The Nonprofit Quarterly | @npquarterly | May the Nonprofit Force Be With You! Star Wars Museum in Petaluma Goes Nonprofit

The Nonprofit Quarterly | @npquarterly | May the Nonprofit Force Be With You! Star Wars Museum in Petaluma Goes Nonprofit: Who are we to judge the “nonprofitness” of this nonprofit? The nonprofit sector is full of “expressive” as opposed to “instrumental” nonprofits. Most people think of nonprofits on the instrumental side of the continuum, serving and meeting some sort of instrumental community need or demand. Now at the University of Texas, formerly at the Hauser Center at Harvard, writer Peter Frumkin has written powerfully about the expressive functions of nonprofits—those organizations that exist simply to express a belief, value, or idea rather than having a utilitarian function of community benefit. The Rancho Obi-Wan, for example, created to pay homage to Star Wars memorabilia.