Online Learning: Governance Correlation with Investment Performance

Course Description

Trustees are no longer passive participants outside of mainstream decision-making and policy formulation and how well the boards the serve on function will make a big difference in the fortunes of the organizations they guide. Based on our work with hundreds of institutions over the past 50 years, we believe that good governance is not only critical to the health of the institution itself, but also to the positive performance of the endowment. In a new study that Commonfund embarked on earlier this year, with Chris Merker of Fund Governance Analytics, we set out to highlight the correlation between good governance and positive investment performance. Chris Merker’s governance diagnostics are derived from decades of research and evaluation and they have been used extensively to analyze the governance practices at many organizations. He will speak to the results of this ground-breaking research that focused on governance practices at higher education institutions and detail similar trends in work he has done with foundations and public pension funds.

Differentiate between the key components of fiduciary effectiveness
List the challenges that are confronting nonprofit governance
Differentiate between governance functions and investment functions of discipline as it relates to sustainability, ESG and socially responsible investing
Identify the key governance measures that Merker’s research identifies in the GSAC assessment and their importance to an institution’s success