Jennifer E Mosley, PhD

Jennifer Mosley researches the role of nonprofit organizations as political actors, specifically the role human service organizations, community-based nonprofits, and philanthropic foundations play in advocating for or implementing policy change that affects underrepresented populations. She is particularly interested in the relationship between advocacy and improved democratic representation and how developments in public administration and nonprofit management–such as collaborative governance, contracting, and evaluation–affect public policy outcomes and the roles of nonprofit organizations. Her 2025 book with Nicole Marwell, entitled Mismeasuring Impact: How Randomized Controlled Trials Threaten the Nonprofit Sector, is an investigation into how the movement to embrace RCTs as the ‘gold standard’ for evidence of nonprofit effectiveness may weaken the sector’s ability to be responsive and innovative, inadvertently reducing effectiveness in the long run.

At the Crown Family School, she teaches courses on policy formulation and implementation, organizational theory, nonprofit management, and social change. She is the editor-in-chief of Social Service Review, a premier peer-reviewed academic journal housed at the Crown Family School, and the faculty director for the University of Chicago Obama Foundation Scholars Program.

Professor Mosley’s research aims to unpack the nature of different cross-sectoral relationships, interrogate how differences in power, resources, and legitimacy result in diverse outcomes (by field, organizational type, and community context), and track how the pursuit of ‘impact’ and evidence is affecting both policy and practice in the human services. A central driving question behind her research is: what would it mean for the nonprofit sector and government to work together more effectively and equitably? Her research goal is to uncover what this partnership looks like in practice and how we can make it more fair, responsive, and democratic.  To do this, she focuses on improving the process of government-nonprofit partnerships. Her work has uncovered tensions between bottom up and top-down decision-making at the organizational and policy levels and shown how ground-level concerns can be promoted without forsaking coordination and accountability. Key contributions have been how to support advocacy and mutual learning across stakeholder groups, how policy implementation can be structured to integrate ground-level preferences and realities, and pinpointing how to better maintain mission and organizational health for human service nonprofits. Much of her work explores how these processes take place in the fields of homeless services and child welfare. 

Her previous work includes studies that investigate how environmental and organizational pressures work together to encourage or constrain different types of advocacy involvement, the extent to which human service nonprofits become involved in advocacy, the specific tactics they choose, and the intersection between collaboration and advocacy. Other work explores the how community-based organizations attempt to represent the community they serve (and how those actions are perceived by community members) and investigations into the role philanthropic foundations play in both shaping and responding to major policy change.