Welcome to the “Hunger Games”

In this paper, we articulate how nonprofit legitimacy is generated through the rhetorical construction of symbolic capital by nonprofit organizations. Our analysis demonstrates how symbolic capital responds to and reflects the local values of a donor/volunteer base, thus allowing nonprofits to assuage the potential for dissonance between image and behavior in humanitarian aid. To make this claim, we engage in a rhetorical analysis of one international nonprofit organization headquartered in the United States that conducts most of its humanitarian work in and around Africa. Implications of this study underscore how nonprofits capitalize on organizational identification and point to the value of understanding nonprofit legitimacy as the rhetorical construction of a “donor gaze” and a nonprofit “space of freedom.”