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This study investigated a local aspect of theSwedish elementary school modernization process between the years 1871-1882.Previous studies have been drawn from the school inspectors own reports andshow that the schoolboards housed a negative and resentful attitude towardsreforms and the school inspectors often felt that the parish priests were moreinclined to changes than the schoolboards themselves.  Other research on elementary schoolmodernization has stressed the matching grants as a major cause of developmentand further establishment. In this study, however, a schoolboards own notes inthe form of meeting protocols during an eleven year period as well as a letterby a priest Erik Lundberg, Redogörelseför skolhusfrågan i Tierp dated 6 October 1880 were analyzed to see if theprevious explanation of school modernization, in particular with regard to thereluctance to change by the schoolboards goes to demonstrate and confirm. Theresults of this study have shown that even if the schoolboards do notimmediately follow the school inspectors instructions, it seems not primarilybeen due to resentment. Reforms within the school world are well known forbeing time-consuming but for the current period, as this study concerns andwithin this specific parish there were conflicts of interest which are notshown when only the inspector’s accounts and reports are examined. The late 1900thcentury was a time with a great deal of overwhelming and overthrowingreformations and changes witch challenged its previous social structuresthrough industrialization, urbanization and new political currents. Developmentand change occurs faster than news of it could travel, and it has been aninteresting journey to study these documents and to get a glimpse into how aschoolboard in a rural parish dealt with expansion and change.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / In the past 50 years, we have seen significant public and philanthropic investment in building civil society in countries around the globe. This includes initiating community foundations to support the development of vibrant communities and civic life. Yet we have little knowledge about why some initiatives bear fruit and others fail to do so. More specifically, why some community foundations initiated by institutional funders are able to garner local giving necessary to sustain themselves and others are not. This dissertation contributes to our knowledge about such initiatives by researching the Lilly Endowment’s GIFT Initiative (Giving Indiana Funds for Tomorrow), a project providing incentives to start nearly 60 new community foundations and revive 17 existing community foundations in Indiana since 1990. I employed mixed methods and three sources of data: historical archives, statistics of community foundations’ financial information and community demographics, and case studies of four community foundations. First, I found two existing explanations offered in the literature did not account for the lack of local support for the community foundations I studied. More specifically, I found that high level of income and wealth does not necessarily lead to high level of giving to community foundations and the lack of community identity is not the primary reason explaining community foundations’ struggles in attracting local donations. Rather the study shows that social capital is crucial for garnering local giving through the mechanism of facilitating information sharing. Second, I examined the long-term effects of matching grants, a key strategy used by Lilly Endowment to leverage local giving. I found that long-term provision of matching grants might reduce organizations’ incentives to seek funding sources on their own. My dissertation lends further insight into the sustainability of civic infrastructure organizations, a popular institutional model for building local civil society even today.