Collaborative Research: FW-HTF-R: Mobilizing Nonprofit Resources and Talents with a Community Tool for Purpose-Driven Work

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY

Investigators

Abstract

This project is iteratively designing, assessing, and refining a community tool that provides a new way for nonprofits to obtain the necessary resources and talents to support their purpose-driven needs. This platform can increase the collective impact of small-to-medium nonprofit organizations that provide critical social and human services, particularly for historically marginalized and low-income communities. Partnering withnnonprofits, this project integrates the experiences of impacted workers into the iterative design and assessment process. Through a collective impact framework, the project aims to ensure that the platform remains a community tool that honors the time and talents of nonprofit workers and enables nonprofit organizations to share talents and resources in an inclusive, scalable, and fair way over time. The research team is measuring its transformative impact on workers, nonprofits, and the community and is studying nonprofit workers’ inter-workplace mobility experiences, pursuit of meaningful work, and sense of belonging and purpose. This project convergently brings together expertise in domains including mechanism design, community engagement, collective impact, applied ethics, nonprofit leadership, combinatorial optimization, and law. New mechanisms are being developed to conduct recurrent multilateral combinatorial exchanges, enabling nonprofits to temporarily acquire new resources by mobilizing their own in conjunction with stored credits. These are being informed by rigorous rules of engagement that are inclusive, fair, and scalable. Each recurrent episode features an exchange of offered resources, using combinatorial optimization to reallocate both resources and credits in a way that maximizes collective community value. Rules of engagement are being co-designed using community-based participatory action research. An inclusive development process iteratively integrates both quantitative technology feedback and qualitative feedback reflecting the experiences of mobilized workers and nonprofit leaders. In addition, a framework is being developed to measure the transformative impact and to illuminate the influence on workers’ sense of belonging and purpose, as well as workers’ confidence in their roles as change agents and their pursuit of meaningful work; the extent to which nonprofits’ capabilities for organizational priority-setting and planning are transformed; and how enabled inter-workplace mobility can lead to new professional development opportunities and talent retention in the local community. Finally, this project is exploring the potential for technology to serve as the backbone support for the theoretical framework and engender further cooperation within the nonprofit community. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.