Gugerty, Mary KaySuarez, David F.Finchum-Mason, Emily2022-09-232022-09-232022-09-232022FinchumMason_washington_0250E_24784.pdfhttp://hdl.handle.net/1773/49227Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2022Philanthropic foundations are an important, if understudied, governance institution in the United States that exert tremendous influence over public policy and political discourse through grant-making, capacity-building and technical support, and by shaping organizational fields. Historically, these institutions have been closed off to public input, instead relying on professional expertise to dictate policy problems and their appropriate solutions. But movements to open governing institutions and make them more accessible to citizen/beneficiary/client input have fomented over the past decades. The nature of public challenges has also become increasingly complex and boundary-spanning, necessitating more collaborative models of governance that engage all parties, including those who have been historically marginalized. There is a wealth of literature on how these movements for open governance and citizen participation affect the public sector and there is even growing pracademic literature about participation in grant-making public charities and nonprofits. There is, however, very little research on how participation manifests in the context of private philanthropy. This dissertation seeks to fill this gap by exploring how foundations value stakeholder participation and the organizational factors that predict utilization of participatory practices in these large foundations. Outcome data on participatory practices used to satisfy these research objectives comes from a novel survey of the 500 largest private and community foundations in the United States (by total assets, 2018). Conducted in 2020, this survey represents the first systematic attempt to study the participatory practices of large foundations in the United States. Explanatory variable data on foundations leaders, staff, and organizational attributes was obtained using foundation websites, LinkedIn, and social media aggregators. Overall, the dataset used in this dissertation provides insights on foundations’ leaders, staff, organizational structure, and decision-making processes – this is a unique contribution to a field that has been understudied primarily because of the inherent difficulties of obtaining information about these intensely private organizations. In aggregate, findings from this series of studies build upon previous research and suggest that participatory philanthropy is not only a part of many foundations’ governance repertoires, but as Chapter 2 illustrates, that foundations clearly value stakeholder participation in their grantees. The limitation is that this support decreases as a function of the amount of power-sharing between the grantees and those they serve. That is, foundations express more support for the idea of their grantees consulting beneficiaries than devolving decision-making power to those beneficiaries. That foundations are demonstrably value stakeholder participation, suggests a potential willingness to experiment with and learn from stakeholder participation and to cede power over internal decision-making processes to some extent. Chapters 3 explores one mechanism theorized to drive the adoption and utilization of stakeholder participation in U.S. foundations – namely, the association between foundation program staff characteristics and the uptake/utilization of participatory practices in governance and grant-making. Program staff are the frontline workers of the foundation, essentially the foundation’s equivalent of the street-level bureaucrat; they cultivate relationships with grantees and manage the disconnect between the way that foundation leadership conceptualizes social problems and the way these problems are understood by those who face them. Three attributes – the proportion of program staff of color, the proportion of program staff educated at elite institutions, and the proportion of program staff educated in business – are tested to determine whether and how they influence organizational-level participatory philanthropic outcomes. Program staff race is found not to be associated with whether a foundation utilizes participatory practices but is significantly positively associated with the extent to which foundations use these practices, a finding which merits further exploration, particularly given the challenges that people of color can encounter working in predominantly white, patriarchal institutions (see Villanueva, 2018 and Kohl-Arenas, 2017). The proportion of program staff educated at elite institutions is found to be negatively associated with uptake and utilization, such that a greater proportion of Ivy League staff is associated with a smaller likelihood and extent of utilization of participatory practices. Finally, the proportion of program staff who are socialized in the business discipline, which is expected to be negatively associated, is positively associated with the extent of utilization of participatory methods. These findings provide some preliminary evidence that diverse worldviews of program staff are indeed correlated with stakeholder participation efforts within the foundation, but more work remains to ascertain whether these relationships are causal. Chapter 4 examines whether and how female leadership and female leaders of color are associated with uptake and utilization of participatory philanthropic practices. Feminist approaches to philanthropy and participatory philanthropy dovetail in terms of their egalitarian, democratic approaches to giving. In fact, both are predicated on the logic of sharing power between resource holders and the historically marginalized. There are also notable observable differences in female leadership behaviors, namely the observed propensity to demonstrate more transformative leadership characteristics, valuing relationship-building and subordinate empowerment more than male leaders in comparable positions. This study theorizes that foundations headed by female executive directors (and female directors of color) may be more likely to utilize participatory approaches to philanthropy. An important counterargument, however, is that organizational inertia and the barriers that women face in terms of influence may be too great to overcome. Indeed, this study finds female leadership and female leadership of color to be unassociated with either the adoption or extent of utilization of participatory philanthropic methods at any level of power-sharing with stakeholders. Rather than seeing these findings as an indication of a summary lack of impact of female leaders, this work raises questions about the organizational factors that impede or facilitate women’s influence and invites further exploration into the leadership-level determinants of utilizing democratizing philanthropic practices.application/pdfen-USnonediversityfoundationsinclusionparticipationphilanthropystakeholder engagementPublic administrationThesis