Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly

http://nvs.sagepub.com Organizational Capacity and Organizational Effectiveness among Street-Level Food Assistance Programs
Peter Eisinger Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 2002; 31; 115 DOI: 10.1177/0899764002311005 The online version of this article can be found at: http://nvs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/31/1/115

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Street-Level Food Assistance Eisinger Programs

Organizational Capacity and Organizational Effectiveness Among Street-Level Food Assistance Programs
Peter Eisinger Wayne State University
Organizational capacity is a critical issue for street-level charitable organizations, such as food pantries and soup kitchens, which are increasingly involved as partners with government in the provision of social services. Capacity refers to a set of attributes assumed in the literature to bear on organizational effectiveness. This survey of food programs in the Detroit metropolitan area not only attempts to develop a capacity profile, but it empirically seeks to link the notion of capacity to effectiveness, that is, to mission fulfillment. The key attributes of organizational capacity that bear on mission fulfillment among this sample of organizations are the presence of a paid staff person and computerization of records. Institutionalization and seeking technical assistance from other organizations, other aspects of capacity, seem to do little to increase organizational effectiveness.

As nonprofit charitable organizations take on an increasingly important role in the provision of social and welfare services in the United States (Boris & Steuerle, 1999; Salamon, 1995; Smith & Lipsky, 1993), it is reasonable to ask about their capacity to do the job (De Vita & Capitani, 1998). Capacity, measured by a set of organizational attributes that get at such characteristics as institutionalization, competence, adaptability, and durability, is assumed to bear on the ability of an organization to accomplish its mission effectively. Capacity is a particularly critical issue for street-level charitable organizations that serve as key providers of services to the needysuch as emergency shelter and food assistance, drug counseling, and economic development because the environment in which they operate militates against strong indigenous institutions. Often the creation of local reformers, activists, community organizers, advocates, or religious congregations, these organizations typically come to life in a harsh and turbulent environment where resources are uncertain and scarce, administrative and technical expertise are at a premium, labor is overwhelmingly of the volunteer sort, and demands are high. Although
Note: A version of this article was originally delivered at the annual meeting of the Association of Public Policy and Management, Seattle, November 2-4, 2000. The research for this article was supported by the Aspen Institutes Nonprofit Sector Research Fund #98-MI-NSRF-02.
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 1, March 2002 2002 Sage Publications 115-130

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compassion, religious conviction, and moral obligation often fuel such operations, these alone are thin reeds on which to build effective organizations. Yet increasingly, government relies on just such organizations as partners in the delivery of critical social services. How capable are these charitable organizations of doing their job? The capacity of street-level organizations that provide emergency food has emerged as an especially important issue in light of the impact of the 1996 federal welfare reform on the food stamp program (Eisinger, 1999). The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act not only limited or ended the eligibility of certain groups for the program, but it also cut the value of the monthly allotment of stamps for the average recipient. The result has been that the traditional client population served by food pantries and soup kitchens has been augmented by people for whom food stamps are either no longer an option or for whom they are now insufficient. Yet to date, no effort has been devoted to a systematic examination of the organizational capacity of street-level food programs. The question of capacity raises at least two issues of importance. First, it is necessary to understand the capacity profile of the typical street-level charitable food provider. Capacity attributes, however, are latent until they are used. Thus, the second issue is to ascertain whether and how capacity is related to outputs or to an organizations ability to fulfill its mission. That is a question of organizational effectiveness. This article sets out to explore these questions among a sample of emergency food providers in the Detroit metropolitan area. Investigation of both issues promises to add to our understanding of street-level organizations in the huge voluntary sector.

THE DETROIT SURVEY This study is based on a survey of directors of food pantries and soup kitchens in the Detroit tri-county region conducted during the winter and early spring of 1999. The director sample yielded 92 completed face-to-face interviews, drawn from the total of 157 emergency food providers actually in existence in the winter of 1999.1 The programs range widely in size, with the food pantries serving from fewer than a dozen to approximately 7,000 people a month (median = 138) and the soup kitchens from 35 to 2,500 (median = 835). Although 82 programs classify themselves primarily as food pantries and 10 as soup kitchens, in fact 11 among the total offer both prepared hot meals and food packages to prepare at home. Apart from the differences in size, the food pantries and soup kitchens did not differ significantly along any of the dimensions explored later in this analysis.2 Thus, the two types of providers were combined. These 92 providers, which are responsible for distributing about one third of all charitable food assistance in the metropolitan area, serve approximately 54,000 people every month. Nearly three quarters of the providers (n = 67, or 73%) are faith based. Of these, 45 are associated with a single religious congregation, whereas the remainder of the faith-based operations

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are sponsored by larger denominational organizations or religious charities, such as St. Vincent de Paul and the Salvation Army.

