Nonprofit Neighborhoods

Please join us for the second lecture in our Spring 2025 series "Poverty in the Twentieth Century" at the German Historical Institute Washington.

Claire Dunning: Nonprofit Neighborhoods - How the US Privatized the Fight against Urban Inequality
Beginning in the 1960s, US federal policy began to increasingly partner with neighborhood-based nonprofit organizations to manage the growing poverty, segregation, and activism of the postwar city. The result has been a private, partial, and invisible welfare state. This talk considers the reasons to cheer the entry of neighborhood-based organizations in local governance, and confronts how policy choices helped perpetuate racial and economic inequalities. As cities continue to face profound challenges, it is time to interrogate the solutions we have turned to for decades, understand their origins in the past, and grapple with their consequences in the present.
Claire Dunning is a historian of the United States in the twentieth-century and is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her work focuses on the histories of poverty, inequality, governance, and nonprofit organizations in American cities. She is the author of Nonprofit Neighborhoods: An Urban History of Inequality and the American State (University of Chicago Press, 2022), and currently at work on a new book on philanthropy and housing policy after 1968. Dunning received her Ph.D. in history from Harvard University and then held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford University.
About the Spring 2025 Lecture Series "Poverty in the Twentieth Century" at the German Historical Institute Washington:

In his bestseller Poverty, by America, the Pulitzer Prize–winning sociologist Matthew Desmond highlights systemic reasons for the persistence of widespread poverty in the United States. Desmond argues that it is in the interest of many affluent Americans to keep some people poor and calls for a social movement to abolish poverty. The GHI’s 2025 Spring Lecture Series addresses the ongoing debates about the causes and persistence of poverty with a historical perspective, featuring four lectures that will trace how European and North American societies treated poverty over the course of the twentieth century.

Throughout the twentieth century, poverty remained a social concern, a political talking point, and an often devastating lived reality. Industrialization had given rise to precarious urban living conditions well before the turn of the century, but even after crises like the Great Depression and the devastation of the World Wars were overcome, the economic deprivation of significant parts of the population endured. In the propaganda battles of the Cold War, economic hardships were identified as products of either socialism or capitalism. Up to today, poverty challenges the legitimacy of political leadership by contradicting their promises of prosperity.

These talks will feature leading scholars offering new perspectives on precarious living in modern society. Going beyond established narratives, the lectures highlight how migration decisions, non-profit organizations, social science research, and the financial industry have all shaped the crises and opportunities those living on the economic margins have faced.
Doors will open at 6:00 pm and will close promptly at 6:30 pm with the beginning of the lecture. Access to the lecture after doors close will be at descretion of the GHI. Registration does not guarantee access once event capacity is reached.

The lecture will be recorded and made available for viewing.

Organized by Raphael Rössel and Atiba Pertilla of the in cooperation with the

Please be aware that this event or conference, or a portion of it, could be live-streamed to registered participants watching remotely via ZOOM or a similar platform, or could be videorecorded for publication. By participating in-person, you understand that it is possible that you could be seen by registered participants watching the stream, that your comments may be seen/heard by participants watching the stream, and that a recording of the live stream could be made available on a video sharing service such Vimeo.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

German Historical Institute, 1607 New Hampshire Ave NW, Washington, D.C, United States