Amateurs Without Borders: The Projects of Anti-Professional INGOs

• In Event: 575 - Regular Session. Voluntary Organization: Expertise and its Discontents

Abstract

The broad appeal of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) rests on a paradox: they are at once rational organizational actors and expressive outlets for altruism and personal connection across social, economic, and geographic divides. A robust academic literature has observed the professionalization of these groups as part of the formalization of the nonprofit sector and broader blurring of the organizational forms of the state, corporation, and nonprofit. But I show that the bulk of American-based INGOs founded since 1990 (roughly 10,000 groups) are in fact anti-professional. The Americans who launch these organizations typically are middle-class college graduates, but have no training or professional experience in international development. Instead of being shaped by the norms of the professional aid field, these organizations are defined by the personal relationships and skills of the people who found them.
This paper compares the projects of these volunteer-driven GINGOS (grassroots international NGOs) with those of traditional American-based INGOs. I draw on an original database of all known websites for international relief, development, and human rights organizations registered with the IRS in 2011. I use structural topic models—an algorithm-based technique for discerning themes in large bodies of text—to show that GINGOs are less likely than other INGOs to emphasize projects related to political change and more likely to emphasize direct service provision, especially to children. The findings show that grassroots American approaches to aid, now thousands of organizations strong, differ systematically from the approaches of traditional, professionalized INGOs.

Author

• Allison Youatt Schnable, Indiana University