GrantStation has formed a 2021 partnership with the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA) to publish six papers written by respected researchers in fields related to the nonprofit sector. The first of those papers is by Jon Van Til, Executive Secretary of the Civil Society Design Network, Professor Emeritus of Urban Studies and Community Planning at Rutgers University-Camden, and co-founder of the school's graduate program in public policy. He is a former president of ARNOVA, and was the 1994 recipient of ARNOVA's Career Award for Distinguished Research and Service.
Van Til is also a prolific author. His newest book is The Hungarian Patient: Social Opposition to an Illiberal Democracy, which looks at the recent political and constitutional changes in Hungary. His other books include Resolving Community Conflicts and Problems: Public Deliberation and Sustained Dialogue, Growing Civil Society, Critical Issues in American Philanthropy, and Mapping the Third Sector: Voluntarism in a Changing Social Economy. From 1978 to 1992 he served as editor-in-chief of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (formerly the Journal of Voluntary Action Research), wrote a regular column for The Nonprofit Times, and has been published in a variety of scholarly journals, including Social Work, Transaction/Society, and Urban Affairs Quarterly.
Jon Van Til knows the nonprofit sector as well as anyone, and possesses not just experience, but a global lens through which to focus it, thanks to two terms as a Fulbright Specialist in Hungary, additional Fulbright service that included an appointment in Turkey, two appointments in Northern Ireland (where he was named Fulbright Distinguished Professor at the University of Ulster), and a term as President of the Fulbright Association of Philadelphia/Delaware Valley. He has also had lecture dates in places as far flung as Sydney, Reykjavik, Toronto, Budapest, and Washington D.C.
His ARNOVA paper is titled “Confronting Pandemia Amidst the Other Crises of Our Times” and discusses the role of the nonprofit sector in times of upheaval, with particular focus on where it stands in relation to the other sectors of society—government, business, and core culture (defined as a commingling of family life, media, belief systems, and other areas). When I contacted Van Til about his paper, I found him not merely ready to discuss its various aspects, but willing to pass questions along to other academics to solicit their expertise (as you'll see below).
Q: To start, can you discuss a little about your background and how you progressed through your career to reach this point?
Van Til: I am a sociologist who believes that people should play participatory and influential roles in the societies in which they live. I think it is a good thing for people to be active as citizens and volunteers. People live fuller and more meaningful lives when they not only see themselves as employees of businesses and members of families, but also as active participants in a civil society. So I’ve spent my career being a pracademic—studying about, thinking about, writing about, and acting in and with a number of voluntary organizations.
My paychecks largely came from teaching, conducting research, and engaging in public service as a professor at such institutions as Purdue, Swarthmore, and Rutgers. But I also spent a couple of years doing what we later learned to call nonprofit management, when at age 33 I was asked to serve as executive director of the Pennsylvania Law and Justice Institute. I enjoyed that position, and wasn’t too bad at it, but when my dream job came up—professor and chair of the Department of Urban Studies and Community Development at the Camden campus of Rutgers University—I moved into a position that I held for 35 years.
During that career, which now spans more than half a century, I found my intellectual home in an academic field I played some role in developing, the field that was initially called “voluntary action research.” The founder of that field, a brilliant and energetic social scientist named David Horton Smith, invited me to participate in a new organization he was creating, the Association of Voluntary Action Scholars. I accepted his invitation and never looked back.
I worked with a small group of colleagues to develop its strategic organizational plan. I attended its first annual conference, and all but two of the next 46. I served as editor-in-chief of its journal for 12 years. I was president of the association for two terms. I've been a proud and supportive member since, always attending the new members’ breakfast as well as the general membership meeting.
I hope that others see that I take greatest pride in having played some role in developing what is now known as ARNOVA into a genuine academic community in which all are welcomed to participate in understanding what we now call society’s third sector.
