The Northern California World Affairs Nexus is a comprehensive Internet guide to world affairs organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area, charting over 400 organizations at work in the area.
We had many audiences in mind when we created the Nexus. We knew it would be useful to people looking for a job or a vocation in this field; to a teacher who wanted a student from South Africa to visit a class; to an organizer of a public forum seeking points of view on U.S. policy in Bosnia; and to people in the mass media, grant-making, or academic world trying to understand independent sector activity.
Clearly, a regional Internet guide is a useful resource. Our initial target, however, was not those who might consult it, but the organizations and institutions in it. We wanted to provide an occasion for them to reflect on their own activity and then to step back from their individual agendas and consider cooperative efforts capable of moving us toward a wiser, more effective, more coherent, and better funded independent sector.
The nonprofit independent sector has grown enormously in the past forty years. Whether measured by assets, jobs, influence or simply numbers (1.4 million and rising), nonprofit, non- governmental associations, a force in American life when Alexis de Tocqueville noted them as a distinctive feature of American society in 1835, now loom ever larger on the American horizon.
While Tocqueville was interested in NGOs formed to meet a specific need or perform a particular function, he focused his attention on the "moral and intellectual associations" that formed to shape the mind and spirit of the country. These are also the primary focus of the Nexus. It includes a wide range of organizations--from trade to famine relief to student exchange and policy advocacy- -and a typology to demonstrate the many lenses through which these groups may be viewed, functions they perform, purposes they pursue, and audiences they address.
The core of our effort here involves those groups that affect the way our country determines and carries out its purposes in world affairs. For us that effort in closely tied to problems of conflict and community, war and peace in world affairs. We believe an America that is firm in its commitment to the beliefs and ideas that have made it so important a milestone in human history has much to offer a world capable of wider political community and consequently of ways to resolve conflict without war. It is our hope that by improving in some small way the ability of Americans to engage wisely in the world, we will contribute to the long term effort necessary to move toward a world in which international conflict can be prosecuted and resolved without mass violence.
The lion's share of the information contained in the Nexus has been reproduced from the book: World Affairs in Northern California: A guide to the Field