From Charity to Commerce: Bondholders, Women's Auxiliaries, and Community Health Care in Arizona

Abstract

summary: This article contrasts women's auxiliaries as volunteers and fundraisers at a voluntary sanatorium and a community hospital in metropolitan Phoenix. Their experience highlights the rising importance of private investors in nonprofit health care. Nonprofit community hospitals depended on volunteer labor from women's auxiliaries to keep their doors open in the mid-twentieth-century United States. However, their position became subordinate to financial demands from bondholders—these (and other) financial influences eroded the social capital created by charitable labor. At Maryvale Hospital, one of the "eight-percenter" mortgage bond hospitals built across the Sun Belt during the early sixties, bondholders assumed much of the fundraising and advocacy activities reserved for women's auxiliaries. Once bondholders assumed the duties of women's auxiliaries, their profitability became the determinant for success in nonprofit health care. Their rise reflects a shift from the social capital associated with charitable volunteers to the bond markets necessary for modern metropolitan development.