Public Policy’s Viviana Chiu Sik Wu Earns Prize for Best Nonprofit and Leadership Paper

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Viviana Chiu Sik Wu, assistant professor of public policy, has earned an Editors’ Prize from the editorial board of the journal Nonprofit Management and Leadership and ARNOVA, the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action, for her paper that seeks to better conceptualize the role of community foundations. “Community leadership as multi-dimensional capacities: A conceptual framework and preliminary findings for community foundations” analyzes the annual reports of more than 500 community foundations to gain insights into to their work.

Using mixed methods and computational approaches, Wu studies the roles and capacities of nonprofit, philanthropic and grassroots organizations to advance public problem solving. Her research interests include philanthropy and nonprofit management, inequality and place-based disadvantage, connective action on social media, computational methods and text as data.

Drawing from academic and practitioner literature, Wu’s paper proposes a framework that explores community leadership in six capacities: strategizing, convening, knowledge building, capacity building, partnering and public engagement. It reveals that community foundations tend to specialize in one or a few leadership capacities, but not necessarily all six components. The article contributes to a conceptual foundation and provides preliminary evidence to inform future research on community leadership.

ARNOVA is the top professional organization for research on nonprofit organizations. Wu’s paper was honored at the association’s 52nd annual conference, held Nov. 16-18 in Orlando.