About Us
What Is GreatNonprofits?
GreatNonprofits is a place to find, review, and talk about great—and perhaps not yet great—nonprofits. You already know that reviews by other people who have gone to a restaurant or tried out a doctor are the best way to find out about the quality of those services. If you have direct experience with a nonprofit, GreatNonprofits makes it easier for you to share your knowledge so that other people can discover the great nonprofits that are out there.
We don't review nonprofits ourselves. Much like Amazon book reviews or consumer reviews site (Epinions, Zagat, TripAdvisor, Yelp, etc.), the reviews and ratings are posted by people who have been touched by a nonprofit and want to share their story about it. You'll see on our site stories of people who have volunteered for or donated to nonprofits and stories of people who have received services.
GreatNonprofits is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization itself, which is funded by the Kellogg Foundation, the Forbes Funds, and individuals who believe that we provide a needed information source for nonprofits, volunteers, and donors.
Launched in November 2007, GreatNonprofits has already received media coverage in Newsweek, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Alliance magazine, and on NPR. GreatNonprofits is led by a seasoned nonprofit executive, Perla Ni, founder and former publisher of the Stanford Social Innovation Review. More about the national board and advisory board are here: http://www.greatnonprofits.org/about/
We're in beta right now, so you'll see glitches here and there. Click on "Bugs?" on the above right if you come across any. And if you have other suggestions for us, drop us a line at . We are eager to hear from you and get your feedback!
Best, GreatNonprofits Team
The Backstory: Why the Voices of People Directly Served by Nonprofits Matter
I was the publisher of the Stanford Social Innovation Review (www.ssireview.org) when Hurricane Katrina hit, and we wanted to write a story about how nonprofits were helping the victims. Even though we had access to far more information than the ordinary donor or volunteer, we found it difficult to find out exactly which nonprofits were doing a good job of helping those in need.
We only started to get a clearer understanding of which nonprofits were actually rising to the challenge when our former managing editor, David Weir, flew out to Biloxi, Miss., and walked up and down the streets, asking people which nonprofits had been out there helping them. The locals told him about several excellent small local nonprofits that provided supplies and help. One guy told him how he had broken his leg and had been living in his car until volunteers from a local nonprofit came and found him and took him to the doctor. The local nonprofit in that case was unknown to the larger world and received little public attention or funding. (David's article ended up being published in Salon.)
In general, there isn't a lot of media coverage for local nonprofits, and when there is, it's usually to uncover a scandal rather than to highlight nonprofits that are doing excellent work.
I've gotten to know a lot of nonprofits and most of them are honest and hardworking. And some of them do darned great work. I've known nonprofits personally as a client of their services. My family had $100 when we immigrated and countless nonprofits helped us. If you look at photos of me when I was a kid, practically everything I wore came secondhand from nonprofits. My cavities got filled for free at a nonprofit community dental clinic.
So I know how much the help of a nonprofit can mean.
It struck me, as I struggled professionally to find great nonprofits for our magazine to write about, that there needed to be an online "Zagat," if you will, for nonprofits that would collect stories and reviews of people—people like me, the victims of Katrina, and hundreds of thousands of others—who have seen the impact of nonprofits up close, and can speak personally and firsthand about it. (An article by Bill Meehan had proposed such an idea a year ago.)
So many donors and volunteers want to know if their giving is going to make a difference. Come help others discover what a difference their involvement in a nonprofit can make.
Sincerely,
Perla
Team
CEO - Perla Ni
Perla was the founder and former publisher of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, the leading journal on nonprofit management and philanthropy. While at the Review, she also launched the successful www.ssireview.org Web site and blog. Prior to her work at SSIR, Ni co-founded and was editor in chief of Grassroots.com, a nonprofit advocacy Web site named by Forbes as "Best of the Web." A frequent speaker on nonprofits and philanthropy, Ni continues to blog at www.ssireview.org. She has a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. She's on the advisory board of the Nonprofit Finance Fund and on the board of Goodwill Industries.
