Woody Powell, Stanford University

The Civic Life of Cities Lab studies the threads that tie nonprofit organizations to the communities they serve. Through interviews with more than 1,400 leaders and analyses of civic activities in seven metropolitan areas around the world—San Francisco, Seattle, Shenzhen, Singapore, Sydney, Taipei, and Vienna—we analyze geographic and political variation in how nonprofits weave together urban life and contribute to the vitality of civil society. Our ambition is to develop a place-based organizational theory that offers fresh answers to questions about accountability, embeddedness, and voice. In this talk, I will focus mostly on our work in the San Francisco Bay Area, but will draw illustrative data from our other cities. In a region that is ostensibly progressive but marked by massive inequalities in wealth and housing, how do Bay Area nonprofits navigate the divides between the haves and have nots? Although the Bay Area sector displays diverse approaches to repairing social ruptures, there is a consistent theme of re-building and re-creating community. Our findings reveal an ecosystem that is developing its own model of what community directed management looks like, neither tethered strictly to a Left Coast ethos, nor displaying uniform responses to strong institutional pressures.