ORGANIZATIONAL CAPACITY AND ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS I define capacity as a set of attributes that help or enable an organization to fulfill its missions.3 The attributes that any particular organization possesses constitute the organizations capacity profile. These attributes are latent until they are mobilized. Thus, what is interesting about capacity is whether it is exploited or not. Effective organizations tend both to have a broad array of capacity attributes and use or mobilize that capacity to fulfill their organizational missions. Although no systematic studies have been conducted of the organizational capacity of emergency food providers, such as food pantries and soup kitchens,4 investigators have applied the concept to such varied entities as public school systems (Timar, 1994), neighborhood communities (Chaskin, 2001), and community development corporations (CDCs) (Glickman & Servon, 1998). In addition, the concept of capacity is certainly implied in what Forbes (1998) calls correlative studies of organizational effectiveness among social service nonprofit entities, that is, investigations of the degree to which various organizational practices and characteristics are related to organizational effectiveness. Although the elements of organizational capacity in these various studies differ slightly in detail, there are some common features. Chaskin (2001, p. 292), for example, noted that definitions of community capacity usually include the existence of resources, networks of relationships, and leadership that impede or promote success in pursuing a communitys objectives. Similarly, the capacity of CDCsneighborhood nonprofit entities engaged in the production of low-income housing, economic development, and community buildingis conceived as a set of organizational characteristics presumed to underlie effective management and goal attainment. Thus, for example, Schwartz, Bratt, Vidal, and Keyes (1996) are particularly interested in how external institutional networks provide CDCs with training, technical assistance, and general operating support, characteristics that they suggest constitute organizational capacity (p. 391). In a national study of CDCs, Glickman and Servon (1998) listed five major components of capacity: resources, organizational factors such as effective leadership, an external helping network, specialized skills to undertake housing and development projects, and political resources. In a contemporaneous study of the National Community Development Initiative efforts to build CDC capacity, Walker and Weinheimer (1998) adapted this list to their purposes, adding the ability to plan effectively and dropping political resources. Students of community and organizational capacity generally seem to agree, then, that critical capacity elements include resources, effective leader-

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ship, skilled and sufficient staff, a certain level of institutionalization, and links to the larger community from which an organization might draw help. These are the elements of capacity that I seek to operationalize in exploring the capacity profile of Detroit food providers. Organizational effectiveness cannot be assumed, however, from an organizations capacity profile. In her extensive review of what we know about community development corporations, Stoutland (1999) suggested that external resources (financial, technical, and political), stable leadership, and commitment to an overall strategy are critical to the success of such organizations, but she presented little systematic evidence that this is the case. Indeed, Cowan, Rohe, and Baku (1999, p. 325) noted that we know little about the factors that result in effective and efficient CDCs.5 To advance our understanding of organizational capacity and effectiveness, there is a clear need to move beyond simply logical lists of capacity characteristics to an empirical understanding of which of these contribute to organizational mission fulfillment. Organizational effectiveness is a concept that can be defined and measured in a variety of ways. I draw on several approaches. One of these is what Forbes (1998) in his review of 21 studies of organizational effectiveness among a variety of nonprofit organizations called the goal attainment approach, which understands effectiveness in terms of the extent to which an organization achieves its goals. This is less simple than it sounds, however, for as Herman and Renz (1998) pointed out, an organizations goals are not only sometimes difficult to identify, but it may be difficult to translate abstract goals into objective measures. Nevertheless, even though street-level food providers may have multiple organizational goals, such as offering clients religious salvation, counseling, and shelter and clothing assistance, a central goal is to try to help the hungry get food. This is the mission I focus on. A second way to define organizational effectiveness is what Forbes (1998) calls the system resource approach, the idea that effectiveness inheres in the ability to acquire and exploit resources to sustain the organizations own survival and functioning. Thus, I explore food providers ability to maintain a food donation flow in response to demands. A third approach, discussed by Martin and Kettner (1996, p. 42; see also Letts, Ryan, & Grossman, 1999), sees effectiveness as a function of providing quality service, including serving with humaneness and empathy (defined as attention to individual client needs). As with many of the investigations that Forbes reviewed, I use a combination of all three approaches by focusing on goal fulfillment, resource acquisition, and quality service. Because the need for food for poor people may be inexhaustible, we cannot say that effectiveness inheres in meeting what may be a perpetually expanding need.6 Every organization would necessarily fall short. We need a standard that takes into account a food providers ability to capitalize on its strengths, adapt to its own limitations, and respond to pressures, constraints, and opportunities in its environment. Organizational effectiveness among street-level food providers lies, therefore, in the ability to meet self-defined

