Risk Management for Nonprofits

Our research, based on the first comprehensive financial analysis of New York's nonprofit sector, found that 10% of the city's nonprofits were insolvent and 40% had virtually no cash reserves. Less than 30% were financially strong. If anything, things are getting harder, given market volatility, the move to value-based payments in health care, and increased costs for real estate and labor.Fortunately, we also discovered that nonprofits can take a few concrete steps to reduce their risk of failure and sustain vital programs:Make risk management an explicit responsibility of the audit and/or finance committee.Develop a risk-tolerance statement, indicating the limits for risk-taking and the willingness to trade short-term impact for longer-term sustainability.Keep a running list of major risks and the likelihood and expected loss for each.Put in place plans for how to maintain service in the event of a financial disaster, or even a "living will" that specifies how programs will be transferred to other providers (or wound down in an orderly fashion) in the event that recovery is not possible.Brief trustees regularly about longer-term trends in the operating environment.Periodically explore the potential benefits of various forms of organizational redesign, such as mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures, partnerships, outsourcing, managed dissolutions, and divestments.Compare financial performance to peers on an annual basis.Develop explicit targets for operating results (margins, months of cash, etc.) and contingency plans if minimum targets are not met.Redouble efforts to build and safeguard a financial cushion or "rainy-day fund," even if doing so forces consideration of difficult programmatic trade-offs.Doing any of these will depend on a functioning partnership between capable management and a critical mass of experienced, educated and engaged board members. Therefore, organizations serious about risk management must work hard to recruit board members with a wide range of experience. They need to ensure ongoing education for both new and existing board members and to empower high-functioning committees. Many organizations, particularly large and complex ones, would also benefit from having an experienced nonprofit executive on their board

Language discrimination by human newborns and by cotton-top tamarin monkeys

Humans, but no other animal, make meaningful use of spoken language. What is unclear, however, is whether this capacity depends on a unique constellation of perceptual and neurobiological mechanisms, or whether a subset of such mechanisms are shared with other organisms. To explore this problem, we conducted parallel experiments on human newborns and cotton-top tamarin monkeys to assess their ability to discriminate unfamiliar languages. Using a habituation-dishabituation procedure, we show that human newborns and tamarins can discriminate sentences from Dutch and Japanese, but not if the sentences are played backwards. Moreover, the cues for discrimination are not present in backward speech. This suggests that the human newborns' tuning to certain properties of speech relies on general processes of the primate auditory system

Selective Permeability of Carboxysome Shell Pores to Anionic Molecules

Carboxysomes are closed polyhedral cellular microcompartments that increase the efficiency of carbon fixation in autotrophic bacteria. Carboxysome shells consist of small proteins that form hexameric units with semipermeable central pores containing binding sites for anions. This feature is thought to selectively allow access to RuBisCO enzymes inside the carboxysome by HCO_3– (the dominant form of CO_2 in the aqueous solution at pH 7.4) but not O_2, which leads to a nonproductive reaction. To test this hypothesis, here we use molecular dynamics simulations to characterize the energetics and permeability of CO_2, O_2, and HCO_3– through the central pores of two different shell proteins, namely, CsoS1A of α-carboxysome and CcmK4 of β-carboxysome shells. We find that the central pores are in fact selectively permeable to anions such as HCO_3–, as predicted by the model

Exploitation status of infralittoral abalone (Haliotis midae) and alikreukel (Turbo sarmaticus) in the southern section of the Eastern Cape coast, South Africa

Intertidal size-frequency distributions and densities for Haliotis midae and Turbo sarmaticus were examined at 10 sites experiencing varying pressure of human exploitation along the southern section of the Eastern Cape coast, South Africa. Target species' densities and maximum sizes were related both to the numbers of collectors on the shore and to indirect indicators of exploitation such as number of households in the vicinity and distance to the nearest beach access point. For both species, there was variation in density (P < 0.05) and size (P < 0.05) among sites, with densities ranging between 0.03-2.23 m^(-2) and 0.07-4.93 m^(-2) for H. midae and T. sarmaticus, respectively. Maximum sizes ranged between 49.4-153.5 mm (H. midae) and 28.3-104.4 mm (T. sarmaticus) shell length. Population parameters such as mean maximum size and total density were significantly negatively related to exploitation indicators for both species. In addition, densities of sexually mature and legal-size individuals of T. sarmaticus were significantly negatively related to the number of households. However, only for H. midae were densities of subadults significantly negatively related to the number of collectors, suggesting that reproduction of abalone may be suppressed at the most exploited sites. Exploitation of T. sarmaticus tends to be localized near population centres, whereas H. midae is collected over a larger range of sites. Overall, T. sarmaticus is less affected by exploitation than H. midae

The Structure of Isolated Synechococcus Strain WH8102 Carboxysomes as Revealed by Electron Cryotomography