Developer - Solspace
Solspace, a full service Web development firm, helped develop the GreatNonprofits platform using open source technologies along with custom modular code. They love working through the challenges of developing highly functional sites built on short timelines for modest budgets.
Developers
- Marcel Blanchet
- Arthur Richards
Arthur Richards is a web developer with passions for open source technology and social justice. He recently co-founded Colingo Labs, a web development company that provides open source solutions for green and socially responsible clients. Colingo Labs' profits fund its development of free open and social technologies, such as Colingo, a global platform for free multi-media language exchange. Prior to starting Colingo Labs, Arthur freelanced in web development after working as a content producer for YouthNoise, a non-profit social networking site focussed on empowering young people. While completing his BA in History from Oberlin College, Arthur worked with Common Ground Relief in New Orleans during the four months following Hurricane Katrina. While working with Common Ground, Arthur helped provide aid and communications to the people of New Orleans and Houma, Louisiana. During his last month in Louisiana, Arthur established a fully networked, solar-powered neighborhood technology center 8th Ward neighborhood of New Orleans.
UI Design - Dan Mayer, Gravity7 and Mike Tam
Quality Assurance - Andrea Heilbronner
VP Product and Engineering - Greg Rublev
Greg is a serial entrepreneur with a passion for building new products. He started at Great Nonprofits in 2007 and has since taken over management of new feature conceptualization and development. Greg is also a Director of Engineering at Plum.com, an up-and-coming social computing startup. Prior to GreatNonprofits, Greg was a Product Manager at Venafi, a systems management for encryption vendor, where he oversaw the Client Encryption Manager as well as a number of other product initiatives. Prior to Venafi, Greg devoted 6.5 years to managing product development at Zoom Information, a premier business information search engine. As a member of the executive team, Greg helped shape the strategic direction of the company and oversaw creation of all of ZoomInfo’s products as it grew from a concept to a multi-million dollar business. Prior to Zoom, Greg was a consultant and provided web programming and development to over 50 clients. He was also a co-founder and architect of Completecase.com, a very successful online legal services provider. Greg holds a Bachelor degree in Computer Science from SUNY at Buffalo and a High Tech MBA from Northeastern University.
Operations Manager - Iskra Astudillo
Marketing and Outreach Manager - Amie Baron
Pittsburgh Program Director- Vivien Luk of The Forbes Funds
Vivien Luk is the community resources officer of the Forbes Funds, a supporting organization of the Pittsburgh Foundation dedicated to advancing the capacity of area nonprofits. At the Forbes Funds, she manages the Greater Pittsburgh Nonprofit Partnership (GPNP), a coalition of about 300 nonprofit organizations in the Southwestern Pennsylvania region, and she also manages projects under their Sector Leadership grants, including Conversations and the Executive Education program. The GPNP is a partner and pilot participant of GreatNonprofits. She is also a co-founder of PGH Party for a Purpose, an organization that hosts fun, creative, and affordable parties for diverse young-minded individuals while raising funds and generating support for nonprofit organizations in Southwestern Pennsylvania. She received her M.S. in public policy and management from the Heinz School of Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University and her B.A. in philosophy from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Board Members
Frances Phillips
Frances Phillips is a senior program officer for the arts at the Walter and Elise Haas Fund in San Francisco. She serves on the boards of the California Alliance for Arts Education, CIF of the San Francisco Foundation, and Grantmakers in the Arts—for which she also serves as co-editor of its triquarterly publication, the Reader. Prior to working at the Haas Fund, Frances was executive director of Intersection for the Arts (1988–94) and assistant director and director of the Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State University (1982–88). She continues to teach grantwriting and creative writing at San Francisco State. Frances is the author of three small press books of poetry and, with her husband Stan Hutton, co-author of The Nonprofit Kit for Dummies.
