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Research has long established nonprofit organizations’ vital role advocating for the needs of vulnerable populations before legislative policymakers. In the best of times, it is difficult for 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofits employing grassroots advocacy to mobilize vulnerable constituencies to compete with 501(c)(4) and 501(c)(6) advocacy and special interest groups. The latter organizations inherently have greater flexibility and resources to lobby lawmakers directly, permitting greater access to influencing the policy agenda. Through a multi-method case study of the 2020 regular session of the Louisiana State Legislature, this article demonstrates how the COVID-19 pandemic’s unique contextual conditions made legislative advocacy more difficult than usual for charitable nonprofits promoting a progressive policy response to the pandemic within a politically conservative state. Conducted through interviews with nonprofit leaders and an analysis of legislative records and committee hearings, the case study reveals specific barriers that hampered charitable nonprofits’ access to the legislative process, including physical capacity restrictions and health concerns, as well as issues with virtual legislative protocols and conservative committee chairs’ discretion to ignore remote testimony. The article analyzes how these barriers negatively impacted charitable nonprofits’ ability to advocate for vulnerable populations and explores potential implications for equitable political participation and response to the pandemic.

This article draws on literature on nonprofit resilience to hazards to explore the impact of federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans on nonprofits' staffing, services, and financial health during the COVID-19 pandemic's first year. Through propensity score matching with survey data collected in spring 2020 and winter 2021 from the New Orleans area, linked to publicly available PPP data, nonprofits that did and did not receive a PPP loan were matched on covariates representing critical resilience capacities pre-pandemic, allowing calculation of effect sizes for short-term outcomes. Results suggest that PPP tentatively supported nonprofit liquidity in the form of reserves, but had at best mixed results in promoting service maintenance, and did not support hiring or staff retention in excess of the non-treatment group. Despite the small sample size, these preliminary findings inform how PPP may have supported short-term sustainability and help guide future federal policy to support nonprofits during crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public officials are oath takers and expected to uphold the law, but criminal convictions provide evidence that corruption exists. When public officials violate their oath, these violations evade ethical norms of behavior important to protecting the integrity inherent in the public office. This article synthesizes the literature on public corruption and related fields and presents a conceptual model to help us understand public leader violations of the oath and factors that enable corrupt behavior more broadly. Through an exploratory analysis of news articles and local government websites of examples of federal corruption convictions from the top ten most corrupt juridictions in the United States, this preliminary model finds six factors influence corruption within a jurisdiction at two collective levels: (1) organizational, and (2) institutional. A case study of an independent nonprofit's experience in anti-corruption further informs a claim that corrupt leaders (i.e., oath-takers) often involve and exert corrupt influence on subordinates. Findings on convicted corruptions expands the conceptual model to inform on institutional factors that may mitigate corruption. Failure to act on corruption creates a distributional consequence for society. Public corruption minimizes equal access to public goods and services, diverts public finances for personal gain, and undermines public confidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public service education aims to prepare students to serve in the "public interest," historically encompassing the "3Es" of efficiency, economy, and effectiveness. However, modern public servants must apply practical and moral wisdom to answer calls for administrators to address inequities and advance social justice. The field is thus implored to elevate social equity as a normative foundation and connect it to complementary values—including engagement, empathy, and ethics—comprising a set of "new 4Es" often overlooked in public administration curricula. But how might instructors teach the new 4Es in Master of Public Administration (MPA) coursework? Review of diverse literatures suggests the case teaching method, which assigns narrative case readings putting learners in the role of participant in a realistic dilemma and asks them to make a critical decision, holds promise for cultivating the new 4Es. Through an example of a foundational MPA management course, this article equips instructors with strategies for implementing the case teaching method and connecting cases to each of the new 4Es. The design, delivery, assessment strategies, and preliminary outcomes of the course are discussed. The article concludes with challenges and opportunities for public service educators to adopt the pedagogical approach within their own contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As intermediaries between donors and local communities, community foundations are well)positioned to lead transformational disaster response. Through its experience with Hurricane Katrina and subsequent disasters in the region, the Greater New Orleans Foundation developed a flexible disaster framework that emphasizes four broad principles — resilience, sustainability, civic participation, and equity. This article describes how the foundation is applying that framework to respond to COVID-19 and concurrent disasters in ways that mitigate immediate harms while laying the groundwork for an equitable long-term recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Corporate giving is increasingly important to the nonprofit sector. However, corporate philanthropy has been slow to adopt insights from the sector's decades-long experimentation with strategic philanthropy. This article explores the question of how corporate philanthropy might leverage service learning partnerships with students in university-based nonprofit education programs to enhance strategy and maximize social impact. We propose a model for strategic corporate philanthropy comprising two axes, on which the corporation can gauge whether its giving is more proactive or reactive, and technocratic or humanistic, to find a balance between strategy and rigidity. Qualitative data were collected from a service learning project between Toyota Motor North America, Master of Public Administration (MPA) students at a Texas university, and residents of an economically challenged area of West Dallas. Findings suggest that service learning partnerships can help corporate philanthropists strike an appropriate strategic balance, whereby the corporation, individuals being served, and students all benefit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines nonprofits' capacity for responding to simultaneous hurricane-pandemic threat, addressing: (1) strategies nonprofits use to deliver services during the COVID-19 pandemic, and (2) how natural hazards may affect nonprofit roles in emergency service delivery during a pandemic. Data come from a survey of New Orleans-based nonprofits demonstrating effects of pandemic on local nonprofit service delivery, and workshops with U.S. coastal community stakeholders exploring expectations for nonprofit roles in emergency operations nationwide. Nonprofits have applied resilient strategies including virtual operations, staff reductions, and funding diversification, but vulnerabilities remain. Findings guide a research agenda for building nonprofit and community resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]