Dr. Elizabeth Searing

Venise and Lawrence D. Stuart established the Venise Stuart Professorship in Nonprofit Management and Leadership to support the research-enhancing activities of its holder, who will have a record of high scholarly achievement in nonprofit management and/or nonprofit leadership. Longtime civic leader Venice Stuart BS’79 received The University of Texas at Dallas’ Distinguished Alumni Award in 2019. She dedicates her time to a number of worthy causes and organizations, including the University’s Center for Vital Longevity and the Center for BrainHealth. 

---

“Nonprofits (and other social-economy organizations) are expected to address the world’s most difficult problems with little respect and even less resources. I use quantitative and qualitative methods to answer research questions about how these organizations operate, and it’s my honor to dedicate my career to helping those that help others.” 

Dr. Elizabeth Searing is a scholar of financial management in nonprofit and social enterprise organizations. She also conducts work on resilience, charity data and comparative social economy.  

As the principal investigator on a $1.1 million multinational project, she is investigating people’s perceptions of nonprofits and how the organizations are regulated in democracies. It is supported by the Trans-Atlantic Platform for Social Sciences and Humanities, a collaboration between humanities and social-science research funders from South America, North America, Europe and Africa. The United States portion of the project is funded by the National Science Foundation. 

The three-year investigation through 2027 will examine cross-sector opinions on trust and accountability in the United Kingdom, Canada, Switzerland and the U.S., with a special focus on Texas. Though these four countries are similar, there is significant variation in regulation, interpersonal trust and popular sentiment toward public-serving institutions. 

Searing’s academic career began in 2015 at Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the University of Albany, where she was an assistant professor of public administration and policy and served as the executive director of the Institute of Nonprofit Leadership and Community Development. She joined the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences at The University of Texas at Dallas in 2020. 

She has written or edited four books, and her articles have been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Nonprofit Management & Leadership and Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. 

She is the division chair of the public and nonprofit division of the Academy of Management and a member of the executive transition team at the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action. She also serves as an associate editor for Nonprofit Management & Leadership, while serving on the editorial boards for five other journals. 

Searing earned a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts in economics from Texas A&M University and Georgia State University, respectively. She completed her doctorate in public policy at Georgia State.