Bruce R. Sievers
Bruce Sievers is a visiting scholar and lecturer at Stanford University and adjunct professor at the Institute for Nonprofit Organization Management at the University of San Francisco. He received a B.A. in international relations and an M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University. He also studied at the Freie Universität Berlin as a Fulbright Scholar and at Oxford University under a Leverhulme Dissertation Fellowship. He has taught political science and was a legislative assistant in the U.S. Senate. Sievers was the founding executive director of state humanities councils in Montana and California and served as executive director of the Walter and Elise Haas Fund, a private foundation in San Francisco, from 1983 to 2002. His work in philanthropy has included serving on the board of directors of the Council on Foundations and chairing the board of the Northern California Grantmakers. In 2002, Sievers received the Outstanding Foundation Executive Award at the National Philanthropy Day celebration in Northern California.
He has published in academic journals in the field of political theory and in the Los Angeles Times and other journals on public affairs and philanthropy. His most recent publications are "If Pigs Had Wings: the Appeals and Limits of Venture Philanthropy," a lecture delivered in Georgetown University's Waldemar A. Nielsen Issues in Philanthropy Seminar series, and "Philanthropy's Blindspots" in Just Money: A Critique of Contemporary American Philanthropy. He is currently working on a book with the working title Between Public and Private: Civil Society, Philanthropy, and the Fate of the Commons.
Mal Warwick
Mal Warwick has been raising money professionally since 1979 and has gained worldwide recognition as an author, consultant, and trainer. He has written or edited 18 books, including the standard texts How to Write Successful Fundraising Letters and Revolution in the Mailbox. Mal is founder and chairman of Mal Warwick Associates (Berkeley, Calif.), which specializes in direct mail, and has founded or co-founded three other companies that furnish data processing, telephone fundraising, and online fundraising and marketing services to nonprofits. He has been a popular speaker at AFP conferences throughout North America for nearly 20 years. Mal is chair-elect of London-based Resource Alliance, which has organized the International Fundraising Congress for more than 25 years. A Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador in the 1960s, he has lived in Berkeley since 1969. You may reach Mal through www.malwarwick.com or by e-mail at mal@malwarwick.com.
Advisory Board
Gregg Behr
Gregg Behr is executive director of the Grable Foundation, a Pittsburgh-based foundation dedicated to improving the lives of children. From 2002 to 2006, Mr. Behr served as president of the Forbes Funds, another Pittsburgh-based foundation that supports nonprofit capacity building, research, and leadership development. Prior to assuming his position at the Forbes Funds, Mr. Behr practiced as a litigator with Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney, a national law firm for which he remains of counsel. Mr.Behr additionally serves as founding director of the Content of Our Character Project, a nationally acclaimed ethics initiative featured in, among other outlets, The New York Times, CNN's Anderson Cooper 360, and the PBS documentary The Power of Integrity.
A recipient of a Truman Scholarship, Mr. Behr simultaneously received his law degree and MPP from Duke University. He also completed the Jane Addams Fellowship at Indiana University. He received his B.A., Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Notre Dame. Mr. Behr serves as chair of the Mentoring Partnership of Southwestern Pennsylvania, and as a trustee for WQED Multimedia and Grantmakers for Effective Organizations. Additionally, he sits on advisory councils for the Pew Partnership for Civic Change, the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute, and the Institute of Politics at the University of Pittsburgh. Past volunteer leadership roles include service to Grantmakers of Western Pennsylvania, the United Way of Allegheny County, Pittsburgh's Clean Campaign Committee, the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, the National Panel on the Nonprofit Sector, Independent Sector, and the Lincoln Legacy Exhibits. In 2002, Mr. Behr received the Outstanding Young Lawyer Award presented by the Young Lawyers Section of the Allegheny County Bar Association. He was also awarded an American Marshall Memorial Fellowship by the German Marshall Fund of the United States. In 2003, Mr. Behr was selected as one of Pittsburgh's 40 Under 40.