Carboxysomes are organelle-like polyhedral bodies found in cyanobacteria and many chemoautotrophic bacteria that are thought to facilitate carbon fixation. Carboxysomes are bounded by a proteinaceous outer shell and filled with ribulose 1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (RuBisCO), the first enzyme in the CO_2 fixation pathway, but exactly how they enhance carbon fixation is unclear. Here we report the three-dimensional structure of purified carboxysomes from Synechococcus species strain WH8102 as revealed by electron cryotomography. We found that while the sizes of individual carboxysomes in this organism varied from 114 nm to 137 nm, surprisingly, all were approximately icosahedral. There were on average ~250 RuBisCOs per carboxysome, organized into three to four concentric layers. Some models of carboxysome function depend on specific contacts between individual RuBisCOs and the shell, but no evidence of such contacts was found: no systematic patterns of connecting densities or RuBisCO positions against the shell's presumed hexagonal lattice could be discerned, and simulations showed that packing forces alone could account for the layered organization of RuBisCOs

Polyphosphate Storage during Sporulation in the Gram-Negative Bacterium Acetonema longum

Using electron cryotomography, we show that the Gram-negative sporulating bacterium Acetonema longum synthesizes high-density storage granules at the leading edges of engulfing membranes. The granules appear in the prespore and increase in size and number as engulfment proceeds. Typically, a cluster of 8 to 12 storage granules closely associates with the inner spore membrane and ultimately accounts for ∼7% of the total volume in mature spores. Energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) analyses show that the granules contain high levels of phosphorus, oxygen, and magnesium and therefore are likely composed of polyphosphate (poly-P). Unlike the Gram-positive Bacilli and Clostridia, A. longum spores retain their outer spore membrane upon germination. To explore the possibility that the granules in A. longum may be involved in this unique process, we imaged purified Bacillus cereus, Bacillus thuringiensis, Bacillus subtilis, and Clostridium sporogenes spores. Even though B. cereus and B. thuringiensis contain the ppk and ppx genes, none of the spores from Gram-positive bacteria had granules. We speculate that poly-P in A. longum may provide either the energy or phosphate metabolites needed for outgrowth while retaining an outer membrane

The Financial Health of Philadelphia-Area Nonprofits

As nonprofit organizations in the five Pennsylvania counties of Greater Philadelphia (Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery and Philadelphia) emerge from the financial crisis of the last decade and head into a very different and hard-to-forecast political and economic environment in the future, financial discipline, smart growth and strong governance are more important than ever. Accordingly, many nonprofit executives and governing boards are asking new questions about the organizations they govern. What risks do we face?1 How risky are we in relation to our peers? Are we doing the right things to understand and mitigate our risks? How should we balance financial risk against programmatic reward? What should we do to reduce the potential hardships from financial distress

The Financial Health of the United States Nonprofit Sector: Facts and Observations

The Financial Health of the United States Nonprofit Sector examines the finances of more than 219,000 U.S. nonprofits for FY 2010-2014. The findings are sobering:Around 50 percent have less than one month of cash reservesSome 30 percent have lost money over three yearsSome 7-8 percent are technically insolventIn this report, we provide some context setting with a brief overview of the size and scale of the US nonprofit sector and why its financial health matters. We look at the financial vital signs of the sector, analyzing key financial metrics segmented by size, sub-sector, and geography1. We describe practical steps that trustees and their organizations can take to strengthen their financial position. Finally, we offer some long-term ideas for how funders and the rest of the ecosystem can actively reduce the risks of financial distress in the nonprofit sector. We conclude with an appendix of tables summarizing key financial health indicators for the sector

Inference on historical Ebola outbreaks using hierarchical models: a particle filtering approach

Particle filters are commonly used to estimate the likelihood for epidemic models when it is analytically intractable. These methods marginalise over missing data and do not suffer from the scaling issues present in traditional data-augmented Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. In this thesis we present a particle filtering methodology which extends upon recent advances in the field to simulate realisations of a process which are consistent with observations of two events from the same outbreak, such as symptom onsets and recoveries. This particle filtering approach is used in a particle marginal Metropolis-Hastings (pmMH) algorithm to fit a hierarchical model to four outbreaks of Ebola simultaneously for the first time. We estimated R₀ above 1 for all four outbreaks (as expected by the threshold theorem), with three of the outbreaks having values above 3. Our results also indicated that transmission began to reduce before the implementation of major intervention measures, which may be due to changes in community awareness. An additional area of work in this thesis relates to the efficiency of pmMH methods. Mixing of the overall Markov chain is crucial to the efficiency of a pmMH method, and is controlled by the variance in the log-likelihood estimates from the particle filter at the maximum a posteriori (MAP). This variance is in turn controlled by the number of particles used. We develop a more sophisticated methodology for estimating the MAP when only noisy estimates of the log-likelihood are available. This enables a priori tuning of the inference methods and the possibility of automating the tuning process.Thesis (MPhil) -- University of Adelaide, School of Mathematical Sciences, 202