Outsourcing Government: Boston and the Rise of Public–Private Partnerships

In 1966 and 1967, the U.S. State Department brought delegations from Scandinavia, East Asia, and Central America to one of Boston's poorest, most segregated neighborhoods. There, the foreign delegates toured the Roxbury Multi-Service Center as officials celebrated a new kind of organization that used public funding to deliver goods and services via a private, locally controlled nonprofit organization.¹ Grants from several federal agencies enabled the organization to employ Roxbury residents and offer programs on education, job training, housing, family counseling, and youth activities. On display in Boston was a new method of social welfare provision in the United States: a system of public–private partnership in which the federal government funded and regulated the activities of local nonprofits that deployed programming and resources to urban residents.² This system was forged as much on the ground by community residents and staff at organizations like the Roxbury Multi-Service Center, as in Washington, DC, by policymakers and bureaucrats. Though experimental during the 1960s, federal support of private nonprofit organizations eventually became a permanent feature of American governance over the ensuing decades, which has transformed the modern state and had a profound effect on urban neighborhoods and the people who lived in them.³

The federal funding that supported the Roxbury Multi-Service Center not only reflected a long tradition of public and private involvement in the lives of poor people in the United States but also marked a departure from earlier models with new levels of federal resources, monitoring, and regulation.⁴ My dissertation, Outsourcing Government: Boston and the Rise of Public–Private Partnerships, considers the reasons for and consequences of the growth of federal funding to local nonprofit organizations from its origins under urban renewal in the 1950s through President Clinton's Empowerment Zone program of the 1990s.⁵ It traces the path of federal funding as it moved from initial passage in Congress to federal agencies and lower tiers of government, and into the coffers of nonprofit organizations and underwrote programming, salaries, and rents in urban neighborhoods. It then follows the grant reports, requests, client data, evaluations, and disputes that traveled back to Washington, DC, and informed later iterations of urban and antipoverty policy. This history frames the density of nonprofit organizations in urban neighborhoods today as the product of deliberate policy choices that expanded federal assistance to urban neighborhoods and delivered that aid to private nonprofit partners via decentralized, hidden, and increasingly market-oriented channels.⁶

Over the second half of the twentieth century, policymakers and local residents positioned local nonprofit organizations as responsible for managing the problems of poverty and urban inequality. Proponents in Washington, DC, connected this approach to a mythic history of a robust private charitable sector, championing public–private partnerships as a quintessentially American response to poverty in context of the Cold War, civil rights movement, and urban protest. Proponents on the ground saw new public funding streams as a means of building grassroots power, helping their community, and participating in a political system that excluded many on account of income, race, and gender. From a range of perspectives and political ideologies, these new funding arrangements seemed to have numerous advantages: they affirmed the role of federal aid to municipal governments and to social welfare provision yet also affirmed a need for local control and flexibility; they responded to grassroots protest with grants to private organizations yet vowed to monitor and regulate those entities; they created channels of public investment yet coaxed the philanthropic and corporate sectors to follow alongside; and they generated employment opportunities yet did so at a range of salary levels that remained off the federal payroll. They also created an extensive—if not fragile—infrastructure to address urban poverty that allowed the federal government to take a position of support not responsibility. For all the supposed advantages, whether and how these funding channels improved the lives and neighborhoods of poor people remained uncertain.

The consequences of these public–private partnerships are best seen at the local level, where activists, bureaucrats, and nonprofit staff shaped policy and negotiated...