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“Much existing scholarship on non-profit organizations’ receipt of government funds appears to assume that there is something highly problematic about this relationship. Although rarely articulated in these studies, the concern about the negative effects of government funding turns on a view of non-profits that privileges their private character. In this article, rather than examining how public funds constrain private action, we inquire about how government deploys private organizations, via the mechanism of government funding, to secure a public good. Using a case study of the non-profit child welfare sector in New York State, we theorize a deficit model of collaborative governance in which non-profits have been deputized by the state to secure children’s social rights but do not receive sufficient resources to cover the costs of securing those rights. Then, we connect this theory to organization-level financial management practices that pose challenges to the non-profits of both survival and service quality. This non-profit organizational instability concerns the state insofar as it threatens the securing of individuals’ social rights.”