|
Dana Point, California |
|
|
|
John Agresto joined the Roundtable as director of higher education programs in March 2007. John brings more than 35 years of experience working in higher education to the Roundtable. From 1989 to 2000, he served as president of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, during which time the college’s endowment tripled and student enrollment reached its highest level in school history. He has also served as the deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities under William Bennett and Lynne Cheney. From August 2003 to June 2004, John worked in Baghdad for the Provisional Authority as the senior advisor to the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, seeking to strengthen and reform Iraq’s universities and vocational colleges. Out of this experience came his book Mugged by Reality: the Liberation of Iraq and the Failure of Good Intentions (Encounter Press, NYC, 2007), the most recent of the four he has written. John received his A.B. in political science and history from Boston College in 1967 and his Ph.D. in government from Cornell University in 1974. |
|
Truman Anderson Truman O. Anderson, Ph.D. is the executive director at the Stuart Family Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois. During his tenure with the foundation, he has overseen the development of grant making programs on the media, national security federal elections and civic education. Before joining the Stuart Family Foundation, he was a lecturer in international history at the London School of Economics, specializing in German history and the World Wars. Anderson is a former Marine Corps infantry officer and holds a doctorate in international history from the University of Chicago. He is a member of the Philanthropy Roundtable’s National Security Breakthrough Group and is a director of the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation. |
|
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen is director of the Arrillaga Foundation, which focuses on education and community development in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is also founder and chairman of the Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund (SV2), a venture philanthropy fund that leverages the financial, intellectual, and human capital of its partners to impact the local and global nonprofit community. Ms. Arrillaga-Andreessen serves on the faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she has created and teaches Stanford’s first courses on strategic philanthropy. She is currently writing two books on institutional and individual philanthropy. Ms. Arrillaga-Andreessen sits on multiple nonprofit boards, including Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the Sand Hill Foundation, Stanford University School of Education, the Hoover Institution, and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. |
|
Barbara Barrett is CEO and owner of Triple Creek Guest Ranch in Darby, Montana, and a business and aviation attorney. She chairs the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy and serves on the senior advisory board at Harvard’s Institute of Politics. Mrs. Barrett previously served as vice chairman of the U.S. Civil Aeronautics Board, deputy administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, founding chairman of Valley Bank of Arizona, CEO of the American Management Association, and delegate to the United Nations. She also chaired the U.S. Secretary of Commerce’s Export Conference, the International Women’s Forum, Arizona World Affairs Council, and Thunderbird School of Global Management. She currently serves on the corporate boards of Raytheon, Aerospace, Exponent, and the Mayo Clinic. Mrs. Barrett was the first Republican woman to run for Governor of Arizona and the first civilian woman to land in an F/A-18 Hornet on an aircraft carrier. She is a Horatio Alger Award recipient. |
|
Steve Beck is executive vice president of Geneva Global, which was created by donors for donors to find effective local programs engaged in life-changing projects in more than 90 countries. Mr. Beck has 20 years' experience in strategy consulting, including six years leading consulting operation in Europe, Asia, and South Africa. He originated the World Wealth Report, an annual report on trends in the wealth management industry produced jointly by Merrill Lynch and Cap Gemini. Mr. Beck is a senior partner of Monitor Group, an international strategy consulting and merchant banking firm. In addition to co-leading the Group's business in Europe, Mr. beck served on the board of the Monitor Institute, the group company that advises foundations and direct service organizations in the nonprofit sector. |
|
Jim Blew Jim Blew is director of K-12 Education Reform for the Walton Family Foundation, which seeks to improve the academic performance of U.S. schools by creating new quality educational options, especially for low-income families in urban school districts. Mr. Blew previously directed various campaigns for the Alliance for School Choice and its predecessor, the American Education Reform Council. He has also worked for political and marketing communications firms in New York and California. In 1997, Mr. Blew helped found the highly successful Watts Learning Center charter elementary school in South Los Angeles. |
|
Paul Brest is president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, California. He has served as a law clerk to Judge Bailey Aldrich and Supreme Court Justice John M. Harlan. Mr. Brest has also practiced with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., in Jackson, Mississippi, working on civil rights litigation before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1969, where his research and teaching focused on constitutional law and problem solving/decision making. From 1987 to 1999, he served as the dean of Stanford Law School. Mr. Brest is co-author of Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking and currently teaches a law school course called “Problem Solving, Decision Making, and Professional Judgment.” |
|
James E. Canales is president and chief executive officer of The James Irvine Foundation, a private foundation dedicated to expanding opportunity for the people of California. Mr. Canales also serves on the boards of various nonprofit organizations, including the board of trustees of Stanford University and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and the board of directors of the College Access Foundation of California, a newly-created private foundation dedicated to assisting California students to attend college. He currently serves on Independent Sector’s Building Value Together steering committee and is a member of the management committee for Southern California Grantmakers in Los Angeles. Mr. Canales is a cofounder and past board chair of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO). |
|
Don “Bubba” Cathy is senior vice president of Chick-fil-A, Inc., one of the largest privately-held restaurant chains in the country with more than 1,300 restaurants. He is also vice president of Chick-fil-A’s WinShape Foundation, where he oversees the WinShape Homes, WinShape Wilderness, and WinShape Retreat. WinShape Homes provide loving, nurturing homes to children who are victims of circumstance and need a secure family environment in which to grow and mature. The 11 homes are located throughout the southeast and can accommodate up to 128 children. WinShape Wilderness provides corporate clients, various groups and individuals with adventure experiences to stimulate physical and spiritual transformation. WinShape Retreat is a scenic retreat near Rome, Georgia, that hosts business and church conferences, as well as youth summer camps. Winshape Marriage also operates marriage counseling sessions at the retreat, working with couples to strengthen their marital bonds by reconnecting with their religious faith. |
