The Resilient Sector: The State of Nonprofit America

Lester M. Salamon

Aug 2003 · Brookings Institution Press

About this ebook

The Resilient Sector makes available in an updated form the concise overview of the state of health of America's nonprofit organizations that Johns Hopkins scholar Lester Salamon recently completed as part of the "state of nonprofit America" project he undertook in cooperation with the Aspen Institute. Contrary to popular understanding, Salamon argues, America's nonprofit organizations have shown remarkable resilience in recent years in the face of a variety of difficult challenges, significantly re-engineering themselves in the process. But this very resilience now poses risks for the sector's continued ability to perform the tasks that we have long expected of it. The Resilient Sector offers nonprofit practitioners, policymakers, the press, and the public at large a lively assessment of this set of institutions that we have long taken for granted, but that the Frenchman Alexis de-Toqueville recognized to be "more deserving of our attention" than almost any other part of the American experiment.

About the author

Lester M. Salamon is the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies. He has written or edited more than twenty books, including a leading textbook on nonprofit institutions, America's Nonprofit Sector: A Primer (The Foundation Center, 1999).