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goals and to manage or change organizational performance in response to external demands. Such an understanding not only opens up the possibility for a variety of different indicators, but it frees us from using strictly numerical output comparisons (e.g., number of clients served or number of pounds of food distributed) as a basis for judging effectiveness.
MEASURE 1

I operationalize this notion of organizational effectiveness in several ways. The first measure seeks to assess the extent to which an organization manages to change organizational performance in response to external demands, in particular an organizations ability to adjust food acquisition to client burdens. It is based on a comparison of an organizations trend in the number of clients served (demand) and trend in food donations (supply). When these trends move together in the same direction, then the organization is managing to adjust its performance to its environment. This is a sign of effectiveness. Thus, as demands rise, an effective organization seeks successfully to acquire more resources. As demands fall, the effective organization reduces its food acquisition (food storage is a perennial problem for street-level food providers and generally precludes stockpiling). The demand measure is based on a comparison of the average number of clients served at the time of the interview compared to 1 year before. The supply measure is based on a response to the question, Please describe the trend of food donations over the past year or so. Would you say the amount of food donated has increased, decreased, or stayed about the same?
MEASURE 2

The second measure seeks to assess both resource sufficiency and perceived goal attainment. It is based on a more subjective indicator than the first measure, namely, the assessment by the director of the organization as to whether his or her organizations food donations are currently meeting the needs of your clients, falling short of your clients needs, or exceeding those needs. No director suggested that donations exceeded needs. The sample broke almost evenly, however, on whether donations were meeting needs (51% said yes to this) or were falling short (49%). In the regression analysis that follows, the measure is treated as a dichotomous dependent variable.
MEASURE 3

A third measure of effectiveness, drawn from the quality approach (Martin & Kettner, 1996), is whether a food organization ever has to turn away eligible clients (These days, do you ever have to turn away eligible clients?). Over a third of the food providers (35%) said that they have to do so.7 This is also coded as a dichotomous (yes/no) indicator. Because turning people away is,

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as Poppendieck (1998, p. 211) points out, the most disagreeable part of the work in the charitable food world, street-level food organizations go to great lengths to avoid having to do so. If they cannot increase their food supply, the more nimble organizations may try to stretch their resources by reducing rations, imposing restrictions on the number of times a client may visit, or reducing their hours of service. Effective organizations seek to adjust their operations in such a way as to achieve balance between resource supply and demand to avoid having to turn away clients.
MEASURE 4

A fourth measure of effectiveness, also based on quality criteria, seeks to measure an organizations capacity for leveraging its resources by shifting some of the burden for providing food to government programs. Specifically, directors were asked whether they ever encourage or actually help clients apply for federal food assistance, like food stamps, WIC [Women, Infants, and Children Program], and so on. Seventeen percent said they actually provided help, 47% said they simply encouraged people to apply, and 35% reported that they did neither. Although this can be treated as an ordinal variable, for the logistic regressions that follow, the organizations that provided simple encouragement and those that provided actual help were combined to treat this as a dichotomous dependent variable. In the following analysis, I develop the capacity profile of Detroit streetlevel food programs by reporting on their resources, staffing patterns, institutionalization, and networks, and exploring the link between these latent attributes of organizational capacity and organizational effectiveness.

KEEPING RESOURCES IN LINE WITH DEMAND The ability to acquire resources is a measure of organizational capacity; to acquire enough resources to do the job is a measure of organizational effectiveness. However, what is enough? This we cannot really know. Rather, I suggest that an organization that manages to adjust its resource flow in response to the demands on it is one that is doing an effective job in fulfilling its mission of service. The number of people seeking emergency food assistance in Detroit has grown sharply. When the December 1997 individual client visits reported by each of the 92 program directors in the survey were summed, the total came to 48,795. That number had grown to 70,792 exactly 1 year later, an increase of 45%. Nearly two thirds (65%) of the sample organizations reported an increase in the number of clients they serve. Many of them, however, also reported that their resources were growing, too.

