Business Commons^™

2018 Annual Report: State Of Nonprofits And Philanthropy In San Diego, Emily Young, Laura Deitrick, Colton Strawser, Jon Durnford

State of Nonprofits in San Diego

The 2018 State of Nonprofits and Philanthropy Report highlights the pivotal role nonprofits play in protecting and enhancing the well-being and prosperity of our region. The sector continues to grow in number of total organizations, size of the workforce, and total revenues and assets. Despite continued growth, demand for nonprofit services continues to outpace the sector's ability to meet growing needs. Additionally, the full impact of federal tax reform on charitable giving remains unclear. Moreover, nonprofit leaders are challenged with navigating an ambiguous policy environment at a time when the public is increasingly divided about how to help the constituents …

Donor Stewardship And Repeat Giving, Faith Hoelscher

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This quantitative correlational study evaluated the strength and direction of relationships between the dependent variables: major giving since September 1, 2009 and average elapsed time between major gifts in relation to the independent variables: number of stewardship activities, stewardship activities occurring within one-month of a major gift, and duration of major giving relationship. Using a multiple regression, a relationship was found between the independent and dependent variables. These results were then affirmed by Pearson r evaluations in an effort to reinforce the importance and significance of the independent variables in spite of the multicollinearity shown for the subset of stewardship …

2018 Learning How To Think Like An Engineer: A Design-Based Research Study Of Kid Spark Education’S Curriculum In Kindergarten, Tessa Tinkler, Megan Kelly, Ida Rose Florez

Youth, Education, and Literacy

This report, prepared by the Nonprofit Institute's Caster Center, documents the findings from a design-based research study of Kid Spark Education's early childhood engineering curriculum.

Cricket Island Foundation: A Case Study Of A Small Foundation’S Impact Assessment, Anna Pond, Seema Shah, Elizabeth Sak

The Foundation Review

In 2015, the Cricket Island Foundation conducted a multimethod assessment of its grantmaking portfolio to examine its impact and inform future decision-making and strategy. The foundation, which supports youth-led social change using a cohort-based model, focuses on emerging and medium-sized organizations and provides capacity-building supports to help organizations achieve greater organizational sustainability.

The assessment focused on two of the foundation's three cohorts and found positive trends in five key areas of desired impact: organizational capacity, youth leadership, nonprofit executive leadership, grantee collaboration and learning, and funder policy and practice. The assessment also identified areas for improvement to strengthen future impact, …

Signal Incongruence And Its Consequences: A Study Of Media Disapproval And Ceo Overcompensation, Jp Vergne, Georg Wernicke, Steffen Brenner

Business Publications

We draw on the signaling and infomediary literatures to examine how media evaluations of CEO overcompensation (a negative cue associated with selfishness and greed) are affected by the presence of corporate philanthropy (a positive cue associated with altruism and generosity). In line with our theory on signal incongruence, we find that firms engaged in philanthropy receive more media disapproval when they overcompensate their CEO, but they are also more likely to decrease CEO overcompensation as a response. Our study contributes to the signaling literature by theorizing about signal incongruence, and to infomediary and corporate governance research by showing that media …

2018 Study Of San Diego County Local Child Care Needs And Barriers: Data And Insights For San Diego County Individualized Child Care Subsidy Pilot And Local Child Care Policies, Tessa Tinkler, Mary Jo Schumann, Meghan Kelly

Youth, Education, and Literacy

This report, prepared by the Caster Center, is a study of local child care conditions in San Diego County and includes an analysis of the demographics of families in need of child care; San Diego County’s self-sufficiency income level; availability of, and enrollment in, subsidized child care; and the cost of providing child care. This report originated from a required independent analysis of local child care conditions for Bill AB377, authorizing the County of San Diego to develop a pilot child care subsidy plan that takes into account the county’s unique demographic and economic environment.

Giving Back: The Right Choice

Business Exchange

Financial planner Chris McCauley discusses his time as an accounting student at DePaul and why he and his wife, Clarice, decided to become donors to DePaul through The 1898 Society.

Best Practices For Financial Success In The Nonprofit Sector, Zach Mckenzie, Benjamin Hendricks, Emily Foskey, Michelle Baria, Gabriel Walker

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

With the recent upturn in economic success over the past year, United States citizens are becoming more and more poised to contribute to nonprofits and philanthropic causes. The aim of this project was to establish the best practices for financial success in the nonprofit sector as nonprofits look for an increase of funding from this philanthropic surge. Using ratio and environmental analysis, we found several best practices that can be applied to other organizations.

2018 Navigating The Future: Transforming The Transition Experience For Service Members And Their Families, Kim D. Hunt, Mary Jo Schumann, Aya Tore

Military

This report, prepared by the Caster Center, is an evaluation of Year 3 of zero8hundred. Zero8hundred is a cross-sector community initiative whose mission is to proactively link transitioning service members and their families to resources and opportunities in the community, helping them successfully transition to civilian life.

Family Foundation Development In China: Two Case Studies, Shuang Lu, Chien-Chung Huang

The Foundation Review

Amid the accumulation of private wealth in China, family foundations have begun to emerge in recent decades. Little research, however, has explored this nascent phenomenon. This article examines the development of two Chinese family foundations — the Lao Niu Foundation and the Lu Jiaxiang Foundation — using document analyses and semi-structured interviews with foundation leaders.

While detailed data on program effectiveness and efficiency is lacking because of underdeveloped methods of evaluation, it is evident that both foundations have generated positive impacts on social development despite an overall lack of support for the foundation sector from Chinese government policy.

The case …

A Framework For Good Ownership And Good Governance (1999), Marcy Murninghan

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article encapsulates a more extensive analysis that was commissioned by The Boston Foundation’s board of trustees in December 1998 to investigate its investment practices and identify ways in which its asset management decisions might be brought into fuller alignment with its charitable purpose—without conceding earnings or undermining its philanthropic fiduciary responsibility. The undertaking was spurred by the leadership of Robert A. Glassman, co-founder and co-chair of Wainwright Bank and a trustee of The Boston Foundation (TBF) since 1985, who took the reins from David Rockefeller Jr. in 1995 as chair of TBF’s investment committee. The research project built on …

Motivations For Remittances And Philanthropy – Lessons From A Qualitative Meta-Synthesis Of Literature, Sabith Khan, Daisha M. Merritt Ph.D.

Publications

Why do people send remittances? Also, what are the motivations for diaspora philanthropy? While each of these questions have been addressed by scholars in different way – with the most influential theories suggesting that ‘identification’ is the key theme that explains each of these phenomenon, we contend that there is much more than purely ‘identification’ with the recipients that is at play. In this study, based on synthesis of various theories and some empirical studies, we propose a new ‘mid-range’ theory, that seeks to explain the motivations for giving – both remittances and philanthropy. We explain how the motivations in …