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.
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
Hello everyone, welcome to our venture into the blogging world. My name is Sondra Barringer and I am currently a fourth year student in the Sociology Department at the University of Arizona, working on my doctoral dissertation. My fellow bloggers and I had the pleasure of meeting at the RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community… [Read more…]
Hi all. Welcome to our new online venture. As you can expect, with all of us being PhD students, we have quite a bit on our plates and updates are surely forthcoming. My name is John Ronquillo and I am in my third year at the University of Georgia where I’m a doctoral candidate in… [Read more…]
This week is going to be action-filled in the best possible way…another academic conference! From November 18 to 21 several of the Third Sector Network’s contributors will be in Cleveland for the 39th Annual Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA) Conference. I am very much looking forward to the conference because… [Read more…]
Hello everyone, thanks for joining us. I’m Erica Coslor and I’m currently finishing up my doctoral dissertation in Sociology at the University of Chicago. I had the pleasure of meeting my co-bloggers back in June when we took part in a paper writing workshop at UTexas, Austin. In the company of these fine nonprofit researchers,… [Read more…]
Welcome to my first official blog post! My name is Jasmine McGinnis and I am a second year Ph.D. student in a joint public policy program through the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University and the Ivan Allen College of Public Policy at Georgia Institute of Technology. I have a rather… [Read more…]
John C. Ronquillo
Sondra Barringer
Jasmine McGinnis
Erica Coslor
July 18, 2010 by Erica Coslor
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