Jeffrey Brudney

University of North Carolina Wilmington | UNCW · Department of Public and International Affairs

In this research, we sought to better understand important trends and developments in the teaching of quantitative and research methods courses in graduate public affairs programs. We were specifically interested in the following areas related to the teaching of quantitative and research methods: the impact of new technologies on curriculum deliver...

Since the New Public Management Movement, privatization has become a popular approach for delivering public services. However, few studies empirically assess the relationship between privatization of public service delivery and citizen participation in coproduction. Taking advantage of a national survey of U.S. local government chief administrators...

Much prior research explores the relationship between nonprofit location and various community and market characteristics to determine whether citizen demand drives nonprofit supply. As a widely used “policy tool” of government, nonprofits are expected to be responsive to the needs of the communities they serve. However, results are mixed and it re...

Volunteering can be understood as a human-made, renewable resource that can be grown and recycled, and whose continuation and volume of flow can be influenced by human beings positively as well as negatively. We extend the metaphor and break down the monolithic concept into three categories: traditional (wild salmon), third party (farmed fish), and...

IMPACT Local governments are increasingly seeking new ways to engage the public to improve public services and ensure that more voices are heard. The co-assessment of quality-of-life problems has gone digital, creating more opportunities for engagement, but challenges remain. This article examines how transportation mode choice may play an interven...

In this research, we sought to better understand important trends and developments in the teaching of quantitative and research methods courses in graduate public affairs programs. We were specifically interested in the following areas related to the teaching of quantitative and research methods: the impact of new technologies on curriculum deliver...

This article investigates the idea that different nonprofit organizations, including human service organizations, value volunteers in different ways. We identify three benefits: financial, programmatic, and expressive. Analysis of survey data confirms these as separate factors. Using ESEM, we explore how differences in administrative complexity and...

Volunteering appears to be a mechanism that can contribute to societal inclusion. As nonprofit organizations continuously seek more volunteers, opportunities for volunteer inclusion seem limitless. We argue that, in reality, it is not that simple. Volunteer exclusion derives from the failure to seek, recruit, and place potential volunteers with ant...

Public research report for the second round of the Volunteer Management Capacity Study

This article is intended as the leading article in a Special Issue of Voluntas devoted to episodic volunteering from a cross-cultural perspective. This article focuses on summarizing and distilling knowledge about episodic volunteering. Based on a thorough literature review, the authors present state-of-the-art knowledge about episodic volunteering...

As scholarship on episodic volunteering expands, researchers question if episodic volunteering is similar to, and/or different from, long-term, membership-based volunteering. This article examines the motivations of Ghanaians, South Africans, and Tanzanians to engage in event-based, episodic volunteering. Based on surveys collected from over 1000 p...

Textbook chapter for Council for Certification in Volunteer Administration

National Day of Service (NDS) volunteering events have become common, yet little is known about how the design of such events affects volunteer satisfaction. This relationship is important because volunteer satisfaction ensures a strong volunteer base for special events and promotes sustained volunteerism. We explore how the design of NDS projects...

This article examines the role played by Nonprofit Infrastructure Organizations (NIOs) in assisting service-delivery nonprofits as they confronted the COVID-19 crisis. NIOs constitute a diverse class of entities differentiated by their service focus but united by a common purpose to support nonprofits. Collectively these organizations perform multi...

Volunteer use in the United States constitutes a service delivery alternative in which public agencies involve citizens to assist in delivering public services. This article provides a resource dependence and transaction costs explanation for why local governments in the U.S. may involve volunteers in service delivery. Using a survey of local gover...

This article seeks to answer the following primary research question: Do governments respond differently to citizen service requests depending on where those requests originate in the city? This study is particularly salient in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests in response to police violence or the gross neglect of infrastructure in Flint...

This article reviews the origin and development of research on coproduction and proposes a new Coproduction Amplification Model to guide research and practice. The article shows that coproduction research began and flowered in the USA in the 1980s but lagged in the 1990s. The study suggests and explores reasons for the lapse, including the introduc...

This article examines the citizen representativeness of crowdsourcing achieved through 311 systems—the non-emergency and quality of life service request reporting systems used by local governments. Based on surveys of San Francisco residents conducted in 2011, 2013, and 2015, our findings suggest that no systematic biases exist in participation rat...