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Table 1 offers a summary of the degree to which the Detroit-area food programs experience congruence or stress between the demands on them and their resources. Stress occurs to varying degrees in those cases (indicated by superscript a in the table) when the resource trend does not move in the same direction as client demand. Stressed programs represent 36% of the total. In the modal case (n = 15), stressed programs reported that their resources had stayed the same over the course of the year at the same time that the number of clients visiting the facility had grown. In the next most common case (n = 10), the number of clients served was increasing at the same time that food donations were decreasing. At least insofar as the resource attribute is concerned, we would judge these stressed programs to be both relatively low capacity and relatively ineffective organizations. In contrast, organizations with congruent resource-demand relationships exhibit different degrees of high organizational capacity and effectiveness. Congruence (indicated by superscript b in Table 1) occurs when the organization manages to adjust its resource flow to keep up with or exceed demand. Some food organizations (n = 12) claimed that their resources had grown even as demand had stayed the same or decreased. We do not know, unfortunately, how they deal with this apparent surplus, whether, for example, they provide larger food parcels per client or whether they have managed to stockpile against bad times. The most common situation for programs experiencing congruence, however, was that resources and client burden were both increasing, the case for 33 programs. It is true, of course, that we cannot tell from this latter situation, given our data, whether the increase in resources has actually kept up with the increase in demand, thereby producing no change in the ratio. After all, resources could have increased at a far slower rate than demands. To explore this, I ran the congruence-stress measure against answers to the question on whether food donations were meeting the needs of clients or falling short. The pattern falls in the direction one would predict. That is, 58% of all the programs experiencing some degree of congruence also reported that their donations were adequate to meet their clients needs, compared to 41% of the programs experiencing some level of stress.8 Nonetheless, this is not a robust difference between stressed and congruent programs, suggesting that the data in their present form probably understate the actual stress levels experienced by street-level food programs and overstate somewhat their organizational capacity on the resource dimension. Nevertheless, this analysis suggests that somewhat over half the members of the group operate in situations in which the trend of their resources flow is congruent with the trend of their burdens, an indicator of comparatively high organizational effectiveness. Less than half the programs experience stress, that is, the failure of their resource stream to keep pace with their client burden.

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Table 1. Resources and Client Burdens: Congruence and Stress Patterns

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Change in Average Number of Clients per Month Compared to 1 Year Ago Trend of Food Donations Over the Past Year Increased Stayed the same Decreased Total = 100% (89) Increased % 37% 17% 11% (n) (33) b (15) b (10)
a

Stayed the Same % 12% 10% 8% (n) (11) a (9) b (7)

a

Decreased % 1% 2% 1% (n) (1) a (2) a (1)

a

Note: Percentage in congruence = 63% (57); percentage stressed = 36% (32). Three food programs were not included because they did not provide answers to one of the questions. a. These figures indicate congruence. b. These figures indicate stress.

LINKING ORGANIZATIONAL CAPACITY AND EFFECTIVENESS To gain a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between capacity and effectiveness, I measure the remaining independent organizational capacity variables and run a series of bivariate correlations with the organizational effectiveness variables. Because the latter are all coded as dichotomous indicators, logit is the appropriate technique.
STAFFING

The food pantries and soup kitchens in the Detroit sample are staffed overwhelmingly by volunteers. Only 30 programs have any paid staff, and even among these, the average number of paid staff, either full- or part-time, is 3.5.9 Fifteen of these organizations have only one or two paid staffers, and only 7 have more than five. Only 18 programs employ a professional nutritionist among their paid staff.10 On the other hand, the 92 programs collectively draw on approximately 920 volunteers each week. Nevertheless, these high numbers may not offset the training, experience, and consistency that paid workers tend to bring to the job. Does the presence of more paid workers result in greater organizational effectiveness? To put the question in another way, does paid staff as an attribute of organizational capacity contribute more to organizational effectiveness than volunteer staff? Each of the three dichotomous organizational effectiveness indicators was run against two different measures of staffing. The staffing measures included the number of paid workers and the ratio of volunteer workers to clients. More paid workers and a high ratio of volunteers to clients are indicators of high capacity. Are these related to effectiveness? The results are reported in the first two rows of Table 2.

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Table 2. Staffing Patterns, Institutionalization, External Help, and Mission Fulfillment (logit coefficients) Never Turn Away Eligible Clients .067 .108 .470 .063 .091 .508 .117

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Variable Number of paid staff Ratio of volunteer staff per 100 clients Intake interviews Computer storage of files Regular staff meetings Engaged in strategic planning Seeks technical assistance from external sources **p < .05. ***p < .01.

