Post 4

Like many of us have said in past postings, the textbook can feel a bit dated in its facts, so I really appreciated having the direct comparison to some of the articles we read off Blackboard that were much more current. The differences between public and private ownership seemed to really be the central element to most of the material this week, and that’s definitely the topic that I would want to explore the most in this blog entry. While the article on the Green Bay Packers gave me some neat insight into how the ownership dilemma really transcends multiple institutions in our society, the issue that I found most interesting was hospital ownership. When for-profit hospitals were first mentioned in the textbook, my visceral reaction wasn’t very positive. I think what was so troubling was that in my head and heart, “for-profit” and “hospital” didn’t seem very compatible. Indeed, when compared to what we know and love about nonprofits, the term “for-profit” isn’t very comforting. That said, as I read on through the rest of the chapter and the additional articles, I learned that my response was not only perhaps unwarranted, but unfair. The textbook, written in 1997, and the Mergers of for-profit, non-profit hospitals: Who does it help? article, written in 2010, both evidenced that about 60% of hospitals are nonprofit, and that an additional 20% are owned by the government. Only a small chunk of hospitals are for-profit, and as the Mergers article also cited, it seems that the big conversions we’re reading about tend to come and go in phases, and equally from nonprofit-to-profit and vice-versa. Plus, the textbook noted on page 104 that the General Accounting Office didn’t find a huge difference in the amount of uncompensated care offered by nonprofit and for-profit institutions, which definitely surprised me. All that said, I think the point that really hit it home for me were these two quick sentences in Merger:

“Jill Horwitz, a business and law professor at the University of Michigan who studies the hospital market, says the biggest difference between the two types of hospitals is in the services they offer. For-profit hospitals, she says, are more likely to offer lucrative services, such as cardiac and diagnostic services, while their non-profit counterparts often provide more less-profitable services such as trauma centers, burn centers and alcohol- and drug-treatment programs.”

I think this quote is what it all comes down to for me in terms of conversions of hospitals one way or the other.

Also, just to give my quick two-cents on the ADD Grows Up article, I agreed and disagreed with some of the ideas presented. I don’t want to discredit ADD as being a legitimate condition because I really don’t know enough about the issue and think it could have a really crippling effect on a lot of people. However, I do agree that ADD is infinitely more complex than anything a six-question survey could capture and that it sure is strange how ADD rates in America are vastly higher than anywhere else in the world after all the marketing that was done on TV and in magazines. Case in point: I wanted to learn more about ADHD so I typed it into Google and saw that “ADHD” had a YouTube channel. I thought that this was a neat way to disperse info about the condition out to the public, so I went to view what they had on their site. Turns out it’s really just a marketing ploy for Concerta, an ADHD drug for kids and adults. Awesome.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3ySskAz7Ho

Post 3

Our readings this week on affordable housing, community development, and social service tied together nicely and got me excited for what we might be learning about and discussing in class this week. I have had some great experiences in my time here at UO volunteering for issues related to homelessness and it is an issue I feel very strongly about. Through the Service Learning Program on campus I have participated in multiple Alternative Break trips to different cities in California and Oregon, and I am always consistently frustrated by the differences I find between the reality of the homeless communities I’ve worked with and the stigmatized views of them that can be found in the media and amongst our peers and politicians. I don’t contend that stereotypes of homeless individuals are entirely unfounded, and indeed recognize that, like any community, there is a full spectrum of behaviors and actions within the homeless population. I think what is frustrating for me is that I can’t seem to shake the idea that we have essentially created these stereotypes for transient individuals because it is simply easier and less costly to do so than to address the root causes of homelessness and accept some shared social responsibility for our situation. As the news article Understanding the tools in the affordable housing toolkit put it, “An often-overlooked remedy to the underlying problem is to increase the minimum wage across the board so that working people can live off of their income without needing other assistance. But this has not been the chosen approach, for the most part, in the United States.” Instead it seems, we have opted to fix the most basic element of the equation – the lack of housing part – via free and reduced-price housing options, leaving the disadvantaged communities utilizing them to fend for themselves beyond that. A couple of previous PPPM classes I’ve taken dealt with the history of the federal government’s Housing and Urban Development department, and I think it’s a really interesting example of looking at the evolution of social programs and policies in America; I’d recommend looking more into the subject to anyone who enjoyed the Understanding the tools article like I did.

While I also enjoyed reading that Louisiana was receiving federal funds for families struggling to keep their utilities paid, the other reading I liked a great deal was the chapter in our textbook on social service, particularly the latter half and the discussion of trends in nonprofit and governmental relations. It was almost ironic to me that this reading came now since I felt like it addressed a number of points of interest we had all brought up in weeks previous about how our current system of government and welfare came to be in America. The “public-private partnership” between all levels of government and the nonprofits they work with was cited in the book on page 85 as being “more pragmatic than philosophical” for a number of reasons. I think this was my favorite part of the reading because it summed up much more eloquently than I had ever done regarding why nonprofits are such an important part of our society. Without being tied down to governmental bureaucracy nonprofits are much more fluid and adaptive, and provide a great deal more jobs and better service to their constituents. Plus, it de-politicizes subjects that might otherwise have been too controversial to take action on. For many of these reasons and more I am thankful for nonprofits in our society. 