This study explores the circumstances under which certain collaborative tools are adopted, and whether some tools are typically used in combination with others. We share the view of other scholars that collaboration practice is ahead of scholarship. Accordingly, we ground our analysis and conclusions on the observations provided by a sample of publ...

Scholars have devoted substantial attention to developing conditional models of volunteer administration and management, but no consensus surrounds the criteria underlying the different models or the rationale. The literature reveals a welter of possibilities but no clear choice. This study conceives the primary managerial challenges as securing ac...

Crowdsourcing is a concept in which the crowd is used as a source of labor, idea generation, or problem identification. Crowdsourcing originated in the private sector; though with any good private sector practice it is increasingly being utilized in government. This paper provides an overview of the concept of crowdsourcing, gives examples of its u...

Crowdsourcing is a concept in which the crowd is used as a source of labor, idea generation, or problem identification. Crowdsourcing originated in the private sector; though with any good private sector practice it is increasingly being utilized in government. This paper provides an overview of the concept of crowdsourcing, gives examples of its u...

This article examines how a tool relatively new to nonprofits - geographic information systems - can support community building. Three trends - rising use of GIS overall and potential for technology transfer to nonprofit organizations, the decreased cost of GIS software and relevant data, and the increased number of public servants trained in GIS -...

This chapter briefly discusses the roots of government collaboration in the United States and then identifies a set of factors that help determine whether it is appropriate to go it alone and use traditional governmental service delivery or invest in collaborative approaches. The chapter then examines the role contextual and environmental factors p...

Nonprofit infrastructure organizations provide multiple functions to the nonprofit sector: strengthening individual and organizational capacities, mobilizing material resources, providing information and intellectual resources, building alliances for mutual support, bridging the research and practice divide, and connecting nonprofits to the other s...

Despite popular rhetoric concerning the benefits of volunteerism for public and nonprofit organizations, the use and management of volunteers to assist in the delivery of services is uneven: some organizations rely heavily on volunteer labor for this purpose, while others circumscribe volunteer contributions or eschew volunteer involvement altogeth...

Despite burgeoning research on collaboration, the preference and choice of public managers to partner with other public-sector institutions versus private-sector organizations has received comparatively little attention. This study proposes that public managers are inclined to partner with other government agencies, i.e., within their “comfort zone...

The quality of the relationships between volunteers and paid staff can have far-reaching consequences for organizations that utilize volunteer programs to support service delivery. We utilize a mixed methods case study design to explore volunteer and staff perceptions of their mutual interactions within a large library system in the southeastern Un...

The literature of film studies has emerged in many academic fields as a relevant prism to examine the image of those professions in popular culture. Nonprofit management, though, has paid much less attention to film images. This article explores the cinematic image of the nonprofit volunteer and the volunteer manager in American feature films. It i...

Crowdsourcing is a concept in which the crowd is used as a source of labor, idea generation, or problem identification. Crowdsourcing originated in the private sector; though with any good private sector practice it is increasingly being utilized in government. This paper provides an overview of the concept of crowdsourcing, gives examples of its u...

This chapter elaborates the essential components of the volunteer program and offers suggestions for increasing their effectiveness. Two caveats with respect to coverage are in order. First, one might reasonably add risk management for volunteers and volunteer programs to the listing above, since it has become a concern to many host organizations....

Research on nonprofit lobbying conceives of strategy in various ways. This article presents a more comprehensive view encompassing four components: lobbying motivation (lobbying for organizational or self-interest as well as for societal benefit), concentration (lobbying in a narrow versus wide range of policy domains), type (lobbying policymakers...

Non-profit organizations strive to identify and build community in a variety of ways. A new development to assist non-profit organizations with this critical task is the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) that incorporate data assembled from area non-profit organizations. In this article, we investigate the reasons why non-profit organizat...

This article presents a mixed‐methods, multicase study and comparison of volunteer programs in US national parks that have evolved, in response to growth and fiscal pressures, to be co‐managed by national park staff and their nonprofit support partners. Findings detail why and how the expanded partnerships were formed; how they operate; challenges...

