Nonprofit Sector Knowledge Base Project Research Papers - ARCHIVED

This series of reports is from the Nonprofit Sector Knowledge Base Project. Begun in 1997, the Nonprofit Sector Knowledge Base Project is a multi-year initiative to build a corpus of reliable data and knowledge pertaining to the voluntary sector, its organizations, and the contributory behaviour of Canadians. Its component activities include an inventory of existing data resources, studies to identify the distinctive characteristics and the social dynamics of volunteering and giving of volunteers and charitable donors, participating in generating new data via surveys and case studies, assessing the state of existing information on the voluntary sector in Canada, and strengthening conceptual frameworks that will advance our understanding of the voluntary domain. An essential implicit objective has been to encourage a shift from an orientation to short-term, piecemeal data creation on volunteering toward a longer-term perspective on systematic information development. As of December 2001, 25 research reports had been prepared and others are in preparation. (A list of reports from the project is available on request.)