As a major funder of the Third Sector, recent cuts in UK Government spending may require Third Sector Organisations (TSOs) to turn to other sources of funding, such as trading activities and public sector contracts. It has been argued that such changes can lead to economic objectives overwhelming social ones. This study utilises data from the 2008 National Survey of Third Sector Organisations to examine the relationship between the use of these alternative funding sources and organisations’ perceived success in achieving their primary objectives. As predicted by theory, a negative relationship between income from trading activities and achievement of objectives is found. Interestingly public sector contracts do not show a significant link with achievement of objectives. Social enterprise should therefore not be seen as an unqualified panacea for difficulties in social welfare provision in the UK, but public sector contracts need not necessarily lead to a loss of those elements that make the Third Sector provision attractive.

The long-term performance of NPOs is based on their ability to link and maximize social value as defined in their mission. This involves legitimacy obtained from stakeholders influenced by and influencing NPO activities, and their operational capacity or economic efficiency. Thus, NPOs have to utilize multiple level accountability systems which should be compatible with their multiple objectives and stakeholders’ claims. The accountability system of an NPO should focus on its operational capacity, because in order to maximize its efficiency, an NPO has to measure its resource use, cost structure, and financial structure. Legitimacy obtained from stakeholders is also integral. If an organization is considered a social contract between multiple stakeholders, it has to consider the social economic effects of its activities and it has the duty to account for them. However, since the mission of an NPO is to create and distribute social value to a certain specific group, its social value creation has the most important role and an NPO should measure the social value it has created. This article analyzes the accountability system of a specific type of Italian NPO called Centri di Servizio per il Volontariato (CSVs)—namely centers which provide services for voluntary associations. The aim of the research is to verify if the accountability system adopted by CSVs satisfies their need for multiple level information (operational, legitimacy, and social value) and accomplishes their stakeholder claims, and to determine its impact on the definition and implementation of their strategy and on their long-term performance. The research was carried out using the action research model, and the findings are based on the analysis of a sample of 64 CSVs situated throughout Italy.

This paper describes an exploratory study aiming to investigate the existence of distinct groups of social enterprises according to organisational identity dimensions. A taxonomy was developed with a two-step cluster analysis based on the importance attached to both social and market identity by 111 social enterprises acting in Portugal. ANOVA and Chi-square analyses were employed to investigate differences between groups. The taxonomy provides a parsimonious description of four groups of social enterprises and suggests the existence of a trade-off between the involvement and participation of clients/beneficiaries and the geographical scope. The combination of high levels of social identity and market identity is associated with more satisfactory levels of social and financial performance. However, giving prevalence to the social or the market identity seems to lead to lower levels of financial and social performance, respectively.

Public Humanities projects notoriously begin with the bootstrapping commitment of one or two long-suffering and visionary individuals. If they can make it past the turbulent narrows of their beginnings, they often only endure through unrecognized and little-rewarded labor. Gatherings of public humanists can be exercises in commiseration. When you determine that you have enough funding to last one more year, celebration is in order. Such travails naturally lead to the question of how public humanities programs can move beyond being nice extras to become more central to the concerns of our home institutions. How, in short, can the work of public humanists be institutionalized and become part of the everyday humdrum of academic life rather than the desperate scrabbling of the righteous, committed, frantic, and overtired?

This paper traces discourse and practices among Jewish communal leaders in Western Europe and the United States regarding the need for Jewish missions to China and Ethiopia. Though thousands of miles apart, China and Ethiopia became closely entwined in their racial imagination. Beginning in the 1840s, the Jewish international press depicted both as biblical lost tribes, languishing in isolation and ignorance, and in need of a guiding hand with the mounting threat of Christian missionizing. Jewish communal leaders began to call for Jewish missions in the 1850s, and they looked to contemporary scientific, evangelical, and civilizing missions as models, merging elements from all three. Throughout the 1860s, in debates over who should lead a Jewish mission, three different types surfaced: an explorer, rabbinic emissary, and Orientalist. Each of these reframed prophetic calls for the return of the lost tribes within a modern scientific and imperial project. Drawing on the work of Sylvia Wynter, I argue that these communities in China and Ethiopia came to serve as boundary markers, demarcating the outer limits of the Jewish world, of Jewishness, and Judaism as it became increasingly circumscribed through theological, behavioral, and racial norms. Not only does this upend assumptions about Jewish solidarity and internationalism, but it also points to how missionizing was deployed by minoritized communities in the nineteenth century.

There has always been a debate about the location and role of women during the persecution of Christians under Mwanga II’s first reign as Kabaka of Buganda. Kabaka is the Luganda equivalent of the English word king. The debate is partly fueled by a total absence of women from the pictures of Ugandans historically referred to as the Uganda Martyrs. This paper uses archival research to tell the story of an African woman who, in her adult life, married two devout Anglicans, in whose lives she was actively involved, laying a foundation for Uganda’s Anglican tradition. Evidence shows the first Anglican baptism, teacher and burial in Uganda are traced to her first marriage, which ended in early 1884 with the death of her husband from smallpox. Nakimu Nalwanga Sarah would have been the first martyr if not for the timely discovery that she was Mwanga’s relative. Still, as a punishment, she was ordered to witness the cruel burning of the first martyrs on January 31, 1885. She married again in a marriage that produced Uganda’s first catechist, deacon and priest. Her second husband was part of a team that completed the translation of the first Luganda Bible in 1895.

Pope Francis's has described his vision for a synodal Church, not simply as a once off programme of renewal, but as God's desire for the Church of the third millennium. As such, it aims to concretise the ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council, making the Church today more manifestly one of communion, participation, and mission. It differs from previous synods and Councils in history in that it more directly invites and involves all the baptised in a direct process of listening and discernment to the voice of the Holy Spirit. This paper aims to understand from a theological perspective how listening will work in a synodal Church, by exploring firstly what we mean by the ecclesiology of communion from the Council. Such an ecclesiology, manifesting the equal dignity of the faithful in Christ, will ground listening at the level of participation in God as well as acknowledging the gift of infallibility given to the whole Church. It means calling on the Holy Spirit to help discern how and where, the apostolic deposit of faith has been received by members of the body. It also explores what we mean by listening to the sensus fidei of the whole body and how the authority of laity and hierarchy operate both in united but distinct ways within a synodal process grounded in communion ecclesiology. Overall, such listening is to be done carefully for the sake of the Church's mission as the sacrament of salvation to the world.

The aim of this paper is to appreciate more deeply the ecclesiological and missiological perspectives of synodality and thus to suggest that synodality is not something new or created as the whim of Pope Francis but that it is rooted in the Church's ecclesiology from its earliest times and as such finds an expression in the Church's life and mission. In this paper I will demonstrate that the Church has always been a synodal Church and what we are witnessing now is a valid theological development which takes us into the third millennium. I wish to set my examination of synodality in its ecclesiological and missiological perspectives and thereby posit that these two branches or routes lead into the one synodal pathway. I will show that as we examine the ecclesiological perspective of synodality we shall see that it is set in a renewed sense of mission. For this, we will need to co-operate with God and each other, as Pope Francis hinted at in 2015.