Q: In your paper you mention how the sociologist Talcott Parsons measures successful societies by the AGIL paradigm, which is adaptation, goal-attainment, social integration, and latent pattern maintenance—i.e. finding individual and group meaning through family life, education, religion, and other cultural paths. You note that there have been large, ongoing failures in the U.S. in meeting the AGIL challenge. What have been the most serious failures, and why do you think they happened?
Van Til: That's a difficult question, but thankfully a very bright guy named Robert D. Putnam, whom I first met when I was a senior at Swarthmore and he entered as a freshman, has just written a book that answers it directly. He titles the book The Upswing, but really it’s about the decline of the American polity, economy, civil society, and core culture since 1960. Yes, that’s when he and I first became acquainted, but please don’t blame that all on us.
This downswing has accelerated over the years and we can only hope that it's reached its nadir in the disastrous year of 2020. I’ll not elaborate here. Just think: devastating economic inequality, debilitated democracy, declining participation, dropping “we” while glorifying “I”—all happening at the same time.
Q: How has COVID-19 contributed to these failures?
Van Til: Here, I’m asking my colleague Bok Gyo Jeong to join the conversation. Bok, an assistant professor of public administration at Keane University, has organized a series of webinars on how nonprofit organizations are responding to COVID-19 in a wide range of nations around the world.
Bok observes: As the Representative of Global Issues and Transnational Actors (GITA) Group of ARNOVA, I collaborated with colleagues, including Jon Van Til and Agnes Kover-Van Til, in bringing scholars and practitioners to a virtual table to discuss the effects of the COVID-19 on civil society. This GITA/ARNOVA webinar series focused on how the coronavirus/Covid-19 affects civil society and how civil society is responding to the crisis in regions and continents, including Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas.
It may not be proper to summarize the varied types of civil society's responses in a few sentences, but a couple of observations are worth sharing for further discussion. The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected the condition and environment for civil society globally without any exception. While this global pandemic's impacts are mostly negative and detrimental, there are some hopeful and optimistic lessons gleaned from this unprecedented pandemic. Despite variations globally, civil society has faced multiple challenges, including financial pressure, resource shortage for organizational maintenance, technical challenges, and program discontinuation.
On the other hand, civil society has been demonstrating its resilience during this global-scale pandemic. Nonprofits have continued to reach out to the vulnerable groups to provide needy services; individual/institutional donors made a historical donation for the pandemic fight; civil society organizations were seriously going through strategic plans for long-term capacity building. Individual citizens' socially responsible and mature behaviors were as equally emphasized as organized civil society organizations' interventions. The collaboration between government and civil society, based on the nature and levels of inter-sectoral trust, has become another critical factor contributing to the effective response to the global pandemic.
Q: (To Jon Van Til) What can civil society do to address our current problems?
Van Til: It’s like driving over a barrel of spilled nails and realizing that all four tires are now flat. We won’t be able to resume our trip until each tire is repaired and reinflated. And what civil society can do is first, get folks involved in thinking about what didn't work before and why it won’t work if we try it again. Second, think through some ways in which the four sectors could actually work together, probably beginning on a very local level. And third, find ways to try out some of those ideas.
Civil society—what we sometimes call the third sector, the nonprofit sector, the voluntary sector, charity, philanthropy—it’s something I like to call, “Our Sector.” We are all part of it, and its prime characteristics—thoughtful consideration, reflective involvement, active participation—can be built into organizations in the other sectors and contribute importantly to their energizing.
In the business sector, we call this interjection social enterprise or social entrepreneurship. In the government sector, it’s third-party governance or QUANGO. In the core culture, it’s family business or cooperative. In my own writings, I’ve referred to another space, in which voluntary principles take root in business, politics, family, church, or neighborhood.
Q: You talk in your paper about crises coming in the form of bangs and whimpers. Can you explain the concept for our readers?
