the Nonprofit Sector in a Changing America, edited by Charles T. Clotfelter and Thomas Ehrlich.
(In the spirit of disclosure I should note that I have added to the torrent, with books and articles on nonprofit and philanthropic matters.)
That there is a market for books on nonprofit groups is emphatically confirmed in the latest catalog from a leading publisher in the field, Wiley/Jossey Bass. Relatively few are scholarly works.
Would that charitable giving had mushroomed commensurately with the flood of books on fund raising, including those of Mal Warwick, who wrote The Five Strategies for Fundraising Success in 2000 and Ten Steps to Fundraising Success in 2002.
Such books, however, seem to do little to improve the outlook for charitable giving. Scott Cutlip, author of a 1965 classic, Fund Raising in the United States: Its Role in America’s Philanthropy, declared a quarter century after publication, “The competition for the donor’s dollar is all the keener because giving is not keeping pace with the nation’s overall wealth.” Mr. Salamon’s new book echoes this conclusion: “While individual giving has grown in absolute terms [since 1970], it has declined as a share of national wealth and as a share of the income of the nation’s nonprofit organizations, and this has occurred despite a dramatic professionalization of the fund-raising field and the emergence of a variety of innovative fund-raising techniques.”
Along with a surfeit of fund-raising books are volumes devoted to leadership of nonprofit organizations, including a dozen from the fountain of publications on the subject, the Leader to Leader Institute, formerly the Drucker Foundation. Readers also can find scads of volumes on nonprofit finance and budgeting, and on such trendy subjects as President Bush’s faith-based plan.
Notwithstanding the importance of The State of Nonprofit America and other recent works, it would be a pity if they crowded out such earlier important books as Michael O’Neill’s highly readable The Third America: the Emergence of the Nonprofit Sector in the United States; The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook, edited by Walter W. Powell with contributions from 24 scholars; and The Nonprofit Sector in the Global Community, edited by Kathleen D. McCarthy, Virginia A. Hodgkinson, and Russy D. Sumariwalla.
The appetite for books that have disappeared is not sated. A little more than a dozen years ago, 14 out-of-print books were reissued in the series Classics in Philanthropy, by Transaction Publishers. They included such towering works as American Charities, by Amos G. Warner; The House on Henry Street, by Lillian G. Wald; and The Discovery of Poverty in the United States, by Robert H. Bremner. Now a successor series is being introduced by the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, at Harvard University, this time mainly online and including papers by government commissions and other documents as well as books.
Fresh and otherwise, presses will continue to pour out books on the nonprofit world, but in a period of economic stress one may ask whether the volume should be turned down a bit.
Richard Magat, senior fellow at Community Resource Exchange, in New York, is former president of the Edward W. Hazen Foundation and the author of
Unlikely Partners: Philanthropic Foundations and the Labor Movement (Cornell University Press, 1999).
