Balancing Trust and Accountability: Charities, Regulators, and Society

As societies, we struggle to find the balance between encouraging a vibrant democracy and widening fractures between groups and opinions. Civil society plays a very large role in representing such differing opinions and needs, particularly operating charities and foundations. However, public trust in charities has decreased over recent years in many countries, as has public opinion of government Meanwhile, regulation and the press for accountability in the charitable sector is increasing Why are public-serving organizations trusted so little? This project utilizes four unique country contexts (Canada, the U.K., Switzerland, and the U.S.) to map and understand cross-sector opinions related to trust and accountability. Though these four countries have much in common (including the separation of operating charities and foundations into independent tax-exempt forms), there is significant variation in regulatory approach, interpersonal trust, and popular sentiment toward public-serving institutions. This effort focuses on the perceptions of four audiences toward each other: operating charities, foundations, charity regulators, and the public. We plan to accomplish the study in two phases. In the first phase, the four country teams will conduct an extensive document review to create historical-institutional profiles of each country in the study. This will include not only the scope of the nonprofit sector (as expertly done by Salamon), but also additional information on socio-cultural norms such as institutional trust toward the nonprofit, private, and public sectors. Additionally, the teams will conduct both inter- and intra-country studies using existing public datasets to initially test and expand on the country profiles. These datasets will include the World Values Survey, and other datasets uncovered in the document review. In the second phase, the teams will convene focus groups to gather novel data. These focus groups will represent the four audiences (operating charities, foundations, charity regulators, and the public), with discussion regarding the perceptions of themselves, the other audiences, trust, and the role of regulation. Since individual perspectives and the interaction of people around the topics are both of interest, focus groups are the appropriate methodological approach. Analysis will begin with single-audience groups, but later groups will include mixed audiences.