Although the academic literature reveals great variety in definitions of collaboration, little research has examined the conceptions of practitioners. Because the literature encourages collaboration, and foundations often insist on this arrangement for funding, these views are consequential. This article elaborates the definitions of collaboration...

Nonprofit organizations frequently encounter risks that expose them to liability. These risks extend to the management of volunteers. We assume that through their programs of study in nonprofit master’s degree programs or concentrations nonprofit professionals are introduced to volunteer resource management, including the subject of risk and liabil...

This Handbook focuses primarily on volunteering in and the operations of associations. Because some other topics are sufficiently relevant and important, however, the Handbook covers them as well. Volunteer service programs (VSPs) is one such subject. Although VSPs are rarely found in associations, these efforts are included in the Handbook because...

From a traditional perspective, government production and delivery of goods and services is straightforward. Where economic or private markets fail to provide needed goods, government usually emerges to produce them. Guided by principles such as equity, transparency, and representativeness, government ensures that taxpayer-funded public goods and s...

Research on community-engaged learning tends to view this activity primarily, if not exclusively, from the vantage point of its benefits and challenges for students and educational institutions. Nevertheless, at least one other major actor is involved in this activity: the community. Neglect of the community perspective diminishes the overall value...

Nonprofit employees can make ideal volunteers for other organizations in the sector, and understanding their participation in volunteering is a timely task. Based on “spillover theory,” this study tests how nonprofit employees’ experience on the job may carry over into the nonwork arena. The study focuses on how nonprofit employees’ satisfaction wi...

Although a voluminous literature addresses organizational change, employee stress, and organizational behavior, we have little understanding of employees’ responses to being assigned the role and responsibilities of a volunteer manager. Because many public and nonprofit organizations seek to incorporate more volunteers—especially during times of fi...

The canon of volunteer administration contends that adoption of specified practices separates effective from ineffective programs. Alternatively, structural contingency and strategic human resource management theories suggest that managers make adoption decisions based on how organizational circumstances dictate the applicability or efficacy of par...

As little is known about the impact of short-term volunteering on volunteers’ future engagement, this study explains how volunteers’ intention to continue volunteering can be affected by specifically designing the volunteering activity. The data used in the present study derive from in-depth semi-structured interviews, and participant observations...

The Volunteer Protection Act (VPA) was enacted in 1997 to encourage volunteerism by protecting individuals from liability for their negligent actions while volunteering. Proponents intended to provide legal safeguards for volunteers, whom they claimed were deterred from volunteering by fears of liability. Little attention has been paid to this legi...

Volunteers who perform intermittent, ad-hoc or autonomous activities have received much less scholarly attention when compared with those individuals whom organisations formally identify as their volunteer corps. Yet, they may possibly far outnumber formal volunteers and represent the 'glue' holding together many elements of civic life. The study o...

In this article, using multiple illustrative case examples, we demonstrate that philanthropic institutions are in the business of creating public value. In framing the work of philanthropy more broadly to include the process of public value creation, philanthropic institutions and leaders are challenged to be more strategic not only in their missio...

Several trends are leading to increased and broader involvement of volunteers in social work practice. As a consequence, social workers need to be able to manage volunteers in different settings, based on organizational/program factors and characteristics of the volunteers. Contemporary research on volunteer management can be divided into universal...

Coproduction, or the joint participation of citizens with government in public service delivery, has long interested scholars and practitioners. This article examines the representativeness of citizen coproduction through new, advanced technological means increasingly utilized by local governments: 311 systems. These systems feature a single teleph...

Volunteer centers, also known internationally as ‘volunteer bureaus’ or ‘voluntary action centers’, are ‘community organizations that help to stimulate and coordinate local voluntary action’ (Brudney, 2005, p. 77). Thousands of volunteer centers exist worldwide (International Association for Volunteer Effort, 2009; Bos, 2014), involving millions of...

This article investigates how communications advances affect citizens’ ability to participate in coproduction of government services. The authors analyze service requests made to the City of Boston during a one-year period from 2010 to 2011 and, using geospatial analysis and negative binomial regression, investigate possible disparities by race, ed...

This article explores the limits of public policy as it affects volunteerism in the United States. Our analysis focuses on the potential of the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act (2009), the most sweeping volunteer legislation in U.S. history, to raise the level of volunteering and national service in the United States, particularly among young pe...