David Bonbright
David Bonbright, a lawyer by training, is founder and chief executive of Keystone, an effort to transform the fields of philanthropy and sustainable development through the introduction of systems and tools for planning, performance management, monitoring, and reporting that take constituency feedback seriously. Over his 24-year career in international philanthropy and sustainable development, David has consistently expanded the boundaries of thinking and practice, and successfully caused systemic change at the national level in two countries, with influence traceable across the world, forging networks and mobilizing tens of millions of pounds along the way. His grantmaking expertise was honed in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and spans the gamut of social investment approaches—human rights, social service delivery, advocacy, capacity building, and economic development. In recent years he has concentrated increasingly on building the field of philanthropy, and has become a much-demanded consultant, speaker, and author at the frontiers of impact and performance evaluation, social entrepreneurship, “blended value” investing, communications technology for social change, capacity building, and the role of the independent citizen sector in complementing government and business contributions to sustainable development. While with the Ford Foundation in the 1980s, he was declared persona non grata by the apartheid government in South Africa. In 1990 he returned to South Africa and led the development of key building blocks for civil society, including SANGONET (the first nonprofit Internet service provider), SANGOCO (the first national association of NGOs), SAGA (the first national association of grantmakers), and worked to reform the regulatory and tax framework for not-for-profit organizations. He also represented Ashoka: Innovators for the Public in Africa, overseeing the election of the first few years of Ashoka’s social entrepreneur fellowships in Africa. As a grantmaker and manager with Aga Khan Foundation (1997–2004), Ford Foundation (1983–87), Oak Foundation (1988–90), and Ashoka (1990–97), David has sought to evolve and test innovative approaches to strengthening citizen self-organization for social justice and sustainable development as an alternative to prevailing bureaucratic, top-down models. He was an early advocate of market-oriented solutions to social problems, importing social audit methodology to South Africa in the early 1990s to help businesses recognize and realize opportunities to create social value through core business activities. He has authored and co-authored a number of reports and books, including Creating an Enabling Legal Framework for Nonprofit Organizations in Pakistan (Pakistan Centre for Philanthropy, 2003), Enhancing Indigenous Philanthropy for Social Investment (Aga Khan Development Network, 2000), Philanthropy in Pakistan (Aga Khan Development Network, 2000), and Leading Public Entrepreneurs (Ashoka, 1997). He sits on the boards, advisory councils, and knowledge networks of CIVICUS Global Alliance for Citizen Participation (Chair of the CIVICUS Board Programme Committee), the Constant Gardener Trust, Global Action Network-Net (Co-Lead Steward of the Measuring Impact Community of Practice), Alliance magazine (editorial board, regular contributor, occasional guest editor), AccountAbility Forum, Allavida, the Johns Hopkins University Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project, Goldman Foundation Environmental Awards, and the CIVICUS Civil Society Index. In 2003, he was elected as a Synergos Senior Fellow. David can be contacted at David@keystoneaccountability.org. Further information can be found at www.keystoneaccountability.org.
Phil Buchanan
Phil Buchanan is president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) and was the first CEP staff member hired in 2001. At CEP, Phil has built a research team, secured funding, developed a research agenda, managed the development and introduction of new performance assessment tools, and authored or co-authored CEP’s major research reports. Phil speaks regularly on issues of foundation effectiveness, foundation-grantee relations, foundation governance, and assessment of foundation performance at national and regional gatherings of foundation and nonprofit executives and trustees. He has experience in strategy consulting as a principal at the Parthenon Group, where he worked with senior executives at a variety of companies to define strategies and assess performance. He also has significant nonprofit management experience at Wesleyan University, where he served as special assistant to the president, and Mount Holyoke College, where he was assistant to the president and secretary of the college. His writings on education, foundation, and management issues have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Alliance magazine, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among other publications. He is a member of Independent Sector’s Ethics and Accountability Committee and serves as a member and past president of the board of directors of the Children’s Center of Lexington. He holds an MBA from Harvard University and received his undergraduate degree in government from Wesleyan University.
