FOCUS ON FACULTY:
Faculty Feature: Barbara Clemenson, Adjunct Instructor, Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences
Q. You are currently an adjunct instructor teaching nonprofit financial and managerial accounting to our graduate students. Please tell us a bit about the career/education path that led you to this position.
I wanted to be a high-school history teacher, making the "story" of history come alive and become relevant for each student. I substitute taught for 3 years, but couldn't obtain a job as a history teacher. I worked for 5 years at the Library of the Western Reserve Historical Society, which was a dream job for a history major. I earned my Masters in History from CSU during that time, focusing on Cleveland's progressive mayor, Tom Johnson (1901-1909) in my thesis, but for many reasons that couldn't be a long-term position.
In reassessing my life, I knew I had to move in some direction where I could make a living and work up to the extent of my abilities. I frankly started taking accounting classes because my first job out of college was at a bank and I was good at it.
My passion has always been in the nonprofit sector, so specializing in nonprofit accounting was simply a logical step. After taking the CPA I took a job as Director of Finance and Administration at The City Mission in Cleveland. It was the perfect job at the perfect time, as we were transforming from a simply-run organization, with a bookkeeper and outside accountant, to a more professionally run organization. I brought everything in house and was able to totally restructure the accounting and donor management databases to be strategic instead of descriptive, so that we could understand and make long-term decisions based on a clear understanding of our finances - both income and expenses.
The donor management database was under my supervision, and from the beginning I was a vital partner in the fundraising efforts of The City Mission and found I loved development. I did extensive analysis on our giving and was able to help guide our fundraising decisions, working with our fundraising agencies and on our in-house plans. I had my own roster of Major Donors I also cultivated. With my interest and work in fundraising, I decided to obtain the CFRE qualification, also, to express my commitment to and involvement in the profession. And after I left The City Mission, I actually worked for a fundraising agency for a year, being in charge of all the Missions we worked with in the central U.S.
All that being said, I started adjunct teaching in the accounting department in 2000. My passion had always been teaching, and I realized through this that teaching at a college level was the passion of my life. I especially enjoyed making accounting understandable and bringing in real-life experiences.
With that career in mind, I began working on my doctorate here at CWRU, which I plan to complete by May 2008.
I wanted to teach the Mandel Center classes from the time I sat in on them years ago. So when the Center asked me to teach the classes in 2004, it was a dream come true for me.
I love to learn and therefore love to teach. I purposely set up all my classes so that learning is very active and personal to the students - based on their interests and passions - and so that I learn from them about those interests and expand my own horizons and knowledge. Hopefully that's a win-win situation. It has been my joy to redesign a course and teach basic fundraising for Rescue College, as fundraising is my other passion in the nonprofit sector.
Q. What do you enjoy most about teaching Mandel Center students?
I kid that scientists may have thought they've figured out human DNA, but they haven't yet identified the "Nonprofit Genes." Some of us simply have those: We're passionate about the nonprofit sector and can't be truly happy or fulfilled anywhere else.
The wonderful things about teaching Mandel Center students are:
- They are fascinating and wonderful people. I am delighted when former students keep in touch, and we even spend time together as our schedules permit. Many become dear friends as well as colleagues.
- They share that gene and passion - or they wouldn't be in the program.
- They bring a wealth of experiences and a wide range of interests to the program and classroom, which is totally invigorating.
- I love seeing light bulbs go off. The students move from often a fear of finances, to understanding and using financial information and principles in a practical way in their professional lives. And that is what I live for!
Q. You are also a student and Mandel Fellow in the Executive Doctor of Management Program. What type of research are you focusing on and what interests you about this topic?
Nonprofit people tend to be passionate, but sometimes our passion and the extent to which we pour ourselves and our lives into our organizations can cause us to mentally and emotionally move from a proper stewardship attitude toward the mission, to an ownership attitude, which constricts our ability to be open to new ideas, welcoming to new talent, and willing to let go. Often this is unconscious, although not always; we label some extreme examples of this "founder's syndrome."
My doctoral work began with an examination of the qualities that enable an organization to be a true stewardship organization instead of slipping into ownership. That revealed the incredible power of values - of leaders and of those leaders as they profoundly influence the collective values of an organization's culture - in fostering stewardship instead of ownership. [Read the paper.] This was reinforced through the work of Thomas Jeavons [now Executive Director of ARNOVA] in this two books: When the Bottom Line is Faithfulness: Management of Christian Service Organizations (1994) and, with Rebekah Burch Basinger, Growing Givers' Hearts: Treating Fundraising as Ministry (2000. Both published by Jossey-Bass.). Although these books focus on Christian service organizations, Jeavons concludes his first book by stating he believes organizational values are just as important in secular nonprofits, and probably also in for-profit companies. He was writing, of course, before the scandals of the past decade have more intentionally focused scholarly debate on values in business.
I conducted a qualitative study, using seven nonprofit, for-profit and public organizations, to examine the impact of leaders' values on their employees. The findings were fascinating. [Read the paper.] I am now building on that study to research quantitatively the impact of the contents of leaders' values on their employees' perception of their integrity and the extent to which they believe their organization values them and cares about them. All this is part of the current scholarly debate on "authentic leadership" in which leaders who know themselves and are consistently true to themselves, have the ability to inspire their follower to also become authentic. What the research has not examined is the role that leaders' value content has on this process, which is what I'm examining.
So my research is at the intersection of ethics and values, leadership, and organizational behavior. As a result of my interest, I take a very organizational, ethical and leadership position in my teaching of accounting. After all, numbers only reflect the real operations of organizations - and operations are conducted by and with people. Often our "number problems" (both income and expenses) can be traced to organizational, and most likely people, problems. So you have to understand these organizational, ethical and leadership issues, as well as the resulting finances, in order to effect change and truly lead an organization effectively.
Q. What other interests, hobbies, etc do you try to make time for?
I frankly don't have much time for anything other than what I've mentioned. I do some consulting (although I have limited time right now as I finish my doctorate). I also serve on two National Boards: The Association of Gospel Rescue Missions and the National Association of Street Schools, where I'm secretary and chair of the Development Committee, which has been leading the organization through a fascinating branding process. I am a frequent presenter for various organizations with which I'm associated. Other than that, once I finish my doctorate I have several research and writing projects (6 books already planned and, of course, articles will stem from that research, also) I want to focus on. And, of course, I want to teach!
