| In the year 2000, the nonprofit sector grew by six percent, with more than 80 thousand new tax-exempt organizations incorporated in the U.S. alone. New business starts, whether structured for profit or not, fuel the economy with additional jobs, fresh innovation and increased resources, each started by an entrepreneur, a founder. The past two decades have produced volumes of research on small business entrepreneurs. Yet only recently have nonprofit founders become the focus of academic attention. The philanthropic field, which so values nonprofit organizations, is nearly devoid of positive literature about the nonprofit founding experience or the specific elements that contribute to a founder's success. Instead, the existing literature, mostly written by non-founders, describes founder-syndrome, founderitis , or the founder-trap. The “syndrome” language, written from outside the founder experience, is simply not helpful to nonprofit founders. My study instead, takes an “inside” perspective to the subject of nonprofit founders, capturing their lived experience in the founders' own words. My primary research consists of qualitative interviews with a purposeful sample of 13, U.S. arts founders. To this same sample, I administered a brief quantitative survey to compare their responses with 12 classic entrepreneurial traits found in small business entrepreneurs. The triangulation of my research data yielded 14 entrepreneurial behavior patterns of nonprofit founders, including a positive correlation between the trait-based characteristics and early influences of those nonprofit founders in my study and other entrepreneurs. The findings from my research suggest at least six potential field-wide applications, some of which require future research, while others could be developed immediately into educational products and services. |