Rob Gitin
Rob Gitin is the co-founder and director of At the Crossroads (ATC), which reaches out to homeless youth and young adults at their point of need, and works with them to build healthy and fulfilling lives. He first became involved in working with homeless youth through an internship at Youth Outreach Program (YOP) in San Jose that was part of a service-learning course he took while he was an undergraduate at Stanford University in 1994. He continued to work full time or volunteer at this drop-in center and homeless shelter for teenagers throughout his last two years at Stanford and for one year after graduating. As a senior, he wrote an honors thesis that provided a historical perspective and contemporary overview on homeless youth that included interviews with homeless teenagers he worked with at YOP. After graduating in 1996, in addition to working as a YOP counselor, Rob was a teaching assistant for the service-learning course he had taken as an undergraduate, “Poverty and Homelessness in America,” taught by Al Camarillo. His primary responsibility was to set up a pilot after-school tutoring program for children at two local shelters for homeless families. In April 1997, he was awarded an Echoing Green fellowship to start up ATC with his colleague Taj Mustapha, and has been working there ever since. ATC began providing services in early 1998.
Andy Goodman
Andy Goodman brings experience in advertising, radio, and television (where he wrote for the network comedies Dinosaurs and The Nanny) to his work as a communications consultant and trainer. Based in Los Angeles, he specializes in helping nonprofits, foundations, government agencies, and educational institutions reach more people more effectively.
Andy publishes a monthly journal, Free-Range Thinking, to share best practices in public interest communications, and is author of the books Storytelling as Best Practice, Why Bad Ads Happen to Good Causes, and Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes. He currently serves as a senior fellow for Civic Ventures, on the advisory board of VolunteerMatch, and was selected by Al Gore to train 1,000 people who are currently conducting presentations on global warming throughout the United States and around the world.
Andy Goodman 444 North Larchmont Blvd., Suite 102 Los Angeles, CA 90004 323.464.3956 (ph) • 323.464.5412 (fax) E-mail: andy@agoodmanonline.com Web site: www.agoodmanonline.com
Bill Jackson
Bill Jackson is the founding president of GreatSchools.net, a nonprofit Web site that provides parents with information that helps them choose the right school for their children, support their children’s learning, and improve schools in their communities. Under his leadership GreatSchools.net has grown to become the leading national source of information about K-12 information for parents, serving 3 million parents per month.
Bill was formerly a project director at Smart Valley Inc., where he helped create SmartVoter.org, an online guide to elections. Before that, Bill spent five years in the computer network industry and was a teacher in Hunan, China, and Washington, D.C. Bill has a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Yale University and is a graduate of the San Francisco Coro Fellows Program in Public Affairs.
An avid public school volunteer, Bill serves on the board of directors of the San Francisco Education Fund and recently served as treasurer of two San Francisco school financing measures and a school board campaign. He was also recently appointed to the California "P-16 Council" by State Superintendent of Instruction Jack O'Connell and is member of the board of directors of the California Voter Foundation.
Jan Masaoka
Jan Masaoka is a leading writer and thinker on nonprofit organizations with particular emphasis on boards of directors, business planning, and the role of nonprofits in society. She recently left her position of 14 years as executive director of CompassPoint Nonprofit Services (www.compasspoint.org), a consulting and training firm for nonprofits based in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Masaoka writes the Board Café for nonprofit board members, a newsletter now with 44,000 subscribers (www.boardcafe.org). She authored The Best of the Board Café (published by the Wilder Foundation) and her research work includes recent studies on female executive directors of color, executive director tenure, all-volunteer organizations, and nonprofit space and occupancy needs. She is a frequent keynote speaker and contributor to nonprofit journals.
Masaoka's community activities include serving as the chair of the Asian & Pacific Islander Wellness Center (www.apiwellness.org), and as a board member of the San Francisco Foundation Community Initiative Funds (www.cifunds.org) and the Hispanic Foundation of Silicon Valley (www.hfsv.org). She was a member of the Governance and Fiduciary Working Group of the Panel on the Nonprofit Sector convened to advise the U.S. Senate Finance Committee. Masaoka has completed two terms on the Telecommunications Commission of the City and County of San Francisco.