Brudney and Meijs (2009) conceive of volunteer energy as a social resource that constitutes the basis for (organizationally based) volunteering. They show that volunteer energy can be compared to a human-made, renewable resource that can be grown and recycled – but likewise one that is subject to misuse and misappropriation that can imperil the vit...

This study examines factors influencing “formal” volunteering (that is, to an organization) and “informal” volunteering (that is, volunteering carried out individually outside of an organizational context) and the relationship between these two activities. We hypothesize that formal and informal volunteering activities are positively interrelated b...

This study began with an effort to obtain data on the economic contribution of the nonprofit sector in a large, metropolitan community to inform policy-makers. Despite the growing interest of policy-makers in the nonprofit sector, and the importance of accurate, reliable, and timely data to make sound public policy decisions and to evaluate their e...

Since the 1980s, public policymakers and contracting agents in the United States have promoted the concept of public-private partnerships (PPPs). These are typically seen as partnerships between the public and business sectors, but research finds that nonprofit intermediary institutions, either created for the purpose or already in existence, are o...

The association between altruistic values, religious values and pro-social behaviour is well documented, though mainly in North America and across disparate demographic groups. However, we currently have no data that focus on the relationships between personal values, religious values and pro-social behaviour across many different countries. Our st...

U ovom su radu analizirani rezultati istraživanja volontiranja studenata Sveučilišta u Zagrebu te Tehničkog i Društvenog veleučilišta u Zagrebu, provedenoga 2006.-2007. godine, a u sklopu međunarodnoga komparativnog istraživanja studenata u 14 zemalja svijeta. Cilj istraživanja bio je prikupiti podatke o različitim vidovima volontiranja (iskustvo,...

This chapter discusses strategies that organizations can use to lay the foundation for an effective volunteer effort. The focus is on service volunteers, people who donate their time to assist other people, or the operations of the host organizations, directly, rather than on policy volunteers, citizens who assume the equally vital role of sitting...

The importance of volunteers and the effects of their donated services on the prospects of clients, organizations, society, and the volunteers themselves have become important matters of discussion and measurement. Volunteer administrators and their host organizations need to be concerned about evaluating volunteer programs to satisfy the informati...

This article investigates the benefits and costs to nonprofit organizations emanating from the adoption of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002). The act was intended to stem financial malfeasance in the for-profit sector; nevertheless the article finds that about half the surveyed nonprofits adopted provisions of the act and experienced effects in proport...

The association between altruistic values, religious values and pro-social behaviour is well documented, though mainly in North America and across disparate demographic groups. However, we currently have no data that focus on the relationships between personal values, religious values and pro-social behaviour across many different countries. Our st...

In a national study of public charities in the United States, we find that some organizations experience little difficulty recruiting volunteers while others report substantial problems. We study which organizations are more likely to report recruitment problems, separating the underlying forces for those problems into two camps. One, which we labe...

Voluntary participation is connected to cultural, political, religious and social contexts. Social and societal factors can provide opportunities, expectations and requirements for voluntary activity, as well as influence the values and norms promoting this. These contexts are especially central in the case of voluntary participation among students...

This study is targeted to understanding the giving of time and money among a specific cohort – university students across 13 countries. It explores predictors of different combinations of giving behaviors: only volunteering, only donating, neither, as compared to doing both. Among the predictors of these four types of giving behavior, we also accou...

Functional theory suggests that people choose activities based on their perception of how well the work matches their personal motives.This process implies that worker motivations vary by activity even when controlling for typical motivational antecedents. Although this perspective is common in the volunteering literature, the public service motiva...

This article evaluates the potential of the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act of 2009 to raise the level of volunteering and national service in the United States, particularly among young people, and its implications for public administration in 2020. The act would increase service-learning opportunities and national service placements substanti...

Programs targeting student volunteering and service learning are aimed at encouraging civic behaviour among young people. This article reports on a large-scale international survey comparing volunteering among university students in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The data revealed high rates of student vo...

Service-learning literature has been dominated by studies from North America with little cross-national comparative work. This article reports on a survey of university students conducted across 14 different countries. The study examines the relationships between service-learning programs (both compulsory and optional) at high school and university...