The NGO Care and Food Aid From America 1945-80: Showered With Kindness'? by Heike Wieters

Author:Heike Wieters [Wieters, Heike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, International Relations, General
ISBN: 9781526129727
Google: _uKcwwEACAAJ
Goodreads: 45990611
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2019-11-28T11:38:53+00:00

6

From American relief to international development cooperation (1961–68)

Expanding the firm – the promise and peril of scale

[F]ew business and political leaders had a truly global outlook, one of a world without significant borders, until the 1980s. […] Few understood how treating the world as a single marketplace both for sourcing and producing goods and for serving customers was transforming the marketplace.1

It is imperative that we may move even faster toward integrating our feeding program with our developmental goals. […] Failure to do so will result in the loss of our pre-eminent position among the voluntary agencies, but more important, we will have failed to respond effectively to one of the world’s most pressing and basic needs.2

There is more to organizational success than financial stability and the bottom line, a finding that is particularly true for non-profit enterprises. However, non-profit legitimacy is as much dependent on sound operations and financial arguments as it is on the accomplishment of societal goals and the fulfillment of a particular mission. Given the primacy of the non-distributional constraint in non-profit enterprises, organizational growth or expansion is unlikely to be driven solely by the profit interests of owners or shareholders.3 Hence, other reasons and stakeholder interests have to be put forward to explain non-profit growth and organizational expansion.4 Regarding CARE, it could be argued on a general level that agendas like fighting hunger or providing humanitarian aid actually demand large-scale operations, as enormous tasks require corresponding institutional solutions.5 However, this argument ignores the fact that only a handful of private American humanitarian players actually developed into particularly large organizations, whereas the majority of private voluntary agencies did not. Throughout most of the 1950s, membership numbers in the ACVAFS stagnated or even declined. Parallel to this trend, a select number of humanitarian agencies like CARE, Catholic Relief Services, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the American Friends Service Committee, Lutheran World Relief and Church World Service expanded their operations quite dramatically. This concentration process was triggered both by external structural factors – such as institutional ties and networks, historical donor preferences, and government funding guidelines that privileged large agencies – and internal organizational factors, namely professionalization, increased organizational effectiveness, innovative programming, and successful marketing.6

At the start of the 1960s, however, the relatively comfortable position enjoyed by these “traditional” agencies was challenged, as new players entered the scene. The overall number of members in the ACVAFS increased from roughly 60 in 1960 to 80 in 1969, with a visible emphasis on new specialized agencies working in fields like healthcare, education, and technical assistance.7 Other agencies were founded that did not bother to become members of the ACVAFS at all. In contrast to the traditional agencies in the food relief field, these new agencies concentrated on the provision of technical expertise and special development projects and financed their operations via private and public grants. Without a relevant constituency of private donors and devoid of a large organizational infrastructure (making them less dependent on the continual influx of income), these

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