Van Til: The phrase, of course, comes from TS Eliot's 1925 poem, “The Hollow Men.” “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper…” I tried to apply it to the understanding of contemporary social crises in a keynote address I gave a few years ago to the Australia and New Zealand Third Sector Research organization. My point was that often a particularly violent, and usually loud, incident arouses greater attention than do more gradual, and usually quieter experiences with suffering and death.
Thus, a big bang like 9/11, which killed 3,000 people, or even the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, often is given more significance in public policy and citizen worry than the slower, less visible, more anonymous, and often far more numerous deaths that are annually occur globally as a result of hunger, cancer, or traffic accidents.
In that talk, I was suggesting that nonprofit strategies need to be adjusted to the different cadences of these often horrendous, but usually reducible episodes of suffering and death. That’s about as far as I’ve been able to push this argument, but I still think there's a lot to learn from a closer study of the ways in which societies choose between accepting or reducing avoidable deaths among their populations.
Q: How do you categorize COVID-19?
Van Til: COVID-19 certainly is a case in point here. When it arrived early in 2020 it often took the form of a bang—if you get it, you will die. Then, after a few months, the sense settled in that it was only some people who would die, but the rest of us could learn to live with it. And, of course, those who did die, or are still dying––more than a hundred times as many people as met their fate on 9/11 in the U.S. alone––expired behind closed doors and hospital walls. They died by quiet whimper, not by explosive bang.
There are lessons to be learned here if we are truly to merit standing as a civil society. Government can tell us what is actually going on and how we should or must reduce transmission rates by limiting contact. Business can find ways to get customers food and vaccinations. Families can try their best to support their members during overcrowded lockdown situations. But many other tasks remain which civil society can best accomplish—helping neighbors find food, counseling those in recovery, mourning the dead, dealing with creditors, and caring for children who suddenly find themselves alone. This is just a partial and beginning agenda for a society in sudden crisis and deepening need. A truly civilized society would find ways to address it by means of citizen involvement and organizational commitment.
Q: Let's take the business sector as an example. Since it's geared toward profit, how can it be influenced to fulfill an improved social contract, which ideally would include both providing good employment and contributing to general wellbeing?
Van Til: I think it’s useful to see three ways of building a productive social economy––that is an economic system in which business enterprises moderate their quest for profit by reflecting on what it is that they produce. This is the long-standing aim of socialist economies—to organize people and processes to make things that are useful throughout society. Socialism is sometimes seen as flawed because it grants so much power to central government.
A second path toward social economy tries to achieve a more even balance between government, private enterprise, and civil society, and may be found in systems of corporatist coordination. This approach was a central focus in the New Deal of the 1930s, embodied in the alphabet soup of CCC, TVA, WPA, SEC, and many more collaborative creations.
More recently, a third way toward the achievement of social economy has been found in a variety of approaches aimed toward social enterprise. These ventures seek to “do well by doing good” as well as “doing good by doing well.” On a voluntary basis, they introduce the values of civil society into a fundamentally unchanged capitalist economy. The years ahead will likely be ones of great experimentation along these lines.
There’s some indication that younger Americans are less fearful of some forms of governmentally directed business than their parents have been. The coming of the Biden administration will certainly awaken ideas of greater inter-sectoral collaboration in meeting the challenges of environmental and infrastructural development. And the enthusiasm of young social entrepreneurs, well educated in the liberal arts and often highly trained in business curricula, gives assurance that there will be much attention paid to social enterprise in the coming years.
Q: Some of the advice that you give nonprofits is to not flinch from addressing negative worldwide trends: the rise of populist authoritarianism, global warming, increased terrorism, the spread of military weaponry to civilian populations, heightened refugee crises, etc. To look at one of these areas—the rise of populist authoritarianism—how does a nonprofit address such a broad issue? Where would you suggest its efforts be spent to tackle such a complex problem?
Van Til: Well, we’ve seen since the election in the United States one way of taking down populist authoritarianism, and that is by vigorous and determined electoral participation, combined with the willingness of civil society to take to the streets in massive and nonviolent protest when such is needed. Granted that Donald Trump was not a particularly sophisticated or accomplished autocrat, but he still, as they say in Britain, had his innings.
