Allison Schnable is a sociologist and the Paul H. O’Neill Associate Professor in the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Her work focuses on the tension between nonprofit organizations’ roles as sources of social solidarity and providers of services. She serves as President-Elect of the International Society for Third-Sector Research.
Schnable’s book, Amateurs without Borders (University of California Press, 2021) winner of the Virginia A. Hodgkinson Research Book Prize, examines the possibilities and limits volunteer-driven NGOs in international development. Her more recent work considers the time costs to access services from public and nonprofit organizations, and the implications of these time costs for well-being and inequality. Her research has been published in such venues as World Development, Social Problems, Third World Quarterly, and Voluntas, and has been featured in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Schnable is the recipient of grants from ARNOVA, the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, the Tobias Center for Innovation in International Development, and Indiana’s Social Science Research Commons. She founded and co-directs a summer program on comparative civil society in Copenhagen and serves as Director of the O’Neill School’s Honors Program.
Schnable holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University. She has previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. Before beginning her academic career, she served as a Presidential Management Fellow with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and as a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal.
