Nonprofit Organizations,Community, and Shared Urgency: Lessons from the Arts and Culture Sector

Mainstream arts management and stakeholder research highlights the relationships between nonprofit organizations and community, yet empirical research on how those interactions result in outcomes is limited. This article looks at the stakeholder attribute “urgency” and the impact on and by the stakeholder group “community.” Building on a comparative case study of five cultural organizations and their capital intensive facility projects, our research finds that both new and existing organizations embrace a community-wide process whereby internal and external stakeholders are identified, relationships nurtured, social and emotional bonds strengthened, and shared urgency between community and organization is created towards specific outcomes.