Trust, power, and organizational routines: Exploring government's intentional tactics to renew relationships with nonprofits serving historically marginalized communities

• Published date: 01 May 2023
• Author: Yuan (Daniel) Cheng,Jodi Sandfort
• Date: 01 May 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13596

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Trust, power, and organizational routines: Exploring

government’s intentional tactics to renew relationships with

nonprofits serving historically marginalized communities

Yuan (Daniel) Cheng

1

| Jodi Sandfort

2

1

Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University

of Minnesota Twin Cities, Minneapolis,

Minnesota, USA

2

Evans School of Public Policy & Governance,

University of Washington Seattle, Seattle,

Washington, USA

Correspondence

Yuan (Daniel) Cheng, Humphrey School of

Public Affairs, University of Minnesota Twin

Cities, 301 19th Avenue S, Minneapolis, MN

47408, USA.

Email: cheng838@umn.edu

Funding information

University of Minnesota Center for Urban and

Regional Affairs Faculty Interactive Research

Program

Abstract

Existing public management practices and organizational routines in the contract-

ing regime have systematically created power asymmetry and distrust between

government agencies and nonprofits serving historically marginalized communi-

ties. However, little is known about how the government could reform public

bureaucracies to renew relationships with these important organizations and build

trust. Through a process-oriented inductive study of Minnesota’s 2-Generation Pol-

icy Network, we find that government’s cascading trust-building tactics both

inside the bureaucracy and with nonprofits serving Black, Latino, Indigenous, and

Immigrant/Refugee communities allowed them to create a new collaborative infra-

structure that both changed organizational routines and built power to address

racial inequities in the existing human service system. Power is not a zero-sum

game. By sharing resources and building trust with their nonprofit partners, gov-

ernment agencies and nonprofits collectively access more power for genuine pub-

lic management reform to address systematic inequities.

Evidence for Practice

•Trust-building with nonprofits serving historically marginalized communities is

slow, hard, yet critical work.

•Intentional actions and tactics inside government bureaucracies are necessary

precursors for building trust with nonprofits serving historically marginalized

communities.

•Trust helps transform existing organizational routines as a source for change

and creates opportunities for new organizational routines and structures to

develop.

•When the stock of institutional trust is low or missing, interpersonal trust is key

to starting a trust-building loop.

•Power is not a zero-sum game. By sharing resources and building trust with non-

profits serving historically marginalized communities, government agencies and

nonprofits collectively have access to more power for genuine public manage-

ment reform to address systematic inequities.

There is growing recognition that public organizations need

to experience significant changes to respond to the “ner-

vous area of government”: racial equity (Gooden, 2014).

While government agencies may provide security, stability,

and predictability, the trust in them is at an all-time low, par-

ticularly from historically marginalized communities

(Kettl, 2017:Peng&Lu,2021). In fact, trust building between

government agencies and nonprofits serving historically

marginalized communities may be one of the most daunt-

ing public management challenges in the United States

given the legacy of historical institutional racism (Feit

et al., 2022;Kendi,2016; Stivers, 2007). However, little

research focuses on understanding the incremental ways

that trust is built within administrative contexts where the

history of racialized institutional distrust is apparent. Yet this

reality now faces many public managers grappling with

Received: 24 September 2021 Revised: 18 December 2022 Accepted: 18 December 2022

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13596

570 © 2022 American Society for Public Administration. Public Admin Rev. 2023;83:570–586.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/puar

both the neoliberalism legacies of new public management

and the racial reckoning since the fatal shooting of Michael

Brown and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement

(later ignited in the summer of 2020 due to the murder of

George Floyd and the COVID-19 pandemic).

This study focused on a public management innova-

tion to intervene in these mechanisms. It focused on inter-

vening in three human service policy fields where racial

inequity is rampant. In child welfare, the state has the

authority to remove children from their parents and termi-

nate parental rights. The over-representation of Black and

American Indian children is well documented (Children’s

Bureau, 2016; Wells, 2011) and racial biases exist at each

decision point in the service continuum (Font, 2013;

Putnam-Hornstein et al., 2013). In early childhood educa-

tion, in almost every measure of service and attainment—

from diagnosis of developmental and behavioral chal-

lenges to kindergarten readiness—there are significant

racial disparities (Morgan et al., 2016; Reardon &

Portilla, 2016; Zuckerman et al., 2014). The vulnerable cash

assistance programs are built upon and perpetuate racial

inequity (Floyd et al., 2021). The results are clear—in these

and other human services fields, the administrative appara-

tus is not delivering unbiased outcomes.

