Investigating identity and exploring effectiveness

Abstract

In the past decade, the Hispanic/Latino population has grown to become the largest and fastest growing minority group in the United States (Passel, 2008; U.S. Census Bureau, 2006). Such a demographic shift has led scholars and practitioners to pay increased attention to Latinos’ needs and concerns, especially regarding legal and illegal immigration. Considerable debate surrounds how to serve native and immigrant Latinos. However, limited research, using nonprofit sector organizations as the unit of analysis, has sought to understand the empirical impact of Latino-serving nonprofit organizations and their effectiveness. The literature found a dearth of research on organizational effectiveness relating to identity-based nonprofit organizations. Nevertheless, Resource Dependency Theory, and the Goal and Systems Resource Models suggest that mission-based and outreach-based organizations respond to community needs with varying levels of success. This study contributes to the literature on identity-based organizations in the nonprofit sector by exploring the differences between Latino-serving nonprofit organizations and how these differences may impact organizational effectiveness. The study is built on original survey data and examines three research questions: What characteristics differentiate mission-based and outreach-based Latino nonprofit organizations? What are the main characteristics of nonprofit organizational effectiveness? And to what extent can we consider nonprofit mission statement fulfillment as a primary measure for organizational effectiveness? The data consists of a purposive sample of 201 Georgia Latino-serving nonprofit organizations. The results of this study indicate that mission-based nonprofit organizations have structural differences based on age, composition, as well as cultural and linguistic competence in contrast to outreach-based nonprofit organizations. Latino-serving nonprofit organizations, as a whole, have limited financial resources, few collaborative relationships, and are negatively impacted by perceived reputation attributed by the nonprofit, private, and public sectors. Consequently, their organizational effectiveness may be hampered. This reality, coupled with the mixed-immigration status of Latinos, limits both clients and the organizations that seek to serve them as neither are able to access traditional channels for social welfare. Such a quandary compels the nonprofit sector to grapple with its legacy of serving the most marginalized populations in the face of government and market failure. These findings offer intriguing directions for future research