Customer Reviews

On Being Nonprofit: A Conceptual and Policy Primer

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This book is brilliant. It is thorough in its analysis yet not repetitive or overly analytical. I am a graduate student taking my first nonprofit class and bought this book for my midterm project. In its compact 181 pages the book covers everything we have covered in class and more. The author brilliantly presents both sides of every issues and refrains from asserting anyone one viewpoint. I absolutely loved it and would recommend it to anyone involved in or interested in the nonprofit sector. In fact I suggested to my professor that it be included as a required text for his class because none of our assigned texts can touch this.

This is a very good book that is weak on political theory. The book is very readable and I used it with success in my class of upper level undergraduates at a strong undergraduate college. They liked it, found it easy to understand and digest, and it served my needs in terms of explaining what nonprofit organizations are to an audience that had not thought about them before. The book reads as though Frumkin taught this material many times when he was at the Kennedy School and then decided to write down his teaching notes. That's probably why it such a good teaching book. But the book is written from the standpoint of neoclassical economics and the economic theory of nonprofits even though it is written as political theory. The book mostly leaves out political economy, pluralist theory, ideas about social capital, and the ways all of these contribute to shaping nonprofits and the nonprofit sector. Ultimately that caused me to give up on the book as a text for my course.