Donations Meet Needs .243** .034 .075 .299 .629 .262 .061

Help Clients Apply for Federal Food Aid .428** .041 1.245** .894*** .806 .519 .288

The logit analysis suggests that programs with more paid staff are more likely to exhibit evidence of effectiveness. Paid staff members are most likely to be managers (executive directors) and nutritionists. That is, they are professionals, with the training, experience, and prestige that come with that designation. There is a slight tendency for the programs with larger client burdens to have more professionals (Pearsons r = .27, significance = .011), but it is clear that size is not a simple proxy for the presence of professionals. Programs with greater numbers of paid staff report that they are better able to acquire sufficient food donations to meet client demand, and they have the skills, knowledge, and inclination to steer eligible clients to federal food programs, thus leveraging their own resources. Volunteer labor, in contrast, may suggest organizational capacity, but it does not seem to translate into great organizational effectiveness. The ratio of volunteers to clients makes little difference in whether an organization reports that it is able to meet demands or help clients get federal aid, although high-ratio programs are more likely never to turn away eligible clients. The staffing patterns indicate that the presence of paid staff (organizational capacity) is a sign of high organizational effectiveness. Because a minority of street-level food programs have paid staff, such capacity is not common.
INSTITUTIONALIZATION

It is reasonable to suppose that organizations are more likely to allocate their resources efficiently and manage demands effectively if they function according to established rules and procedures (Forbes, 1998; Herman & Renz, 1998). Ad hoc operations risk waste, a confusion of purpose, and chaotic lines of communication. Organizations that think seriously about the future, seeking to improve performance or worrying about the possibility of failure or even demise, are also more likely to be effective. Strategic planning is a

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common way to anticipate these challenges. Established rules of procedure, modes of communication, and planning are all indicators of institutionalization, and institutionalization is an indicator of capacity. To what degree does institutionalization contribute to organizational effectiveness? Most of the emergency food programs function according to formal rules. Seventy-eight percent conduct an intake interview with new clients, and all but one keep records on their individual clients. Methods of information recording and retrieval vary considerably, however. Only 11% have computerized their records, whereas, at the other end of the spectrum, 13% simply gather information on daily sign-up sheets. The remainder of the programs keep written dossiers or card files on their clients. Most street-level food organizations (79%) hold regular meetings for staff, but only 42% claim ever to have done any strategic planning. Do any of these elements of organizational capacity make any difference in how effectively these programs function? Table 2 suggests that organizations that do intake interviews and maintain computerized records are more likely to encourage or help clients apply for federal food aid such as WIC and food stamps. Orderly administrative routines and adoption of technology make it possible for an organization to do more than simply hand out food. However, holding regular staff meetings seems to have little impact on the outcomes we use to measure organizational effectiveness. In addition, strategic planning does not make a contribution. Meetings and planning may function more as organizational rituals for such purposes as helping to form bonds among the staff or providing a sense of purpose than for making the food programs more effective programmatically. The various measures of institutionalization, taken collectively, thus appear to be only a modest contributor to organizational effectiveness.
EXTERNAL HELP NETWORK

Setting up and operating a street-level food program is no simple proposition. Establishing a reliable stream of food and cash donations is difficult in itself, but so, too, are training and recruiting staff, organizing the recordkeeping enterprise, computerization, grant writing, networking with other social service organizations, keeping up with government regulations, purchasing or leasing equipment and space, and learning the rudiments of nutrition. A variety of larger social service and religious organizations offers technical assistance to street-level volunteer programs. Foundations, corporate sponsors, and the United Way agency in Detroit all actively encourage streetlevel providers to seek technical assistance.11 The willingness to draw on this network is an indicator of an organizations effort to improve organizational performance, that is, to become more effective. Surprisingly few Detroit food programs take advantage of this support, however. Although the food pantries and soup kitchens of the metropolitan area are assiduous in developing a diverse network of food donors, they are far less active in seeking technical assistance. Directors of the programs were asked in

