In the majority of my work, I ask some variant of the following question: how do human service organizations set the stage more or less successfully for service seekers to overcome difficult life circumstances? The circumstances I am most interested in are homelessness and housing insecurity, deep poverty, and drug addiction.

Nonprofit Organizations and American Homelessness

My dissertation project advances recent efforts by sociologists to better understand how antipoverty organizations affect poverty. It focuses on a particularly intractable manifestation of poverty in the United States—homelessness—and a particularly prominent class of antipoverty organization—nonprofits. Since nonprofits today hold much of the responsibility for delivering emergency shelter and low-cost housing services to homeless and housing-insecure individuals, I conceive of their executive staff members as ‘supply-side’ actors and argue that understanding the worldviews that guide their programmatic decision making can help explain the dynamics of American homelessness. I use several sources of qualitative data, including more than 150 interviews with leaders from over 80 nonprofits, spanning all 50 states, and an original corpus of texts (mission statements, vision statements, value statements, timelines, and histories) gathered from the public websites of hundreds of nonprofits.

Sobriety-Oriented Organizations and Drug Addiction

Another project draws on participant-observation research at a Boston-area nonprofit. I spent the majority of the research period with individuals from a leased-housing program the nonprofit administered, which provided subsidized apartments to individuals who were trying to overcome drug addictions and had histories of homelessness. This project has yielded two papers. One muddies the common logic that ‘negative’ social ties are best avoided or discarded by individuals who are trying to achieve and maintain sobriety. The other illustrates how local institutional norms can undermine the healthful potential of shared, sobriety-oriented settings, depending on how they structure interaction within those spaces.