Governance Practices Among Nonprofit Organizations Contracting with New York City

New York City provides many of its services via contracts with nonprofit agencies. In this paper, we report on a recent survey of the governance practices of those agencies. The survey collected information from the Executive Directors of over 400 city contractors and more than 4000 of the board members of those organizations. The paper uses these data to compare governance practices at these organizations with national bench marks, and to analyze the sources of differences in governance. Our results suggest that governance practices vary considerably by size and structure of agencies, and that differences in governance have significant effects on the behavior of individual board members.