Yesterday, the Social Innovation Fund announced their inaugural grantees–eleven in total–that received grants between two and ten million dollars to be distributed over the next one to two years. While the Social Innovation Fund has received mixed reviews in terms of it’s scope and veritable innovativeness, this collaborative among the federal government, private funders, the… [Read more…]
July 18, 2010
by Erica Coslor
Lately I've been thinking about pension funds. (This is partly due to examining the art buying efforts of the British Rail Pension Fund in my research.) There was an interesting article by Lowenstein about why US municipalities are being hamstrung by high pension obligations in the New York Times (here), with quite critical letters pointing out that in the case of teachers, they were trading lower salaries for higher pensions later, and that states and municipalities had been essentially shorting their pension funds, contributing less than they should have due to... let us say overly optimistic assumptions about investment returns (letters here). So this has gotten me thinking about the situation for nonprofits, particularly in the arts.
July 6, 2010
by John C. Ronquillo
Innovation is a buzzword. It has been for quite some time. Let’s face it, we all want to believe that our organizations, or we as individuals, have a high capacity to innovate (and for the sake of humanity, let’s hope we do,) but let me pose a rhetorical question here: is it safe to say… [Read more…]
June 16, 2010
by Jasmine McGinnis
Perhaps it’s the curse of becoming an academic that I am constantly questioning both if things will work as they intended and/or how we actually measure that? I like many others have been closely following the unveiling of the Social Innovation Fund under Obama’s Administration, not only watching ‘who’ is advocating and supporting this Fund,… [Read more…]
June 8, 2010
by Sondra Barringer
I have been reading about organizational structure of higher education organizations as part of the background reading for a paper I am working on and it got me thinking about organizational boundaries and how it relates to the key players involved in organizations. When thinking about for-profit businesses there are three key constituencies which come… [Read more…]
March 10, 2010
by Erica Coslor
When conducting my research on the use of artwork as a financial investment, I came across some interesting justifications for investing in art from some of the finance-side interviewees. In addition to the typical comments about portfolio diversification, some people, along with some of the background readings, suggested that we could envision art as a… [Read more…]
March 9, 2010
by Sondra Barringer
Over the past 30 years or so the argument that public higher education is becoming privatized has become an accepted fact. However, less attention has been focused on how, why and to what extent these colleges and universities are actually pursuing more “private” means of sustaining themselves as various types of government support has declined.… [Read more…]
January 21, 2010
by Jasmine McGinnis
A good deal of my dissertation interests and current research surrounds understanding the connection between foundation governance and grantmaking. Like Sondra, this has led me to a number of organizational or governance theories that would lead us to hypothesize about the connection between the board members of a foundation (or any funder) and their eventual… [Read more…]
John C. Ronquillo
Sondra Barringer
Jasmine McGinnis
Erica Coslor
July 23, 2010
by John C. Ronquillo
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