Welcome to this special issue of policy briefs derived from papers presented in the 2016 ARNOVA Symposium on Public Policy for Nonprofits. The symposium was held on November 15, 2016 in Washington DC and featured five papers competitively selected through an RFP process by an ARNOVA committee led by Rachel Laforest and Steven R. Smith, the special editors of this issue.
This is the second year for which Nonprofit Policy Forum has had the privilege of publishing the papers of the annual ARNOVA public policy symposium. We appreciate the opportunity and look forward to a continuing productive relationship with ARNOVA in the future. The concept of a policy brief as employed here is rather broad, but in essence it connotes a work in progress which reflects the policy relevance of a path breaking research project. As manifested in this issue, policy briefs offer several benefits to the worlds of nonprofit policy research and practice. Several of the papers here offer new methodological approaches to the analysis of nonprofit-related policy issues, including applications of network analysis to collaborative policymaking, spatial analysis to understand the role of organizational mobility in the effectiveness of public service contracting, and a new framework for “smart partnerships” between government and nonprofit organizations. Other papers more directly address what we know about key nonprofit policy issues and how we might better approach them; one paper applies new research to the problem of funding nonprofit overhead expenses while another considers how state regulations influence the fundraising effectiveness of nonprofit organizations.
Laforest and Smith, the special editors of this issue, provide an integrative perspective on these papers in their overview essay at the front of this issue. We are grateful to them as well as the authors of the briefs that follow for their incisive contributions: Judith Saidel, Julia Carboni, Saba Siddiqui, Chris Koski and Abdul-Akeem Sadiq, Brent Never and Drew Westberg, Nancy Berlin, Jan Masaoka and Mary Jo Schumann, and Nathan Dietz, Putnam Barber, Cindy Lott and Mary Shelly.
Finally, the feature in this issue is a book review by Benjamin Gidron, one of NPF’s associate editors, of The Social Enterprise Zoo, edited by myself, Elizabeth Searing and Cassady Brewer. I am grateful to Prof. Gidron for taking on this assignment, not so much for the positive review as his willingness to offer a critical and independent assessment of a book that I think is important to policy making in the social enterprise field but for which I cannot be objective.
Please enjoy the issue!
© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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