Resurrecting and Appending Identities: The Role of Nonprofits in Managing Stigmatized Identity

Abstract

Homelessness is an issue that impacts more than half a million people in the United States every day. Nonprofits are often on the front lines of efforts to aid individuals without homes. In this study, we focus on an area underexplored in the nonprofit literature, stigma, to explore the nonprofit’s role as a critical catalyst in managing stigma within and among client beneficiaries. Based on our interpretive analysis of interviews and observations of the nonprofit Running for Change (RFC), we delineate how RFC created conditions under which beneficiaries without homes could resurrect former identities and append new identities for themselves as part of the stigma management process. Our work carries implications for prior research on nonprofit organizing related to constituent participation and beneficiary empowerment and opens up new pathways for nonprofit partitioners to think about the agentic capacities of beneficiaries.