Since 2003, the Center for Civil Society has studied nonprofit leadership and management, grassroots advocacy, nongovernmental organizations, social movements, civil society, social capital, civic engagement, and philanthropy. With a special emphasis on the Southern California region, our various studies

• Map the nonprofit and community sector and civil society institutions more generally.
• Develop theory, policy approaches and management model
• Present the impacts of leadership, social entrepreneurship and organizational behavior.
• Analyze philanthropy and foundation
• Examine relevant developments and policies at local, state, national and international levels.

Our reports and case studies on Southern California’s nonprofit sector are available for free on the Publications page.

Current Research Projects

Human Services Survey
The UCLA Center for Civil Society, with support from the James Irvine Foundation, is conducting a follow-up study of over 600 human service nonprofit organizations in Los Angeles surveyed in 2002.  It will be the most comprehensive, longitudinal picture of the challenges facing nonprofits in Los Angeles that has been done. Using the 2002 baseline data, we will seek to describe changes in terms of financial resources, organizational models, and responses to new patterns of population, poverty, and need.  Results from this survey will help funders, policy makers and leaders of nonprofit organizations better understand what it is like to run nonprofits in today’s environment and what policies and resources may strengthen them. 

Social Entreprises
The social enterprise project seeks to understand how nonprofit human services, which combine social services with work experiences for their clients, balance between the service logic and the business logic. Using a comparative case study approach, the project has been collecting and analyzing data on various social enterprises in Los Angeles.  To read more about this project, please click here.

Legislative Advocacy
This project explores the role of nonprofit organization in advocating for social rights.  Using a series of congressional legislative hearings on welfare reform and homelessness it identifies the interest groups that testified at the hearings and the positions they advocated. It explores the particular frame used by the advocates to justify their position on the proposed legislation and the extent to which the frame promotes social rights vs. personal responsibility.