PONPO celebrates 20th anniversary with conference

Twenty years after its founding, the Program on Non-Profit Organizations (PONPO) at Yale, as well as the organizations that it studies, have come a long way.

"When PONPO started its work two decades ago, we were still trying to figure out what the term 'nonprofit' meant and whether the voluntary associations, tax-exempt organizations, religious bodies, and other non-governmental entities constituted a distinct and coherent institutional sector," notes PONPO director Peter Dobkin Hall. "Today -- with privatization and welfare reform shifting essential services from government to secular and religious nonprofits -- there can be no doubting either their reality or their significance."

One indicator of the growing significance of nonprofits, Hall says, is the fact that more than 200 colleges and universities now offer courses and degrees in a field in which, 20 years ago, Yale stood alone.

Another sign of the rising significance of nonprofit organizations, says Hall, was the recent invitation he received to compile a chapter on these organizations and their activities for the forthcoming Millennial Edition of "Historical Statistics of the United States." Published roughly every 20 years since 1949, "Historical Statistics" is a supplement to the annual "Statistical Abstract of the United States" of the U.S. Department of Commerce. The Millenial Edition of that volume -- which is being published by the Cambridge University Press -- is expected to appear early in 2000.

"That the authoritative statistical reference work on American institutions, which had never before considered secular or religious nonprofits worthy of attention, has turned to PONPO for this task is a real compliment to the efforts of faculty, students, and visiting scholars who have worked at Yale over the past two decades to map the dimensions of this centrally important, but largely unknown domain," Hall says.

To celebrate its 20th anniversary, PONPO -- which recently relocated from the Institution of Social and Policy Studies to the Divinity School -- will host a symposium Friday-Sunday, Dec. 11-13. The event will bring together scholars from across the nation who are studying the quantitative dimensions of voluntary, nonprofit and religious entities and activities.

Over the course of two and a half days, Hall and historian and statistician Colin B. Burke of the University of Maryland, who coedited the "Millenial Edition" chapter, will share their findings with such leading experts on civic life, organizations and religion as Harvard's Sidney Verba and Theda Skocpol; Princeton's Robert Wuthnow, Paul DiMaggio and Julian Wolpert; Roger Finke, founder of the American Religion Data Archive; and researchers from the Urban Institute's National Center on Charitable Statistics and the American Association of Fund Raising Counsel.

The conference is invitation-only. Yale students and faculty interested in participating in working sessions of the event should contact PONPO at 432-6297 or ponpo@yale.edu. Datasets for the chapter can be accessed online at: http://research.umbc.edu/burke/~hsus.html.

The compilation of the chapter and the forthcoming conference were made possible through the support of the Ford Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, Inc., the Nonprofit Sector Research Fund of the Aspen Institute, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and Yale's Institution for Social and Policy Studies.