DOI: 10.3886/icpsr35239
title: Six Cities Trusteeship Project: Trustee Biographical Dataset, 1931, 1961, 1991 [Atlanta, Boston, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and Philadelphia]
title: Archival Version

description: The Six Cities Trusteeship Project was designed to chart and understand the changes in the scope, scale, diversity, growth, and role of nonprofit trusteeship in the United States from 1931 to 1991. The data collection was divided into six discrete projects centered around each of the cities of interest: Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. Each research team was responsible for identifying the 15 organizations in their city that fit the criteria of largest 501(c)(3): secular hospital, Protestant hospital, Catholic hospital, Jewish hospital, art museum, symphony orchestra, United Way, institution of higher education, Junior League, community foundation, YMCA, YWCA, secular family services, Catholic family services, and Jewish family services. The process resulted in a board-level data set of about ninety organizations that would be directly comparable across cities; researchers then collected demographic information on the trustees of each organization during the years 1931, 1961, and 1991. Researchers collected data on 8,926 individual trustees from 289 separate boards (approximately 15 organizations' boards for each of six cities over three different time periods). The data set archived at the Cultural Policy and the Arts National Data Archive (CPANDA) was missing data for 22 entire boards (see Collection Note 2).
description: This data collection was designed to chart and understand the changes in the scope, scale, diversity, growth, and role of nonprofit trusteeship in the United States from 1931 to 1991.
description: For this study, researchers examined the composition of 15 types of not-for-profit boards of trustees: secular hospital, Protestant hospital, Catholic hospital, Jewish hospital, art museum, symphony orchestra, United Way, Junior League, community foundation, institution of higher education, secular family service, Catholic family service, Jewish family service, YMCA, and YWCA, and focused on three separate time periods: 1931, 1961, and 1991. Trustee lists were either obtained from the organization itself, annual reports, or the IRS 990 forms. Once the trustee lists were acquired, the study team in each city began background research on the trustees in order to provide answers on the trustee code sheets. The project coordinator provided research teams in each city with codesheets indicating the information to be collected. Memoranda were sent to researchers with instructions as questions arose or coding procedures changed. The research teams collected biographical information on trustees through print sources, Nexis searches, and interviews. They completed the codesheets as thoroughly as possible given the information available. There is extensive missing data in this study due to factors such as a lack of adequate records from 1931 and uncooperative organizations. The trustee biographical study collected data on 8,927 individual trustees from 289 separate boards (approximately 15 organizations' boards for each of six cities over three different time periods). The data set archived at CPANDA was missing data for 22 entire boards.


Researchers collected biographical information on trustees through the use of local, public, university, and foundation libraries; personal interviews; historical societies; archives; and other depositories of historical data.
description: This data collection has no weight variables.
description: Each research team was responsible for identifying the fifteen organizations in their city that fit the criteria of largest 501(c)(3) secular hospital, Protestant hospital, Catholic hospital, Jewish hospital, art museum, symphony orchestra, United Way, institution of higher education, Junior League, community foundation, YMCA, YWCA, secular family services, Catholic family services, and Jewish family services.
description: Datasets: 
DS1: Six Cities Trusteeship Project: Trustee Biographical Dataset, 1931, 1961, 1991 [Atlanta, Boston, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and Philadelphia]
description: Trustees of the largest non-profit organizations (in terms of operating expenditures) in eight industries or purpose groups in Atlanta, Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and Los Angeles during the years 1931, 1961, and 1991. Smallest Geographic Unit: city
description: record abstracts; face-to-face interviewThe study was conducted by Program on Nonprofit Organizations at Yale University. The research involved in this data collection effort was organized by Rikki Abzug, then based at the Program on Non-Profit Organizations at Yale University. Memoranda were mailed to the local research teams for each city to ensure that collection methodologies were standardized. The local research teams included: Lisa Buxbaum, David Swartz, and Richard Roth in Boston; Diane Grabowski, David Hammack, Yuan Li, Todd Michney, and Nancy Erdy (of University Hospitals) in Cleveland; Joseph Galaskiewicz, Elizabeth Turner Sosin, and Ann Deetz in the Twin Cities; Judith Blau, Charles Heying, and Joe Feinberg covering Atlanta (though located at the University of North Carolina); John C. Lammers and Christy L. Beaudin in Los Angeles; and Michael Useem and Chul Hee Kang in Philadelphia.This data collection was previously distributed by the Cultural Policy and the Arts National Data Archive (CPANDA). The CPANDA Identification Number (study number) is a00190. CPANDA conducted the following processing steps for release of this collection: produced a codebook, checked for undocumented codes, performed consistency checks, provided frequencies, performed recodes, and reformatted the data.Research sites were established in or near each city of interest in order to elicit the aid of local scholars and archivists.Organizations varied greatly in their internal archiving and in their cooperation with researchers. Some organizations did not retain their annual reports, while others had institutional libraries. Some organizations consented to interviews and provided trustee resumes and biographical sketches; others were unwilling to cooperate at all with researchers. The data collection challenges resulted in extensive missing data for some organizations and time periods.Researchers are encouraged to collect data on trustees in other cities by using the survey format and questionnaire from this study.Data from the board codesheets have been removed from the data set due to the authors' concerns about the data, particularly the large amount of missing financial data.Information regarding data processing for this data collection is in the "Codebook Notes" page(s) in the ICPSR Codebook. Most notably:


For this data collection, no documentation was provided for the following variables: RESPOSH and ORGSIZE.

For this data collection, no documentation was provided to describe how data were coded for the following variables: BOARD1-BOARD4 and CORP1-CORP4.