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From 2007 to 2019, over 650 public schools closed in Puerto Rico. School closures not only affect students and teachers; these spaces serve as anchor institutions providing social infrastructure for the sustained health of communities. While closed schools remove a critical community asset, these vacant buildings provide adaptive reuse opportunities for alternative social infrastructure and community resources. This article explores how abandoned schools are repurposed in Puerto Rico, focusing on "rescued schools"—that is, grassroots, voluntary initiatives that repurpose schools to support community development. Through a multi-method approach, we categorized and mapped 161 repurposed schools throughout Puerto Rico—38 were rescued schools—and conducted twelve interviews and two focus groups on rescued school initiatives. Our results describe how abandoned schools offer a galvanizing opportunity for motivated community members to meet emerging, localized needs, and the challenges in gaining school ownership and attracting sustained financial and volunteer support, the lack of which impedes their potential impact. We demonstrate how rescued schools embody alternative regional political visions within Puerto Rico and argue that government authorities can minimize the harm from school closures by forging new partnerships between community-based organizations, municipal governments, and other supportive actors to repurpose schools and reproduce their role as community anchor institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) has focused primarily on large INGOs, which capture the majority of total INGO spending but represent a small number of total INGOs. Over the past two decades, the number of INGOs has more than tripled throughout the global North, which has ushered in a decentralization of the sector as an emerging class of small- and medium-sized INGOs increasingly share the same space once occupied solely by large INGOs. This study focuses on these INGOs in transition to explore how they differ from large INGOs that receive significant government funding and their pathways to scale. Using an original dataset of 1371 Canadian INGOs, we explored comparative differences related to funding sources, overhead, organizational age, country coverage, staff, and religion between the transitioning and small-scale INGOs. Our results identified several general insights for how INGOs transition: (1) Large INGOs are less likely to articulate a religious motivation, which may impede government funding; (2) INGOs are more likely to be headquartered in Ontario, which is closer to federal government offices; (3) low overhead expenditures inhibit small-scale INGOs from transitioning to medium- and large-scale INGOs; (4) organizational age plays a critical factor to scale-up as INGOs increase their experience and expertise; (5) generous compensation to attract talented staff offers an under-valued pathway to scale. Finally, our results demonstrate the diversity among INGOs in Canada and problematizes singular scale-up pathways, while underscoring the necessity of future research to explore scaling strategies through individual case studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]