Exploring the Determinants of Nonprofit Coproduction of Public Service Delivery The Case of k-12 Public Education Laurie E. Paarlberg University of North Carolina Wilmington Sheldon Gen San Francisco State University Americans have long formed nonprofits to voluntarily coproduce public services. However, demand perspectives on the development of the nonprofit sector and supply perspectives on the activation of civic engagement suggest potentially contradictory explanations of collective coproduction. Using the case of nonprofit support for public k-12 education, the authors explore the community- and school-level determinants of nonprofit coproduction of public education. Their findings suggest that nonprofit coproduction is influenced by unmet demand for public services and the supply of human and financial resources necessary to engage in collective action. Although the formation of a nonprofit to support a public school may be related to the demand generated by heterogeneous preferences of service beneficiaries and the human capital to self-organize, the ability to generate a significant level of financial resources to support coproduction is related to the resources of the service beneficiaries and their integration into the larger community. Keywords: nonprofit; coproduction; education T hroughout American history, groups of citizens have voluntarily engaged in collective action to work side by side with government to plan for and actually provide public ser- vices (Bremmer, 1988). Ordinary citizens have organized to build and maintain parks and community-meeting centers, support public libraries and public schools, and enhance the safety of public spaces by participating in crime watches and forming volunteer fire crews. Voluntary efforts to improve the quality of public services through joint public–private delivery can occur through individual or collective action coordinated by a formal organi- zation, such as a nonprofit organization (Brudney & England, 1983; Whitaker, 1980). Despite the tradition of collective coproduction of public service delivery, we know little about the determinants of voluntary nonprofit support of public service delivery (Conway & Hachen, 2005; Marschall, 2004). To date, much of the literature on nonprofit support of public service delivery has focused on nonprofits engaged in formal contract relationships or individual acts of civic engagement (Haddad, 2004). However, understanding the sociodemographic determinants of nonprofit coproduction is important for several reasons. First, these determinants are not as clear as one might imagine. Our theoretical understanding of the factors that influence the development of the nonprofit sector, such as population heterogeneity and community need, may be opposite The American Review of Public Administration Volume 39 Number 4 July 2009 391-408 © 2009 The Author(s) 10.1177/0275074008320711 http://arp.sagepub.com 391