Other People’s Children: How Diversity Without Inclusion Impacts Community Support for Public Schools

Organizations pursuing activities that advance the public interest often require support from their local communities, but such support may be harder to come by in more racially diverse communities. In this study, we argue that this negative effect of racial diversity on support for organizations serving the public interest will be weaker the more inclusive the community, especially where community inclusion is accompanied by shared values among members of different groups and where the organizations themselves are racially representative. We test and find support for these predictions by looking at one specific type of public service organization: public schools in the United States. Specifically, we find that community support for public schools—both generally in terms of local spending per pupil and specifically as the bond amounts residents vote to approve—is negatively associated with racial diversity within a school district, but this negative relation only holds for less inclusive communities where members of different groups are less likely to live close to each other or to have social ties with each other. We further find that this moderating effect of community inclusion is complemented by shared values and organizational representativeness, so that diversity has the most negative effect in less inclusive communities where members of different races differ in their political beliefs and schools are relatively segregated, and no significant effect in inclusive communities with shared values and integrated schools. Our study sheds new light on the conditions under which organizations seeking to address grand challenges can benefit from strong community support. Funding: This work was supported by the Carlson School of Management [DEI Research Grant] and the Responsible Research in Business and Management [Dare to Care Scholorship]. Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2024.19351 .