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the survey if they ever sought help from Detroit-area social service organizations, including, specifically, United Way, the Hunger Action Coalition (HAC), Gleaners, Focus Hope, or any other institution. Directors who answered yes to any one of these were asked what they asked for. Most had asked for food or money. Only 20 (23%) of the 92 directors had asked for any sort of technical assistance (training, nutritional information, start-up guidance, administrative advice, grant writing, or help with understanding government regulations and assistance programs), primarily from the HAC, a nonprofit agency whose explicit mission is indeed to provide such support to member food pantries and soup kitchens. (All 92 of the street-level programs in the sample were HAC members.) Most food programs sought help from only one external institution, but 5 asked for help from more than one. The tendency to ask for help is unrelated to the size of the program or its secular or faith-based status. The low rate of help seeking suggests that the majority of the street-level food programs are relatively isolated in the larger community, though whether this pattern is the product of a sense of being able to handle organizational challenges or of being completely preoccupied by the task of gathering enough food to serve the growing client population cannot be ascertained from the data. Seeking technical assistance has no impact on any of the organizational effectiveness measures, as the logit coefficients in the last row of Table 2 show. Judged by interest in exploiting the external help network for technical assistance, Detroit food programs exhibit low capacity, and those that do seek help do not seem to use that help to be more effective organizations.

MODELING ORGANIZATIONAL CAPACITY AND EFFECTIVENESS To explore whether the bivariate relationships change when other independent variables are controlled, I regressed each of the three indicators of organizational effectiveness against measures of staffing, institutionalization, and seeking technical assistance, controlling, in addition, for the size of the program (a function of the average monthly client burden) and whether the program was faith based or not. All three models are presented in Table 3. The presence of paid staff and the ability to obtain a computer and use it to systematize record keeping are clearly the critical elements of organizational capacity that contribute to organizational effectiveness. Paid staffers in these organizations are most likely to be program directors, social service workers, or nutritionists. In other words, they are professionals, bringing to the job a range of administrative skills, specialized training, and public relations experience that professionalism entails. The computerization indicator suggests not only that the organization had the ability to acquire (through purchase or donation) computer hardware but also the resources to learn to use it.

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Table 3. Organizational Capacity and Organizational Effectiveness: A Logistic Regression Help Clients Apply for Federal Food Aid SE .3552 .0002 .3498 .0404 .9895 .9502 .5079 .2166 .0248 2.1655 .6320 .0003 .1908 .0491 .6413 .3500 .6298 .5678 .6822 2.1655 Significance .5741 .5583 .0667* .4111 .1228 .0066** .4200 .7029 .9710 .1143 Donations Meet Needs Independent Variable Faithbased organization a Size No. of paid staff Ratio of volunteer staff per 100 clients Intake interviews Computer storage of files Regular staff meetings Engaged in strategic planning Seeks technical assistance from external sources Constant a. Average monthly client burden. *p < .10. **p < .05. .2848 .0002 .3144 .0793 .5646 .4851 .4755 .3299 .4218 1.3698 SE .5588 .0003 .1498 .0467 .5995 .2934 .6039 .4916 .5847 1.8880 Significance .6103 .4308 .0358** .0896* .3463 .0983* .4311 .5022 .4706 .4681 1.4993 .0004 .2036 .1484 .6295 .2978 .4729 1.2778 .2478 3.4400 Never Turn Away Eligible Clients SE .6536 .0004 .1410 .0617 .7221 .3318 .7165 .6311 .2372 2.15544 Significance .0218** .2279 .1488 .0162** .3834 .3694 .5092 .0429** .2961 .1100

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Both paid staff and computerization are related to the perceived ability to maintain the flow of donations in the same direction as demand (Model 1) and to the willingness or ability to provide help or encouragement to clients to apply for federal food aid (Model 2). Both are demanding tasks. The former requires effective networking in the larger donor community; the latter requires knowledge of federal programs and their eligibility rules. Both activities are consistent with the presence of a paid (professional) director. A large number of volunteers relative to the client burden is also related at a modest level to donation flow. However, other measures of institutionalizationintake interviews, regular staff meetings, strategic planningdo not appear to be important components of capacity, nor does the effort to seek technical assistance from other organizations. Indeed, several of these institutionalization attributes are negatively related both to the ability to acquire enough donations to meet demand and to efforts to help clients enroll in federal food programs. How might we explain the negative relationship between both strategic planning and seeking outside help and organizational effectiveness?12 One possibility is that in organizations that depend so heavily on a single paid professional director, the impulse to develop more stable institutional features is put on hold. An effective individual at the helm lessens the urgency to develop institutional strengths that transcend the individual. Volunteers and sponsors may not only feel confident in the leader, but they may even believe that strategic planning or seeking outside aid could be construed as a challenge to the leadership. It is also possible that the most energetic paid staff themselves are so taxed by the overwhelming challenge of gathering enough food to meet growing demands that they cannot devote the energy and attention necessary to the task of organization building. The coefficients in Models 1 and 2 suggest, then, that organizations with paid staff and technical capabilities for record management are most capable of managing the challenge of maintaining congruence between resources and demand and of providing assistance to clients beyond the simple provision of food. Model 3, however, provides a different picture. Here, organizational effectiveness is measured by whether the organization ever has to turn away eligible clients. The coefficients here suggest that this is less a technical challenge than an issue of humaneness or even religious duty. Whereas maintaining the donation flow in relation to demand and mastering computer record keeping call for rational, professional, technical skills, the decision of whether to turn a supplicant away may lie beyond that realm: Faith-based organizations are clearly more willing to take measures to keep their doors open to all than are programs run by nonreligious groups or institutions.

