Finance Council Update

J. Abbott Byrd, III, MD
Finance Council Chair

The Finance Council is composed of four committees:

The Corporate Relations Committee is chaired by John Dormans, MD.  The committee remains quite active communicating and meeting regularly with our corporate sponsors.  The goal is to expand the list of SRS corporate sponsors and to maintain and increase their level of support.  Dr. Dormans' team has been quite successful with this effort and the 2014 aggregate of SRS corporate sponsorship was $1,847,250 or 42 percent of our annual income.

The Development Committee is chaired by Serena Hu, MD and is charged with maintaining and increasing financial support from the SRS membership. John Dimar, MD was the past chair of this committee and deserves a big round of applause from SRS for steering the SRS 50^th Anniversary Campaign which began in 2014.  This effort was quite successful generating $250,000 in member donations and over $110,000 raised by the auction which was enjoyed by all at our Annual Meeting in Minneapolis.  I am confident that Dr. Hu will continue to expand the fund raising effort for SRS which is based upon the generosity of our membership who believe in our mission to improve spinal care for our patients.

The Long Range Planning Committee is chaired by Dr. Dormans who also deserves thanks from SRS, not only for his work as our Past President but also for chairing two important committees listed in this report.  This committee is responsible for selecting the meeting sites for our future IMAST and Annual Meetings listed respectively:  2016 Washington, D.C., USA and Prague, Czech Republic; 2017 Capetown, South Africa and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA; 2018 Los Angeles, California, USA and Seoul, Korea.  The committee is reviewing meeting sites for 2019 and 2020 which will be announced in the future. 

The Finance Committee is chaired by myself and is charged with monitoring the finances of SRS.  The financial state of SRS is quite sound with almost $2.7 million in general assets and slightly more than $9.1 million in the total Research and Endowment funds. Half of the R/E funds are in the REO fund which is managed by Rockefeller Financial, and as of this year, the other half which has been invested through OREF will be brought back in house to SRS and managed by Vanguard.  The total endowment generates after expenses approximately $300,000 which is awarded to the various SRS research projects. 

I look forward to chairing the Finance Council through the end of my term as Treasurer for SRS and welcome comments and suggestions from the membership.