Bouncing Forward: Exploring Nonprofit Resilience Through Emergency Management

Abstract

Resilience is often associated with the ability to recover quickly or bounce back. However, often, recovery does not look like a return to "normal" or homeostasis. Nonprofit organizations are essential to providing services in response to emergencies, and their involvement builds communities' capacity to deal with future disasters. Nonprofit organizations' response to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has grown almost as quickly as the news and fear of the virus spreading across all continents. The pandemic challenged nonprofits' limits, management, and preparedness everywhere, often exposing limited capacity to bounce back while helping the populations and communities they serve. This dissertation research focuses on two major exploratory questions by utilizing a systematic literature review and a case study on emergency management nonprofits. First, what is resilience, and how can we measure it? and second, what does organizational resilience look like in nonprofit organizations? The systematic literature review and theoretical background of interdisciplinary literature establish this study of resilience from the perspective of nonprofit organizations. The literature is used to develop a framework in which resilience is a process, not a characteristic of an individual, organization, or community. By conducting a case study on emergency management nonprofits, this dissertation examines how the experience and response to the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the organization through primary data collection and interviews with nonprofit practitioners. Risk avoidance, risk management, and the control of risk, with the capacity to cope resiliently, are used to build a relationship between resilience and emergency management (Wildavsky,1998). The findings of this study have direct implications for how future scholarship defines resilience and stresses the importance of actively including and involving practitioners in the field. The COVID-19 pandemic provides a unique situation as risk and perceived risk were completely unknown. Nonprofit organizations acted in the best way they knew how and to their capacity. The findings also include a conversation on mission pivot, the short-term and long-term impacts of a disaster like COVID-19, and participants' reactions to COVID-19.