Conference papers

Studies of collaboration by non-profit scholars have generally focused on particular types of collaborative behaviour, such as mergers, alliances, co-location and government / non-profit partnerships. This paper builds on secondary analysis of data derived from 70 IVAR projects conducted over a ten year period to draw out organisational challenges faced by nonprofits engaging in collaborative behaviour and the responses that were made to those challenges.

Beyond money: A study of funding plus in the UK was launched at a debate event entitled, ‘Funders should stick to making grants’.

Margaret Harris (IVAR's academic adviser) presented a paper to the Annual Meeting of ARNOVA (2010) on business and the voluntary sector.

Download the paper - Business and the voluntary sector: Foundations for a research agenda

Authored by Mike Aiken, Leila Baker and Saima Tarapdar, this paper presents findings from IVAR-led research, conducted by community researchers in seven English locations, which examined the contribution of Community Matters members to formal and informal political participation.

Authored by Mike Aiken, Marilyn Taylor and Rebecca Moran, this paper draws on research which examined community organisations owning and controlling assets in the UK.

Margaret Harris, IVAR’s Academic Adviser, gave a keynote address to the 3rd Nordic Conference on Church Leadership and Organizational Change in Finland in September 2011. Her paper was entitled ‘Seeing churches as voluntary associations: Category error or insight for practice?’ 

Ben Cairns (Director, IVAR) participated in a colloquy at the Annual Meeting of ARNOVA 2010. Ben's presentation focused on how research findings and theoretical insights form academics can broaden practitioners' repertoire of possible responses to practical problems.  

Download the paper - Putting theory into practice 

Co-authored by Leila Baker (Senior Research Officer, IVAR) and Lucy Heady (Head of Measurement, New Philanthropy Capital), this paper describes a collaborative action research project about the impact of community organisations that are multi-purpose.

Authored by Dr Mike Aiken (Head of Research, IVAR), this paper examines some of the theoretical and methodological challenges which lie behind understanding and assessing impact for multi-purpose community organisations. The paper looks at terminological issues and the use of words like ‘impact’, ‘outcomes’ and ‘effects’ when talking about the differences an organisation makes to an individual, to a group of individuals or to a whole community.

Co-authored by Eliza Buckley (Research Officer, IVAR) and Gordon McCullough (Deputy Director, IVAR), this paper draws on a recent study of Compact disputes and considers a situation where partnerships are 'regulated' and more formally codified – for example, in the quasi-legal dimensions of disputes. Paradoxically, the existence of a formal dispute could be constructed either as a failure of collaboration or as a sign of active contestation.