The Alternative Break trips I mentioned earlier have been some of the most challenging and most fulfilling experiences I've had here at UO, and I would definitely encourage anyone interested in them to read more about the program online at the Service Learning Program's website - serve.uoregon.edu. Or, feel free to ask me about them! I've had the experience of being a participant and co-facilitator and know the program pretty well and would be glad to testify - in fact, I already did: http://serve.uoregon.edu/programs/alternative_breaks/testimonials

Post 2

I greatly enjoyed this week’s readings on the role of religion in the nonprofit sector. I am extremely interested in religion from a sociological perspective. As evidenced by this chapter, I find it fascinating that it is one of few subjects that seem to pertain to all four sectors of American society: the household sector, the government sector, the for-profit sector, and the not-for-profit sector. From the very first page of the chapter where it is said that “the United States has long been recognized as one of the most religious of the world’s developed nations,” I found multiple points during the text that were particularly noteworthy and intriguing. Perhaps my favorite quote came from page 62 where it says that:

“Ninety percent of American adults say they believe in God and pray and that religion is important in their lives. Seventy percent claim membership in a religious congregation. Forty percent report belonging to a religiously related support group. When asked what degree of confidence they have in major societal institutions, Americans rank religion at or near the top, far above corporations, unions, the media, or federal, state or local government. Religion, the military, and the U.S. Supreme Court are consistently the three top-rated institutions.”

I have a deep and sincere respect for religion for a number of personal reasons, and regardless of your own personal opinion, I think it is quite interesting to explore the idea that religion, which relies so heavily on the idea of faith in the intangible, is given top marks from the American public’s confidence. I find that to be a prime example of how goodwill and a sense of commitment to the wellbeing of others is a prominent aspect of the nonprofit sector in the United States, that we will pick ourselves up from our busy lives and strapped budgets and provide for those in need in our communities when our governments and our societal “safety nets” of social services fail. Volunteering is, as I’ve mentioned in past blogging, is an extremely big player in my own life, and I think it is my experiences as a volunteer that have made me who I am today. Interestingly, our reading also quotes Robert D. Putnam, a sociologist and public policy analyst who has studied and written extensively on the idea that Americans are, for a number of reasons, on a downward spiral because of the growing loss of social capital in our lives. For a number of reasons, including reduced involvement in church activities and organized religion, Putnam thinks that we are losing out on gaining valuable social skills and civic norms by not connecting with each other and having experiences like volunteering and exploring issues facing our society. I would likely agree that our own loss of social capital is truly unfortunate and may be detrimental to future generations if these trends continue. I actually work as a swim instruct for the City of Eugene, and in the two years that I have been at the pool I am at, kids’ involvement in swim lessons has lessened almost every quarter down to our current all-time lows. Examples like this where kids are not getting the opportunities to interact with others and experience new things are really a bummer, and I hope we won’t be paying the price for it down the road. 

Post 1

Hi! My name is Zach Nicolaides and I am a senior here at UO majoring in Planning, Public Policy and Management (PPPM). I grew up just outside of Portland in Hillsboro, Oregon and I miss having such easy access to an urban setting. That said, I do appreciate how “user friendly” Eugene is in terms of transit by bike, bus or foot. The majority of my teenage years in Hillsboro were focused on my competitive swimming career with a local club team. Now almost four years out from quitting in 2007 I still swim laps at the SRC whenever I can, though that usually isn’t very often as my schedule is pretty jam-packed. Volunteering and feeling connected to the community around me are both very important parts of my life, and I am involved with a number of different organizations and events on campus including UO’s Relay For Life, Alternative Breaks and Alpha Phi Omega. Relay For Life is an American Cancer Society (ACS) event that I have participated with in a number of different ways for almost ten years now. Through volunteering and interning with the Society I have gained some great firsthand knowledge and experience in what it is like to work for a nationwide nonprofit, especially in terms of development and donor relations, and I

The purpose of my blog is to provide an outlet for exploring the discipline of nonprofit management as it is presented to my peers and I in PPPM 280: Introduction to the Nonprofit Sector. I’m excited to learn about the nonprofit sector through a variety of mediums this term, such as guest lecturers and small group discussions, and hope that the class will be a very dynamic and invigorating experience. By the end of the quarter, I would love to have a better understanding of how the nonprofit sector in the United States plays a role in our macro economy, as well as how it compares to other developed countries in the world. Each Tuesday I will be blogging about what has been going on in class and in our readings.

For our first few weeks of class we were assigned the first two chapters of Nonprofit Nation by Michael O’Neill as reading. I thought the reading gave a good, if somewhat wordy, introduction to the nonprofit sector, particularly in terms of the difficulty and complexity of giving the sector itself a succinct definition. While the IRS definition of what constitutes a nonprofit for the purposes of taxes and accounting, the book evidenced multiple times that there a numerous nonprofit organizations exempt from these regulations, and therefore unaccountable for. With that said, I think it is absolutely fascinating some of the statistics you can find about nonprofits in the United States. The fact that the nonprofit sector has more civilian employees than the federal government and all 50 states combined, and is accountable for 5-10 percent of our nation’s GDP, is truly humbling for me. As we’ve touched on a bit already in lecture, nonprofits in the United States really have a lot of goodwill and heart behind them, and I’m extremely pleased to read that they are such a prominent part of our culture.