For the past eight years, Masaoka has been named one of the "Fifty Most Influential People" in the nonprofit sector nationwide, and in 2003 she was named "Nonprofit Executive of the Year" by The NonProfit Times.
William F. Meehan III (Founding Advisory Board Member)
William F. Meehan III is a senior director of McKinsey and Company Inc. During his 29 years with the firm, Meehan has had extensive experience working with chief executives and senior leaders in technology, private equity, retailing, financial services, and media. His focus includes top management strategy, organization, and leadership, including assisting more than a dozen new CEOs in shaping their agenda.
In addition to his service to clients, Meehan has held many leadership roles with the firm. As a member of the Shareholders Council, McKinsey's board, he is chair of the Client Committee, which is responsible for all client-oriented polices of the firm. In addition, he chairs the Firm Investments Committee, which oversees more than $4 billion of investments through the McKinsey Investment Office. He was formerly vice chair of the Directors Review Committee, co-chair of the Private Equity and Venture Capital Practice, chair of the West Coast practice, and managing director of the San Francisco office.
Meehan is also a regular writer and speaker on the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors with a focus on strategy, governance, and performance measurement. He is lecturer in strategic management at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, where he teaches “Strategic Management of Nonprofits,” as well as a faculty affiliate of the Center for Social Innovation and a member of the Stanford Social Innovation Review's board of advisors.
Meehan is a member and former chair of the board of Philanthropic Research Inc., which operates Guidestar.org, the preeminent information source on the nonprofit sector; a member and former chair of the board of directors for the United Way of the Bay Area; a member of the board of the San Francisco Symphony; a member of the California Business Roundtable; and former member of the California Chamber of Commerce, the Committee on JOBS, and the boards of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Fordham Prep.
Robert G. Ottenhoff
Robert G. Ottenhoff was elected president and CEO and a member of the board of directors of GuideStar in September 2002. Mr. Ottenhoff joined GuideStar in the spring of 2002 as president and COO. Established in 1994, GuideStar’s mission is to revolutionize philanthropy and nonprofit practice by providing information that advances transparency, enables users to make better decisions, and encourages charitable giving. Through its Web site, www.guidestar.org, GuideStar assembles and delivers comprehensive financial and programmatic reports on 1.7 million nonprofit organizations and foundations. In 2007, it experienced nearly 11 million user sessions from nonprofit leaders, individual donors, institutional donors, and sector service providers. Mr. Ottenhoff spent several years as president of a high-tech company and operating an international consulting practice. He worked for more than 25 years in executive positions in the public broadcasting field, including serving as the executive vice president and COO of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), the executive director of the New Jersey Public Broadcasting Authority, and founder and general manager of WBGO-FM, the New York-area jazz and news station. Mr. Ottenhoff currently serves on the board of directors for Vision TV, Grameen Foundation USA, AAFRC Trust for Philanthropy, and ePhilanthropy Foundation. He is a graduate of Calvin College and Rutgers University.
Tom Patterson
Tom Patterson has held strategic positions at Procter & Gamble, PeopleSoft, and Respond.com. In his last operating role, he was the SVP of technology development and operations for MarketTools, which he managed through five years of rapid growth. Most recently, Tom was an entrepreneur in residence with the Mayfield Fund before joining Wize as CEO. Tom has earned a B.S. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in chemical engineering as well as an MBA from Harvard Business School. Tom also sits on the Wize Board of Directors. www.wize.com
Naval Ravikant
Naval Ravikant is the chairman of Vast.com, and previously founded Genoa Corporation (acquired by Finisar), and Epinions (which went public as part of Shopping.com).
He was a venture partner at August Capital and led investments in Scintera, Neopath, Technorati, Microdisplay, DeviceScape, and Mimosa.
