Nonprofit Finance and Governance

Navigating Nonprofit Missions and Finances

Associate Professor Elizabeth King brings together her experience in nonprofits, corporate law, and healthcare to study nonprofit finance and governance.

After graduating from Dartmouth College with a degree in government, King began working as an AmeriCorps fellow at a financial services nonprofit in San Francisco that aimed to help low-income workers save money and reach financial goals. Through this firsthand service, however, it became clear to her that there were larger, systemic obstacles preventing many of these individuals from achieving financial security. 

“The problem really wasn’t that our poorest program participants didn’t know how to save; they just didn’t have enough income and couldn’t get or keep better jobs,” she says. Recognizing these barriers, King was drawn to law school as a tool for broader impact. “It seemed like there were larger structural issues at play, and I wanted a better skillset to try and understand what was happening at a more foundational level.”

It was during her 1L year that King began to consider academia as the best way for her to explore and engage with these issues. At Yale Law School, she was impressed and inspired by her professors who could both precisely articulate what the law is and illuminate competing normative perspectives on what the law should be.

While in law school, King served as a judicial extern for the Honorable Ming W. Chin of the California Supreme Court and worked as a summer associate at Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, where she later worked after graduation. “I’ve always been interested in economics and finance, so I knew I wanted to work in something corporate related,” says King, who began her legal career working on securities and capital market transactions. 

During her time at Davis Polk, King was also working on a law review article, “Tax Reform, Mixed-Entity Markets, and Hospitals: How the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act Favors the For-Profit Hospital Model” which was later published by the Yale Law & Policy Review in 2019. This article helped her discover an interest in the healthcare industry which eventually led her to make a lateral move to Ropes & Gray’s health care group. There, King spent several years working on hospital mergers, private equity acquisitions, and other corporate and nonprofit transactions involving healthcare entities. 

“My research really stems from that practice experience,” says King. “I also learned a lot from working on different pro bono projects for nonprofits that have helped inform my scholarship interests today.” 

In 2024, King began her intended transition to academia, serving a one-year term as a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. The fellowship, which is awarded to promising legal scholars with high academic achievements and a strong interest in teaching, allows participants to devote themselves to scholarship in preparation for entry into the teaching market. “When I was at HLS, Boston University really stood out to me because of its fantastic Health Law Program,” she says. “I also heard wonderful things about the BU community as a whole, especially that the faculty care a lot about teaching. That was something I really liked, because teaching is incredibly important to me too.”

Since joining BU Law this past summer, Professor King has been teaching 1L Contracts and Bankruptcy. Understanding that law school, and especially 1L fall, can be a challenging time for students, she looks for ways to make her classes engaging and fun—whether it be through interesting hypothetical problems, incorporating policy discussions, or exploring the back stories of important cases. 

“When I think about teaching, my intention is to always see the student as a whole person. I think that there’s a lot going on for students, and I really try to meet them where they’re at,” says Professor King. “I also want to teach them as much law as possible; how to think about the law with clarity and precision, and to consider the ethical and moral implications of what they will eventually do as lawyers.”

In terms of advice for students, King emphasized the importance of having boundaries for school and organizing one’s time in order to prioritize health and well-being. “I personally have found that taking one day off each week to rest and remember that you have friends, family, and interests outside of law school is life-giving—and good for productivity.”

As a faculty member, Professor King aims to be available as a resource and support to her students. “My goal is to provide a space where students feel comfortable asking questions, engaging with the law, thinking about the law, and dreaming broadly about what they would like to do in the law as future lawyers,” she says. “I want to be accessible, helpful, and supportive of my students and their aspirations.”

Regarding her own aspirations, King’s research is driven by an overarching passion to understand why nonprofit organizations do what they do, and how the law influences or constrains those actions. Her most recent project examines the role of debtholders in nonprofit governance. It focuses on hospital institutional debt and studies how the banks, bondholders, and other creditors holding that debt can influence and constrain hospital operational decisions. In other ongoing projects, King is exploring various governance and financial market levers that can influence a nonprofit’s willingness to maximize its mission, even when unprofitable or risky.

“I’m looking at nonprofit governance and finance rather broadly and considering what incentives cause nonprofits to drift away from their charitable missions and avoid investing in ‘unprofitable’ projects or people,” she says. “At the end of the day, all nonprofits need capital, and there is just no such thing as free capital. Every form of capital—from philanthropy to bonds to government funding—comes with governance implications, so these are really tough and turbulent waters that nonprofits must navigate.” Ultimately, King hopes to “illuminate some of the complexities that nonprofits face and eventually shed light on paths forward that will not abandon the hardest to serve.”

Outside of work, King’s free time is “generally monopolized by her two boys,” although she also enjoys working out and is active in her local church.