Smarter and smoother autocrats can also lose elections, as I saw last year during my six-week term as a Fulbright Specialist in Turkey. A very close election was conducted to elect the mayor of Istanbul. Over eight million votes were cast, and the oppositional candidate won by the narrowest margin of 14,000 votes. Of course, autocratic president Erdogan led the effort to overturn the election, and did manage to arrange a second go-round two months later. That time, the challenger won by some 800,000 votes.
Or we could talk about Hungary, where I’ve lived with Agnes for the last ten years, and about which I co-authored The Hungarian Patient, which talks about oppositional movements. In Hungary, the autocrat is in firm control of both elections and the government. He still managed to see his party lose the last election for mayor of Budapest, and he is regularly confronted by rather restrained demonstrations organized on seemingly ad hoc bases around particular issues or legislative constraints.
Q: So many nonprofits are struggling to deal with increased immediate needs while trying to keep their budgets intact. How can they contribute to this sort of long-term change when they're just trying to put out fires?
Van Til: The eight nation Nonprofit Policy Forum special issue Agnes and colleagues are preparing indicates agreement with one of my mother’s favorite observations about life itself: “It ain’t easy, Magee.” Just because needs increase does not mean that resources to meet those needs rise as well. And bigger and more established nonprofits seem to suffer the most in times like ours. It’s those who are willing to go with fewer resources, lower (if any) wages, and have more aptitude with social media that seem to cope best in times like these. The sector will continue to grow on the web and by the Zoom.
Q: You mention that the nonprofit sector holds three keys that can potentially unlock the treasuries of fundamental change. You described one of those keys as “consummatory socialising.” Can you explain that term briefly?
Van Til: Think about a sewing circle, or a fraternal organization. People talk, smile, and think while they sew, discuss a book, drink, or share a meal. Getting together on a regular basis is an important part of the voluntary sector. Unfortunately, [political scientist] Bob Putnam’s data show that participation in such associations seems to have been in decline during the downswing of the last 60 years. Same thing for churches and other places of worship as well.
Q: Do you think that the COVID-19 crisis and how it has exposed problems with the basic American framework has reshaped people's expectations of how the U.S. should function? For example, more people are aware that essential workers may not be the ones they thought, and perhaps are underpaid. More people may be aware that vaccine manufacturers stand to make billions, and wonder about the ethics of that. More people may be thinking about the need for healthcare that isn't tied to employment.
Van Til: All this sounds good. Positive and sensible social change is a requirement of this age, and there are many ways that individuals and organizations can get on board to encourage and create the change that we need.
Q: Last question. Is there something that you would like to share with our readers that I haven't covered in the previous questions?
Van Til: What I have missed most in this time of pandemic are the chances I occasionally was offered to work with thoughtful and creative leaders active in our sector throughout the world. I loved the chances I had to keynote occasions large and small in places like Sydney, Reykjavík, Grand Rapids, London, and Istanbul, and then to follow these talks with individual conversations and small group explorations. We haven’t yet been able to re-create the energy of these events on Zoom or by webinar. But we should keep trying, because distances have become expanded by the pandemic, and will remain so as we learn to live more sensibly in our environmentally challenged world.
I am honored to have been selected by ARNOVA's Pracademics section and by the GrantStation organization to help keep the flames of thoughtful creativity and innovation alive in this age of isolation and lockdown. Friends and colleagues, we are keepers of a spirit that asserts that wherever we are, and in whichever organization or community or network we find ourselves, we can contribute to the building of a world that is more just, more serene, and more humane than it has ever been before.
Action steps you can take today
- Visit the ARNOVA website and browse the gallery of webinars.
- Watch Jon Van Til talk about his newest book The Hungarian Patient.
- Find out more information, links to ARNOVA research, and a series of articles on our Partnership Page.