In Nonprofit Neighborhoods, Claire Dunning tells the complex story of how Boston municipal leaders and community activists forged partnerships to share the administrative and financial responsibilities of governing the city. While Dunning acknowledges that public-private arrangements have long influenced American politics, she argues a key shift occurred in the post-war era when grant money and a mutual desire to address the urban crisis bound local government and nonprofits together as formal partners. This arrangement created “nonprofit neighborhoods” (p. 14) where local nonprofits took part in the administration of a wide range of public services, including housing, education, public health, and even policing. Local governments embraced these nonprofit groups as a way to respond to social movements without making fundamental changes. Community activists entered into these partnerships with hopes of securing inclusion and a degree of influence in the governing process. While politicians of both parties heralded these partnerships as harbingers of a more equitable and democratic society, Dunning concludes that Boston's nonprofit neighborhoods failed to deliver on those promises. Local nonprofit organizations could help individuals overcome social and economic inequality on a case-by-case basis, but they did not make Boston a more equitable city. Her analysis cleanly integrates well-established welfare politics and urban crisis frameworks with recent political historians’ imperative to focus on the state and measurable policy decisions.
Dunning wades through a variety of government documents and nonprofits’ papers to tell a chronological narrative of Boston's nonprofit neighborhoods framed around the stakeholders who forged that system. The first section of this work traces the origins of nonprofit neighborhoods to the city's struggle against post-war suburbanization and the urban renewal projects that linked public governance with private development through federal grants. These projects brought together predominantly white liberal city planners with an idealistic desire to build a modern, democratic city and black community leaders who longed to reverse the effects of disinvestment and housing discrimination. Chapter 4 examines how Great Society grant programs, particularly the Model Cities program, fueled the expansion of local public-private partnerships and encouraged the proliferation of nonprofit organizations. Chapter 5 explains how progressive community groups increasingly borrowed marketplace methods during the financial turn of the 1970s in attempts to harness capital for social good. The latter chapters of this work describe how Boston's nonprofit neighborhoods became essential to city governance by the 1980s as well as boosters’ efforts to promote their city as an exemplar of efficiency and equality. By the 1990s, nonprofit neighborhoods stood as a mainstream model for community development, as the Clinton administration wholeheartedly embraced public-private partnerships with nonprofit organizations through tax incentives and grants. Dunning punctuates her narrative by pointing to a 2016 study from the Brookings Institution that declared Boston the most unequal city in America, which served as a searing indictment of Bostonians’ “self-congratulatory liberalism” (p. 243).
Dunning's work strikes at the heart of recent heated historical debates concerning neoliberalism and the ways market-oriented thinking has shaped politics and policy in recent America. She joins a cadre of urban historians who have convincingly described cities, including Boston, New York, and Chicago, as critical sites of political, social, and economic experimentation that produced a neoliberal movement in the late twentieth century. She contributes a compelling case that Boston's nonprofit neighborhoods were “manifestations of neoliberalism” (p. 17), where local nonprofits paired market tools with progressive social aspirations to create “a privatized and financialized inclusion” for minority communities (p. 137). By addressing social problems through financial methods, such as community development corporations, they helped popularize customer-service-oriented approaches to addressing poverty and public needs, which perpetuated the inequalities they hoped to resolve. Their chronic need for funding also created a fundamental weakness, as they were highly susceptible to the influence of donors and grant-administering government agencies. This invariably led to political and ideological compromises—intentional and unintentional—that impaired their original goals and missions. By demonstrating nonprofits’ ability to simultaneously encourage and undermine social change, she reconciles apparent contradictions between the beginning of a neoliberal era and the continuity of structural inequality in recent American history.
Dunning's study raises further poignant questions concerning how nonprofits have shaped American civil society outside the city limits. As Dunning and others have acknowledged, the same policies that drove severe economic crises in urban America affected rural communities during the same period. Likewise, many key figures and politicians who embraced public-private partnerships and preached “self-help” most vocally, such as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, hailed from the rural South. Future studies should extend Dunning's approach to rural America and analyze the influence of public-private partnerships and the nonprofit organizations in these areas. Dunning has done a great service by untangling the complex and often obscured ties between nonprofits and local government. She has effectively elevated the nonprofit sector, which many scholars have taken for granted as benign, as an intriguing subject that demands further inquiry from historians.
