Introduction

This book is based on an important but complicated question: How have nonprofit human service organizations sustained themselves over time? This question is the focus of this volume as it documents the organizational histories of pioneering nonprofits. These nonprofits are defined as human service organizations that have developed a mission that is unique to their local community and sustained themselves over more than twenty years of operations. In essence, pioneering refers to both a unique mission and significant longevity, in one case 157 years. The organizations were selected from a pool of nonprofit human service organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California (USA) based, in part, on their proximity and access to the recently established (2006) Mack Center on Nonprofit Management in the Human Services at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Social Welfare.