Beyond Goodwill: Race, Resources, and Volunteer Reliance In Nonprofit Organizations

Background and Purpose:
Volunteer labor is often portrayed as a flexible and widely available resource that nonprofit organizations can mobilize to supplement limited financial capacity. From a resource dependence perspective, organizations facing constraints in formal funding may rely on volunteers to sustain service delivery. However, research on volunteer management suggests that recruiting, coordinating, and retaining volunteers requires organizational infrastructure and access to social networks. These perspectives raise questions about whether volunteer labor is equally accessible across nonprofit organizations. One factor that may shape nonprofits’ access to resources is race at the organizational level. Nonprofits vary in the racial composition of leadership, governance, workforce, and clientele, and these differences may influence their access to both formal and informal networks through which resources flow. While prior research documents racial disparities in nonprofits’ access to financial resources, less is known about whether similar inequalities exist in access to volunteer labor. This study examines how the racial structure of nonprofit organizations relates to their reliance on volunteers. Specifically, it asks how these dimensions of racial structure relate to reliance on regular volunteers, episodic volunteers, AmeriCorps volunteers, and the perceived importance of volunteers to nonprofit operations.

Methods:
This study uses data from the 2024 National Survey of Nonprofit Trends and Impacts, a nationally representative survey of operating 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations in the United States. The analytic sample includes 4,056 nonprofits, with survey weights applied to ensure national representativeness. Volunteer reliance is measured using four indicators: number of regular volunteers, number of episodic volunteers, participation in the AmeriCorps program, and perceived importance of volunteers. Volunteer counts are log-transformed due to right-skewed distributions. Racial structure is measured through organizational characteristics including CEO race, board chair race, proportion of non-white board members and staff, and whether the organization serves communities of color. Multivariate regression analyses examine relationships between racial structure and volunteer reliance. Ordinary least squares models are used for volunteer counts and perceived importance, and logistic regression models analyze participation in AmeriCorps. Models control for organizational resources, funding sources, revenue, organizational size, region, and urban location.

Results:
Findings reveal systematic differences in volunteer reliance associated with nonprofits’ racial structure. Organizations with greater representation of people of color in executive leadership, board leadership, board composition, and staff composition report fewer regular and episodic volunteers and place less strategic importance on volunteer labor, net of organizational resources, size, and geographic context. In contrast, organizations serving communities of color are significantly more likely to participate in AmeriCorps, a formal volunteer program embedded in institutional networks.

Conclusions and Implications:
These findings challenge the assumption that volunteer labor functions as an easily accessible substitute for limited financial resources. Instead, access to volunteer networks appears unevenly distributed across the nonprofit sector and shaped by organizational racial structure. The results highlight the importance of distinguishing between informal volunteer networks and formal volunteer programs, which operate under different institutional conditions. Efforts to expand volunteer engagement should consider structural inequalities affecting nonprofits serving communities of color and explore strategies to broaden equitable access to volunteer networks.