What’s different about small nonprofits?

The vast majority of nonprofits are small groups with small budgets. Most aim to deepen their impact within local communities, rather scale nationally. But nonprofit narratives center the cultures, contexts, and infrastructures of larger organizations, who have adopted the institutional theories of “Collective Impact,” among others, which discuss how actors from every sector must join together in disciplined collaboration to solve social problems.

Mainstream narratives have not sufficiently served, nor recognized, the unique contexts of smaller nonprofits. This essay explores how the researchers situate small and local nonprofits in dominant narratives.