Braided Threads

<p>The United States today supports the strongest most varied nonprofit sector in the world an economic force of about $2 trillion responsible for 5.4% of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product in 2014 and accounting that year for 10.3% of the country's private-sector workforce. Roughly three-quarters of all households in America give to charity with the average total donation being $2030 annually. Yet for all this few Americans and more specifically a surprisingly small proportion of the sector’s practitioners know where the nonprofit sector came from or how it developed and came to be what we know it as today. This work is a historical overview of that sector presented less as a chronology than as a discussion of the major influences—some legal some social some political—that helped shape the arena.</p><p>The core message of the book is that the developmental trajectory of nonprofits has not been a straight line. Rather its path over the years might be compared to that of a pinball moving straight and building up momentum for a time but then ricocheting off some event or social trend and taking off in a new direction altogether. Equally important however the sector is also the product of a founding genome that came out of colonial Puritan-inspired New England and spread as that culture and its values became one of the dominant forces in American society. Knowing this history is a prerequisite for understanding and appreciating the character of this deeply influential part of American social culture. </p>