Climate Change and the Voluntary Sector: An Introduction

This article is a comprehensive empirical overview of environmental protection and conservation nonprofits’ discourse on social media. To what extent have these nonprofits framed climate change in their public discourse and how has it evolved over time? How do organizational characteristics and resources affect their social media behavior? To address our research questions, we use machine learning with texts—specifically topic modeling—to track the activity of 120 environmental nonprofits during a 14-year time span on X, formerly known as Twitter. Our analysis of more than 1.3 million tweets shows that climate change, although not closely aligned with the missions for more than half of the top tweeting organizations included in our sample, has consistently been a prevalent priority issue on their social media agendas for more than a decade. This heightened attention to climate change discourse by the environmental nonprofit sector denotes their uniform efforts to inspire government for climate action.

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Empirical Mapping of Environmental Protection and Conservation Nonprofit Discourse on Social Media

Ter-Mkrtchyan,

Taylor

2023

“…This article assesses an organizing question of this special issue and associated symposium: To what extent are environmental organizations focused on climate change? (Gazley & Prakash, 2021). In addressing this question, we broadly define environmental organizations as any registered nonprofit for whom environment protection or nature conservation is a primary organization purpose.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Characteristics of Large Environmental Nonprofits That Identify Climate Change and Social Justice as Focal Concerns

Johnson

Coma

Castonguay

2023

This article examines the uptake of social justice and climate change as focal issues among the largest U.S. environmental nonprofits. We use 2016 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) filings to identify 5,413 large environmental nonprofits of which 8% attend to issues of climate and 10% to issues of social justice. Larger organizations are more likely to attend to issues of climate change and social justice, as are groups founded more recently. Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling of organizational mission statements and descriptions of major activities is used to assign groups to six distinct issue categories. Results highlight the divide between wildlife groups that are decidedly unlikely to attend to issues of either climate or justice, and the rest of the national environmental movement. Energy and natural resource groups, while strongly vested in climate issues, rarely attend to social justice. These findings have clear implications for climate and justice advocates seeking change in the environmental advocacy sector.

Leading Volunteers Effectively: Development and Preliminary Validation of the Volunteer Leader Behavior Scale

Tsai,

Newstead,

Lewis

et al. 2024

Volunteers are integral to civic and social life, and leadership is integral to keeping volunteers satisfied and committed. However, volunteer leadership research is hindered by the dispersion of leadership theories and the absence of a specialized leader behavior assessment tool. To address this, we developed and validated a four-dimensional scale for evaluating the behaviors of leaders of volunteers. Using confirmatory factor analyses, we confirmed a four-factor, hierarchical model in an Australian emergency volunteer sample. Concurrent validity was confirmed in relation to satisfaction with leadership, overall satisfaction with volunteering experience, and affective organizational commitment. Further details of quantitative studies for scale evaluation are provided. This study provides researchers and practitioners with a valid and reliable instrument to assess different aspects of effective leader behaviors within the volunteering context. Implications, limitations, and future research directions are discussed.