In these human services policy fields, contracts with non-

governmental services providers are often used for public

service provision (Milward & Provan, 2003;Sandfort&Mil-

ward, 2008; Smith & Lipsky, 1993). State attention often

focuses on negotiating principal–agent relationships one by

one with these contracted service organizations without con-

sidering the larger systemic consequences of the contracting

regime (Smith, 2010). However, the true consequences of

“the system”is apparent to nonprofit organizations strug-

glingbothwithpersistentunderinvestmentandcontradic-

tory performance criteria created by local, state, and national

governments (Marwell & Calabrese, 2015). In its operational

reality, these administrative arrangements are more likely to

generate distrust rather than a trusted partnership for public

services (Kettl, 2017; Salamon, 1995).

In this study, we take advantage of a unique initiative

trying to address these specific challenges and build

more durable, trusting relationships between a state gov-

ernment agency and nonprofits serving historically mar-

ginalized communities, or more specifically Black, Latino,

Indigenous, and Immigrant/Refugee communities

1

in our

study context. Minnesota’s 2-Generation Policy Network is

an attempt to collaboratively redesign systems, policies,

and practices to address racial disparities through inte-

grating health and human services. Our in-depth, multi-

method study provides a window into how trust is built

at the early stages of such a collaborative initiative, partic-

ularly one focused on overcoming the legacy of racial

inequities that strains the relationship between govern-

ment and nonprofits serving historically marginalized

communities.

Through our inductive analysis, we contribute to the

existing literature on trust building and government

nonprofit relations in several important ways. First, we

build a conceptual model that recognizes that while trust

operates as a resource in public service collaborations, it

must be purposively built through cascading administra-

tive tactics, some of which are successful, others which

are not. Analytically, we considered the following ques-

tions: How did existing legacy public management prac-

tices and administrative rules strain the building of trust?

What happened when these practices and rules were

altered? How did community partners respond initially

and over time? In answering these questions, this

research uncovers that for nonprofits serving historically

marginalized communities, trust building begins with

interpersonal relationships. While there may be a belief in

building institutional trust, this often requires aligning for-

mal operational practices within the bureaucracy which

take longer to change.

Second, by a careful examination of the tactics and

strategies undertaken by the state government to build

trust and what resulted from the perspective of nonprofit

grantees, we seek to enhance the scholarly understand-

ing of how trust is built at the institutional level. Our find-

ings indicate that trust building must commence at the

beginning of a formal initiative. It also highlights both the

fragility of trust and the reality that it cannot be only built

through instrumental activities. These findings contribute

to a better understanding of how public managers and

street-level bureaucrats develop contextualized solutions

to deal with the limitations and vulnerability of the exist-

ing bureaucratic system (Masood & Nisar, 2022).

Finally, this case examines an initiative focused, from

its inception, on advancing racial equity and addressing

long-standing disparities in public service outcomes. As

we will discuss below, the leaders recognized the racial-

ized nature of the bureaucracy and intentionally sought

to introduce alternative practices to enable a more holis-

tic assessment of and initial partnership with nongovern-

mental organizations serving minority communities. The

analysis adds to emerging scholarly discussions about

how social mechanisms influence program implementa-

tion within racialized organizations. Pragmatically, it sug-

gests that public administrators must consider many

details about the operation of their agencies and be will-

ing to alter existing structures, routines, and practices if

they want to make progress on rebuilding the trust and

legitimacy of state action with nonprofits serving histori-

cally marginalized communities.

WAYS EXISTING PUBLIC MANAGEMENT

PRACTICES AND ORGANIZATIONAL

ROUTINES CREATE AND MAINTAIN POWER

ASYMMETRY AND DISTRUST

Trust and power have been regarded as two key mecha-

nisms of coordinating interorganizational relations in col-

laborative governance processes (Ansell & Gash, 2008;

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW 571