Ravikant has also helped numerous friends start companies and has been an adviser to them. Some of the companies that he has helped with everything from founding to product design to fundraising include iPivot (sold to Intel), Intrinsic Graphics, Andale, XFire (sold to Viacom), HedgeStreet, Engage, Photo.net, LoyaltyLab, Jaman, Hive7, Dulance (sold to Google), and Bix (sold to Yahoo!).
Tom Reis
Tom Reis is a program director in the Philanthropy and Volunteerism program area at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation in Battle Creek, Mich. In this role, Reis explores new opportunities to better connect and leverage the human and financial resources of current and emerging philanthropists and social innovators into collaborative networks targeted to increase and broaden social impact for the common good. He also provides leadership for foundationwide efforts to increase the organizational effectiveness of Kellogg grantees and nonprofits in general.
Prior to this position, Reis was director of social marketing for the foundation. In this role he worked with foundation program, evaluation, public policy, and technology staff to help plan, implement, and monitor strategy, impact, and knowledge management efforts across the foundation.
Before joining the foundation, Reis spent nearly five years in Indonesia as a senior program officer with the Academy for Educational Development. He provided public health communications and social marketing technical assistance to Indonesian governmental and nongovernmental organizations. Reis has consulted in 15 countries worldwide and has lived in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. He began his career in the commercial sector, holding marketing management positions with the Pillsbury Company and Ringer Corporation, both in Minneapolis. Reis is an avid golfer and occasionally tries his hand at boarding with his "skater" son.
He earned his bachelor's degree in communication arts from the University of Notre Dame, and his MPA from Harvard University.
Mark Rosenman
Mark Rosenman is a distinguished public service professor at the Union Institute & University, where he has long served in many roles while conducting applied research on charity issues. He sees his current work on strengthening the nonprofit sector as an extension of earlier professional efforts in the civil rights movement, urban antipoverty work, international and domestic program development, and in higher education.
He holds a Ph.D. in higher education from the Union Institute Graduate School, an M.A. from New York University's Center for Human Relations and Community Studies/School of Education, and a B.A. from Brooklyn College in psychology and sociology. He was an Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Fellow. Mark has published numerous articles and writes opinions for The Chronicle of Philanthropy and others, as well as blogging for the Stanford Social Innovation Review. He believes that a healthy and vital charitable sector is essential to the commonwealth, citizen participation, and to our very democracy.
Rosenman serves on the board of OMB Watch (which he long chaired) and is a trustee of the Management Assistance Group, as well as holding other appointments on nonprofit bodies.
Although born and raised in Brooklyn, Mark now considers himself an "almost native" of Washington, D.C. He is part of what his psychotherapist wife, Mary Lee Stein, has taught him to call a "reconstituted family," which includes an adult son (Lorin) and daughter (Anna).
Michael Seltzer
Michael Seltzer is a leading authority on charitable giving worldwide. In the course of a career that spans forty years, he has worked at five foundations Most recently, he served as the president of the New York Regional Association of Grantmakers (NYRAG), a membership association of more than 270 private, public and corporate funders. He is a founding trustee of EMpower - The Emerging Markets Foundation, which provides young people in EM countries with the resources, skills, mentorship and opportunities to improve their lives.
Previously, he worked as a program officer at the Ford Foundation, where he was responsible for the Foundation’s work in promoting organized philanthropy in the United States, Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
He is a past chair of the Nonprofit Management Masters Degree Program of the New School University's Milano School of Management and Urban Policy, where he taught for over ten years, and served as president of the Nonprofit Management Association (now known as the Alliance for Nonprofit Management).
Michael is the author of Securing Your Organization’s Future: A Complete Guide to Fundraising Strategies, published by the Foundation Center. The book received the first Terry McAdam award from the Nonprofit Management Association. His articles have appeared in Worth, Foundation News and Commentary, NYRAG Times, New Directions for Philanthropic Fundraising, and the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Currently, he serves as a philanthropic advisor to a number of family foundations and the Council on Foundations in Washington, DC.
