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Building the Knowledge Base of Nonprofit Management:
A Searchable Database
Positioning Ourselves as a Sector: Research and Public Policy
Abstract
In November 1973, the Commission on Private Philanthropy and Public Needs was established as a privately funded effort to accomplish two major objectives: (1) "to study the role of both philanthropic giving in the United States and that area through which giving is principally channeled, the voluntary 'third' sector of American society;" and (2) "to make recommendations to the voluntary sec¬tor, to Congress and to the American public at large concerning ways in which the sector and the practice of private giving can be strengthened and made more effective." The Commission worked for two years and produced its final report with recommendations: Giving in America (Commission on Private Philanthropy, 1975: 1).
One of the major problems that the Commission faced when it first met was "a great deal of one particularly scarce commodity in the areas it was looking at¬ -- information" (Ibid., p. 2). The Commission found after calling together a group of tax experts, economists and sociologists that there was a dearth of information in many areas, including existing data series, analysis on giving patterns and tax effects on giving, the roles of government and the voluntary sector, and others.
To redress this lack of information, the Commission sponsored 91 studies on various aspects of philanthropy and nonprofit activity during its two years in existence. These papers were published in a six-volume set called The Research Papers in 1977. One of the major recommendations that came out of the Commis¬sion was that a permanent quasi-governmental national commission on the nonprofit sector be established by Congress. The reasons for the establishment of such a commission were grounded in the need for continuous information and study of the nonprofit sector in order to understand the changing relation¬ships, contributions and condition of the independent sector in American soci¬ety.
The need was clearly defined by the Commission; however, a quasi-govern¬mental commission was not created. A private organization, Independent Sec¬tor, had nonetheless by 1980 grown from the Commission's recommendations and taken up many of the Commission's recommendations as its organizational goals, including the establishment of a research program with the goal to...
Journal
(1985)
vol14
no2
pages17-24
Categories
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Classification and Research
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Research Methods
