Taylor Schepella
Taylor is a 5th-year student majoring in Sociology.
His thesis work explores how economic, cultural, and relational factors shape how non-profits approach governance and inclusion of marginalized communities in their decision-making.
Outside of school, Taylor can be found exploring nature, enjoying indie games, and reading speculative fiction and philosophy.
Logics of Governance in a Non-profit Community Organization
Non-profits routinely balance contradictory pressures arising from ideological commitments, resource constraints, and the need to legitimize themselves among various stakeholders. Previous research has examined these factors at the industry and national levels, but there is less scholarship examining them at the scale of individual organizations, especially regarding their influence on organizational governance. This is important because understanding how grant availability, organizational mission, and regulations on nonprofit activity influence organizations’ decisions has potential to expand and uncover limitations in existing theories of non-profit behaviour.
This study explores how funding pressures, governance structure, and organizational culture interact to shape the planning of a community advisory panel in a non-profit operating in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Utilizing over 140 hours of ethnographic observation at the organization in addition to 14 semi-structured interviews with staff and community members, this study unpacks how nonprofits in highly competitive funding environments work to develop inclusive governance mechanisms that incorporate the perspectives of service users and local residents.
Preliminary findings indicate the critical role that organizational culture and history plays in motivating community-engaged governance practices. The organization's origins as a grassroots, place-based, institution resulted in a robust culture of inclusion and flexible service provision that continues to animate attempts to engage the community in its governance processes. However, the organization's small administrative team, high staff turnover rates, and significant instability in grant availability made planning and maintaining long-term mechanisms for community engagement extremely challenging. This speaks to wider issues facing grant-dependent non-profits in Canada, where unpredictable funding cycles can inhibit long-term planning and significantly disrupt community-based approaches to governance and capacity-building.
How did you become interested in this topic? Why did you choose it for your thesis?
I’m interested in the topics of non-profit studies and organizational governance for two reasons. First, I have prior experience volunteering and conducting research in the Downtown Eastside through the Urban Ethnographic Field School, and wanted to better understand how non-profits operate in the community. Second, I am deeply interested in organizational governance, especially the factors that motivate organizations to adopt less hierarchical or more democratic governance structures. I think how these democratic structures or attitudes form within groups is really important to understanding who gets to have power and influence at many levels of society.
Can you summarize your project and its main findings for us?
My thesis explores how cultural, economic, and relational factors influence non-profit approaches to governance through an ethnographic case study of a small community organization in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Through a combination of participant observation and interviews with staff and community members, I’ve found that organizational culture and history can play a major role in how organizations approach governance and consultation with their client base. However, unstable funding and staff turnover can pose significant challenges to non-profits seeking to elevate the voices of clients in their decision-making protocols.
What was your favourite part of doing research?
Simply learning about this non-profit and its history, both through interviews and my ethnographic observation as a volunteer. It was like piecing together this big web of events, relationships, perspectives, and people to understand how things got to be the way they are. Hearing all these stories and experiences from people about their involvement with the nonprofit was super fascinating, and I’m really grateful to everyone I spoke with for this study. I think we can take the complexities of how even the simplest groups function for granted, but this project has really highlighted those intricacies for me.
What was your experience working with Sociology faculty on this project like?
My thesis supervisor was Kerry Greer, and she did an absolutely amazing job helping me through this process. Ethnography is a method that comes with a lot of uncertainty, both around what your findings will look like and regarding the ethics of your presence in the field. Kerry provided a lot of guidance and reassurance both in how to approach making observations in light of the uncertainty of my findings, and in navigating some of those trickier ethical questions I encountered during my research. I also really appreciate her efforts to hold her supervisees accountable and keep us on track with our theses!
If you could continue this project, what other facets of your topic or research question would you want to explore?
My thesis largely revolves around an advisory group that the non-profit I partnered with was in the process of planning during my research. Part of my volunteering/participant observation was helping them as a research assistant: running interviews, planning some focus groups, and doing data analysis. While I got to understand why this project was being pursued and saw how those goals developed over the 10 months I was working on my thesis, I wasn’t able to see the group actually be established at the organization. I think it would be really interesting to see how this group and the organization end up evolving alongside each other, and the way it gets integrated into existing governance processes.
