Complex Relationships: Youth-Serving Community-Based Non-Profits in the Urban Schooling Landscape

Youth-serving community-based educational non-profits support the myriad unmet needs of public school students in underfunded school districts. Through partnerships with public schools for their participating students and reliance on private philanthropy to operate, these organizations sit at the intersection of the public and private sectors. While research shows that these non-profits can provide positive, supplementary spaces, less is known about how their partnerships reveal the impact of the neoliberal turn on their work. This paper investigates the complex relationships that sustain one education non-profit. Drawing on resource dependency theory and a case study model, this paper uses interviews, focus groups, a virtual observation, and document analysis, to examine how a non-profit understands their relationships with their partners schools and private funders. Finding identify four types of complex relationships that reinforce the constantly shifting partnerships that both sustain and limit an educational non-profit.