FOCUS ON FACULTY
Faculty Feature: David Hammack, Hiram C. Haydn Professor of History
Q: This past year you have served as president of two nonprofit boards. What type of work have you been doing with them recently?
A: As president of the board for The Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA), as well as the president of the board for Greater Cleveland Community Shares, I've had an unexpectedly deep encounter with the practical realities of nonprofit operations and leadership. The Executive Directors of ARNOVA and Greater Cleveland Community Shares both announced their departures, so I had to lead efforts to find new leaders.
At Community Shares, Lana Cowell was a founder and a remarkably effective longtime leader. Under Lana, Shares went from start-up to a $1 million source of funds each year, mostly through payroll deduction. The funds are for 40 Cleveland organizations devoted to social change. Lana kept Shares organizations together, no easy feat in view of their diversity - they range from the ACLU and the Domestic Violence Center to Habitat for Humanity to community development corporations in several neighborhoods to the Cleveland Public Theater and Policy Matters Ohio. And she led the effort both to secure foundation funding and to gain access to more and more workplaces. Lana gave the board six months to find a new executive director and gave applicants and her successor excellent support before leaving for a long trip once the new ED was in place. We found and persuaded Jacquie Talbott, a Case Law graduate with excellent fundraising and executive experience, as the new ED. Jacquie has already brought extraordinary energy and good cheer, has won new and increased foundation grants, is off to a great start.
ARNOVA's ED had done a good job, but was ready to move on. She gave the ARNOVA board two weeks' notice in September, just a few weeks before the association's annual conference. Other factors complicated the situation: ARNOVA's offices are in Indianapolis, its board members are scattered across the U.S., several of its long-term foundation supporters have moved to other causes, continuing funders need reports, new funders necessarily demand attention. ARNOVA has 1200 members; 20% of them live outside the U.S. Many of us think that ARNOVA could attract a substantially larger membership, but to do so, the association must provide new kinds of services. In particular, ARNOVA needs to do a better job in bringing researchers together with practitioners, and in helping researchers to engage with the pressing issues of the day. With the help of many ARNOVA members, we identified an excellent pool of candidates and succeeded in persuading Thom Jeavons, a widely published researcher who once headed the philanthropic studies center at Grand Valley State University and had for nine years served as General Secretary of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends - the leading staff position of the Quakers in the U.S.
ARNOVA and Community Shares are very different organizations, but in both cases we had to find new leaders with a broad range of skills. So far, all indications are that we found excellent new leaders for both organizations.
To keep ARNOVA moving ahead, I've pursued several initiatives. ARNOVA has been working with American Humanics to develop, evaluate, and publicize its "Next Generation Nonprofit Sector Workforce" project - an initiative to bring in exceptional young nonprofit leaders from the widest possible array of backgrounds. ARNOVA has worked closely with the Nonprofit Academic Centers Council (housed at the Mandel Center) and with W.K Kellogg Foundation-funded efforts at Indiana and Arizona State Universities in co-sponsoring special conferences to promote the use of the best current research in professional, graduate, and undergraduate educational curricula. (One result was Dwight F. Burlingame and David C. Hammack, editors, Education For A Civil Society (Center on Philanthropy, Indiana University, 2005) We've also explored ways for ARNOVA to cooperate with the International Society for Third Sector Research, which runs a meeting every other year in a location outside the U.S. At the initiative of Sage Publications we are revisiting the contract for getting out Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly: the wonderful news is that rapidly rising international demand for ARNOVA's journal, and new ways of delivering content (largely over the web) are producing a much larger flow of income than in the past. And with funding from the UPS Foundation we are completing a pair of short books reviewing best current knowledge of volunteering and on social enterprise.
Q: What work have you done recently for your studies of foundation and the nonprofit sector in general?
A: I'm now about a year into what promises to be a three-year project that will produce two or three books on "The Contributions of Foundations to Society," funded by my co-director, Helmut Anheier (Director of the Center for Civil Society at UCLA's School of Public Affairs). We have lined up an all-star group of researchers on the roles of foundations in half a dozen fields ranging from health care to social reform to international affairs, and also in several regions. Susan Eagan (Executive Director of the Mandel Center) is advising this project, and she and I have already completed much of a chapter on "Foundations in Northeastern Ohio." A paper I presented at a conference on "The Legitimacy of Foundations" in Paris in 2004 will be published later this year in French (if current plans are realized), as well as in English. I presented subsequent papers at a conference organized by the Milbank Memorial Fund at the Pocantico Conference Center of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund in January, and at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, early in April.
I've also recently had many wonderful opportunities to try out outlines of a history of the U.S. nonprofit sector that I've been working on for too long. These include chances to speak in the last couple of years at the Master in International Studies in Philanthropy program at the University of Bologna, the "Capstone" conference of the (U.S.) Social Science Research Council at an NYU facility in Florence, at the Israeli Center for Third sector Research at Ben Gurion University in Israel, at the Institute for Nonprofits at North Carolina State University, and at the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy. I've tried out some of my ideas about the history of the American nonprofit sector in several articles: the most recent is "Donors, Intermediaries, and Beneficiaries: The Changing Moral Dynamics of American Nonprofit Organizations," appeared in David H. Smith, editor, Good Intentions: Moral Obstacles and Opportunities (Indiana University Press, 2005).
Q: What other hobbies and interests do you pursue?
A: I've been exceptionally lucky to be able to combine my research and writing and teaching with traveling, one of my favorite hobbies. And traveling has given me many opportunities to learn about food and wine - my favorite, and daily, recreation is to cook.
You can contact David Hammack at david.hammack@case.edu.