Peter Tavernise
Peter Tavernise is the senior program officer with the Cisco Systems Foundation (www.cisco.com/go/foundation ) and senior manager of Cisco Systems Inc., Public Benefit Investment. Tavernise brings more than 14 years of nonprofit fundraising, private family foundation, and corporate funding experience to meeting the core mission of Cisco philanthropy: Helping to mobilize NGO-based Internet solutions for the underserved that address basic needs, improve education, and increase individuals' economic opportunity.
He also serves on the board of Teachers Without Borders, and of YouthNoise.org.
David Weir
David Weir is editor in chief at KeepMedia. Weir is a writer, entrepreneur, and educator, with a diverse background in Internet, radio, TV, magazine, and newspaper companies. In 2005 he completed a three-year visiting professorship teaching journalism at Stanford, and also a stint as interim managing editor for the Stanford Social Innovation Review. He periodically also teaches memoir writing for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at San Francisco State University.
Weir became known early in his career as an investigative reporter. In the mid-70s he co-authored the explosive Patty Hearst series for Rolling Stone. Later, with Lowell Bergman, he co-founded the award-winning Center for Investigative Reporting. He also served as managing editor of Mother Jones, senior editor at California magazine, and managing editor of Salon.com, when these media outlets broke big stories.
During the past decade, he also worked in senior management positions at KQED, Wired Digital, and Excite@Home, as well as serving as founding editor in chief for 7x7 magazine. In these jobs, he managed staffs numbering from five to 150, producing daily, weekly, and monthly content.
Over his career, David has written three books—The Bhopal Syndrome (Sierra Books, 1995), Raising Hell (co-authored with Dan Noyes, Addison-Wesley, 1983), and Circle of Poison (co-authored with Mark Schapiro, Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1981). He's working on his fourth, a biography of Jann Wenner (Wiley & Sons).
He has written more than 150 articles in newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Economist, The San Jose Mercury News, New York, The Nation, Rolling Stone, LA Weekly, Wired News, The San Francisco Examiner, Salon.com, and many more. He has won or shared more than two dozen awards for this work, including a National Magazine Award in 1980. He also has worked as a screenwriter and consultant for feature film and television companies, with shared story credit for the film Rollover with Jane Fonda and Kris Kristofferson (Warner Brothers/IPC Films, 1981.) In 1969 he received a B.A. from the University of Michigan, majoring in journalism, and served two years in the Peace Corps in Afghanistan as an English teacher. From 1985 to 2002, he taught various journalism courses at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, over 14 semesters.
Partners
Greater Pittsburgh Nonprofit Partnership
The Greater Pittsburgh Nonprofit Partnership (GPNP) is a coalition of close to 250 nonprofit organizations serving the greater Pittsburgh area. The GPNP serves to unify the nonprofit sector and to provide a voice that speaks to its priorities and concerns. While local nonprofit organizations have been able to turn to recognized leaders to offer answers, the nonprofit sector has not always expressed its collective voice well. The GPNP is a convener for the Pittsburgh region's nonprofit organizations to come together for common purposes—to press our vision for community well-being, to promote philanthropy broadly, and to engage the public and policymakers in honest dialogue about our future. The GPNP was formed just over a year ago by the Forbes Funds, and is now one of the largest associations of its kind in the country. For more information, please go to www.forbesfunds.org/gpnp.
Contact
For all questions or comments about nonprofits in the Pittsburgh area, please contact our Pittsburgh Director, Vivien Luk at the Forbes Funds.
For all questions or comments about nonprofits in the Pittsburgh area, please contact our Pittsburgh director, Vivien Luk at the Forbes Funds.
Vivien Luk Forbes Funds/Greater Pittsburgh Nonprofit Partnership 5 PPG Place, Suite 250 Pittsburgh, PA 15222 (415) 394-2634
All other inquiries, please contact
GreatNonprofits 365 Guinda Street
San Francisco, CA 94107