CONCLUSION The analysis provides a basic profile of the organizational capacity of street-level food programs in Detroit, but many of these elements apparently

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contribute little to organizational effectiveness. The food pantries and soup kitchens, which feed over 50,000 people every month, are largely volunteer organizations. Yet despite (or perhaps because of) their volunteer nature, few seek outside technical assistance from the extensive helping network of social service and charitable organizations in the metropolitan area. It is true that even though these street-level food providers are volunteer organizations, nearly all operate according to a set of orderly administrative procedures that govern client intake, record keeping, and staff meetings. Nevertheless, few food providers engage in any sort of planning, and even fewer have computerized their files. As organizations, these emergency food providers are rudimentary. This portrait of street-level food programs is important for two reasons. One is that we are able to explore the relationship between organizational capacity and organizational effectiveness. Organizational capacity has often been treated in the literature as a list of organizational attributes whose functions and impacts had been assumed rather than investigated. The analysis of the Detroit food providers suggests, in fact, that most of these capacity attributes do not appear to contribute to effectiveness among this group of nonprofit organizations, at least in the several different ways in which effectiveness has been measured here. Organizational effectiveness in these streetlevel food providers is a function mainly of individual effort and skills rather than rules, routines, support networks, or planning. The latter attributes may fulfill other functions (such as, perhaps, organizational solidarity or networking in the larger community), but they do not seem to contribute to fulfilling a central mission of the food providers: helping those who need food assistance. The second reason the portrait of the Detroit food pantries and soup kitchens is important is that we need to know the strengths and limitations of the voluntary sector organizations that increasingly function as key partners with government in the provision of social services. The analysis suggests that, despite the widespread use of administrative rules of operation, the streetlevel food providers are not, in fact, highly institutionalized helping organizations. Their effective functioning is dependent to a certain extent on the presence of a paid staffer, and most such organizations have none. The reliance on paid staff to make the organization effective suggests that the very existence of these organizations is precarious. Individuals may move on, leaving behind organizations with few other institutional attributes that bear on effectiveness. There is clearly a role for emergency food providers to play in the food assistance system, for they tend to offer help to people who fall through the cracks of the formal food aid programs. Furthermore, they provide help in a personalized way, neighbor to neighbor, rarely worrying about rigorous means tests or other proof of need. However, they are fragile organizations, and this finally makes them weak members of the new public-private partnership increasingly assigned the task of holding up the social safety net.

