Nonprofit Neighborhoods: An Urban History of Inequality and the American State

"Claire Dunning's study focuses on the relationship between state power and nonprofit organizations in the postwar era and on the effects their dynamics have had on urban neighborhoods. She reveals how public-private partnerships positioned nonprofits as surprisingly powerful intermediaries between the state and individuals. These nonprofits took the lead in combatting urban poverty-and yet, counterintuitively, the intended devolution and decentralization of power from the state to the community level made the welfare state both larger and more impersonal and financialized. Thus, even as participation in antipoverty programs increased, the structural forces behind urban poverty became only more entrenched"--