Critical Theories of the Nonprofit Sector: Reframing Nonprofit/Community Leadership for Democracy, Inclusion, and Social Change

This graduate course is designed for students interested in nonprofit management. The curriculum asks us to critically engage our past and present to collectively impact our communities through praxis and the continuous process of reflection and action (Bushandat, 2018). We will approach this aim by re-examining nonprofit and community organizations from a critical theory perspective integrating social justice topics as both the process and objective of ending oppression at the individual, institutional, and systemic levels. We will utilize both normative narratives in nonprofit literature as well as critical and contemporary critiques of the sector to better understand the challenges nonprofit and community leaders face in working across organizations, jurisdictions, and sectors to address entrenched social, economic, and political problems. Nonprofits are sites of struggle where those who wish to “do good” must grapple with our own feelings around sexism, racism, and other forms of oppression (Feit and Sandberg, 2022). Therefore, this course also has a critical leadership component where we will engage in self-reflection to challenge ourselves to confront, deconstruct, and reconstruct our own bias and presuppositions in relation to community leadership. We will examine the challenges nonprofit leaders face from the assumption that a collaborative, systems-based approach to leadership is essential for sustained success towards social justice aims.