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1. The original sample numbered 95, drawn from a list of 170 (55.8%). When repeated efforts to contact a director failed, that directors name was replaced through a random draw from the remaining 75 program directors. In all, there were 27 replacements to make up for refusals, programs that had terminated or disappeared (accounting for the final total population of 157 programs), or directors who repeatedly failed to meet their appointments. The world of street-level emergency food providers is both tenuous and turbulent. Lists of providers are out of date as soon as they are printed. 2. Soup kitchens and pantries differ along some other dimensions not discussed in this article. For example, the latter are much more likely to impose eligibility requirements, and the former are open more days per month. 3. Letts, Ryan, and Grossman (1999) speak of capacity in terms of management practices and organizational processes that help nonprofits serve their missions. Missions is used in the plural to suggest that nonprofits may have multiple organizational objectives. This is true in the emergency food sector, where missions may range from providing food to hungry people to saving souls to providing substance-abuse counseling. 4. Poppendieck (1998, pp. 110-115) discussed the institutionalization of food banks, by which she meant the systematization of the process of food gathering, preservation, and distribution. She also wrote of efforts to establish sustainability and stability. All of these characteristics depend, in her view, on the ability to acquire resources and the commitment of leadership, usually one individual. These processes are obviously related to capacity building. 5. Cowan, Rohe, and Baku (1999) go on to analyze organizational capacity correlates of the efficiency of community development corporations (CDCs), which they define as the ratio of total direct investments in a neighborhood as a result of CDC activities divided by total staff compensation. They find that executive director tenure and size of the CDC are important predictors of efficiency. 6. Since 1982, the U.S. Conference of Mayors has conducted at least one survey every year of a sample of its member cities to ascertain trends in demands on emergency food providers. Every year, the member cities report increased demands over the previous year. 7. Directors were asked a follow-up probe about why they had to turn people away. Twenty-six of them said they simply ran out of food. 8. This is significant using a gamma test at the .026 level. 9. The relative lack of paid employees is apparently common among street-level food organizations. Poppendieck (1998, p. 218) notes that only 23% of food pantries and soup kitchens studied in New York State had a paid staff person. 10. Staffing both soup kitchens and food pantries with a professional nutritionist has long been a recommendation of professional dieticians. See, for example, Carillo, Gilbride, and Chan (1990). In the Detroit sample, nutritionists were employed by equal proportions of food pantries and soup kitchens, that is, 15% each. However, of those 11 programs that offered both soup kitchen services (prepared hot meals) and food pantry packages for preparation at home, 6 (54%) employed a nutritionist. 11. This assertion is based on interviews with program officers in the two Detroit-area foundations (Skillman and Macgregor) involved in funding food providers, and with officials in the Hunger Action Coalition, the United Way agency responsible for providing technical assistance. 12. There is some literature that suggests a positive relationship between formal planning and organizational effectiveness. Siciliano (1997), for example, finds that YMCA organizations that engaged in strategic planning had higher levels of performance as measured by a variety of effectiveness indicators.

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130 References

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Boris, E., & Steuerle, E. (Eds.). (1999). Nonprofits and government. Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press. Carillo, T., Gilbride, J., & Chan, M. (1990, July). Soup kitchen meals: An observation and nutrient analysis. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 989-992. Chaskin, R. (2001). Building community capacity: Adefinitional framework and case studies from a comprehensive community initiative. Urban Affairs Review, 36, 291-323. Cowan, S., Rohe, W., & Baku, E. (1999). Factors influencing the performance of community development corporations. Journal of Urban Affairs, 21, 325-340. De Vita, C., & Capitani, J. (1998, Summer). Michigan nonprofits and devolution: What do we know? (Nonprofit Sector Research Fund Working Paper Series). Washington, DC: Aspen Institute. Eisinger, P. (1999). Food pantries and welfare reform: Estimating the effect. Focus, 20, 23-28. Forbes, D. (1998). Measuring the unmeasurable: Empirical studies of nonprofit organization effectiveness from 1977 to 1997. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 27, 183-202. Glickman, N., & Servon, L. (1998). More than bricks and sticks: Five components of CDC capacity. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Center for Urban Policy Research. Herman, R. & Renz, D. (1998). Theses on nonprofit organizational effectiveness. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 28, 107-126. Letts, C., Ryan, W. P., & Grossman, A. (1999). High performance nonprofit organizations. New York: John Wiley. Martin, L., & Kettner, P. (1996). Measuring the performance of human service programs. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Poppendieck, J. (1998). Sweet charity? New York: Viking. Salamon, L. (1995). Partners in public service. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Schwartz, A., Bratt R., Vidal, A., & Keyes, L. (1996). Nonprofit housing organizations: The management challenge. Journal of Urban Affairs, 18, 389-407. Siciliano, J. (1997). The relationship between formal planning and performance in nonprofit organizations. Nonprofit Management and Leadership, 7, 387-403. Smith, S. R., & Lipsky, M. (1993). Nonprofits for hire: The welfare state in the age of contracting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stoutland, S. (1999). Community development corporations: Mission, strategy, and accomplishments. In R. Ferguson & W. Dickens (Eds.), Urban problems and community development (pp. 193-240). Washington, DC: Brookings. Timar, T. (1994). Federal education policy and practice: Building organizational capacity through Chapter 1. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 16, 51-66. Walker, C., & Weinheimer, M. (1998). Community development in the 1990s. Washington, DC: Urban Institute.

Peter Eisinger has been at Wayne State University since 1997, after having taught at the University of Wisconsin for 28 years. He held the Hawkins Chair in Public Affairs there in 1996-1997 and was the director of the La Follette Institute of Public Affairs from 1991 to 1996. He has published a number of books, including The Rise of the Entrepreneurial State (1988) and Toward an End to Hunger in America (1998). At Wayne State, he holds a joint appointment in political science and the College of Urban, Labor and Metropolitan Affairs, where he is the director of the State Policy Center.

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