|
Richard Chambers is chief executive officer of CalOptima, a county organized health system authorized by state and federal law to administer Medi-Cal benefits in Orange County, California. CalOptima has striven to improve access to health care for Orange County’s low-income families, seniors, and persons with disabilities. Mr. Chambers previously spent more than 27 years working for the Federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and San Francisco. He most recently served as director of the Family and Children’s Health Programs Group, where he was responsible for policy and operational direction of Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), including managed care, waiver programs, eligibility, and payment issues affecting families and children. |
|
Clayton M. Christensen is the Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, with a joint appointment in the Technology & Operations Management and General Management faculty groups. His research and teaching interests center on the management of technological innovation, developing organizational capabilities and finding new markets for new technologies. Mr. Christensen previously served as chairman and president of CPS Corporation, a firm he co-founded with several MIT professors in 1984. He holds a B.A. in economics from Brigham Young University and an M.Phil. in economics from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He also received an MBA and DBA from the Harvard Business School, in 1979 and 1992, respectively. He is the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, which received the Global Business Book Award for the best business book published in 1997. |
|
Frederic H. Clark is founder and president of Inner-City Scholarship Inc., a public charity that provides four-year scholarships to inner-city Catholic eighth-graders who wish to attend Catholic high schools. Mr. Clark spent 22 years on Wall Street, first with Goldman, Sachs & Co., and then with his own hedge fund, Pacific Equity Management, which he founded in 1978. He retired from actively managing money in 1995 to devote his time to philanthropic interests. Mr. Clark is a volunteer teacher in the inner city. In 1996, he developed Life 101, a course for seventh- and eighth-graders that teaches students the virtues and habits they need to succeed in life. Mr. Clark currently serves on the boards of the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, Los Niños, the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts, the Witherspoon Institute, and the Institute for American Values. |
|
Bruce Cole is the eighth chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. As chairman, Mr. Cole has launched We the People, an initiative to encourage the teaching, study, and understanding of American history and culture. Under his leadership, the endowment is also spearheading the application of digital technology to the humanities through its Digital Humanities Initiative, begun in 2006. He previously served as a Distinguished Professor of Art History and Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University in Bloomington. Mr. Cole has written fourteen books, many of them about the Renaissance. His most recent book is The Informed Eye: Understanding Masterpieces of Western Art. Mr. Cole earned his bachelor’s degree at Case Western Reserve University, his master’s degree at Oberlin College, and his doctorate at Bryn Mawr College. He is the founder and former co-president of the Association for Art History. |
|
William Damon is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence, and a professor of education at Stanford University. His current research explores how people develop character and a sense of purpose in their work, family, and community relationships. Mr. Damon previously served as a professor of education at Brown University, where he continues to hold an appointment as an adjunct professor of human development. His most recent books are Taking Philanthropy Seriously: Beyond Noble Intentions to Responsible Giving (2006), The Moral Advantage: How to Succeed in Business by Doing the Right Thing (2004), and Noble Purpose: The Joy of Living a Meaningful Life (2003). Mr. Damon received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and his Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Education. |
|
Peter H. Diamandis is the chairman and CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation, which awarded the $10,000,000 Ansari X PRIZE for private spaceflight and is now implementing prizes in a variety of different arenas (cancer, energy, education, genomics, and environment). He is also the CEO of Zero Gravity Corporation, a commercial space company about to launch FAA-certified parabolic flights utilizing a Boeing 727 aircraft. Mr. Diamandis is a founder and trustee of the International Space University, where he served as the university’s first managing director. He is also co-founder of Space Adventures, the company which brokered Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth’s flight to the International Space Station. Mr. Diamandis received his undergraduate degree in molecular genetics and graduate degree in aerospace engineering from MIT and his medical degree from Harvard University. He has a Ph.D. from the International Space University. |
|
Thomas E. Dillon has been the president of Thomas Aquinas College since 1991. Widely-recognized as a national leader in the reform of accreditation in higher education, Mr. Dillon was active in the early 1990s in organizing the American Academy for Liberal Education. In 2003, he was appointed to a three-year term by the United States Secretary of Education to the 15-member National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity. He served two consecutive three-year terms in the 1990s on the 11-member national Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, an independent committee that advises Congress and the Secretary of Education on the disposition of over $60 billion annually in financial aid. Mr. Dillon holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Integral Liberal Arts from St. Mary’s College of California and master’s and doctoral degrees in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame. |
|
Bill Drayton is chairman and chief executive officer of Ashoka, a global association of the world’s leading social entrepreneurs. He is also chair of Youth Venture, Get America Working!, and Community Greens. Mr. Drayton previously worked for McKinsey and Company in New York after graduating from Yale Law School in 1970. He launched both Save EPA and its successor, Environmental Safety. In 2005 Mr. Drayton was selected as one of America’s Best Leaders by US News & World Report and Harvard University’s Center for Public Leadership. This year Mr. Drayton received the Duke University Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship’s (CASE) Leadership in Social Entrepreneurship Award. |
|
Since 2004, Alex Echols has served the Roundtable as a part-time consultant on conservation philanthropy. He set up his own consulting firm in 2001 to help industry, the conservation community, and government deliver more conservation for their dollar invested. Of particular interest to Alex are non-regulatory approaches to better environmental management, getting a better return on conservation investment, use of incentives and markets to improve conservation delivery, and fostering broader participation in conservation. He wrote several key conservation programs, such as the Conservation Title of the Farm Bill, during his 12-year tenure with Senator Robert W. Kasten, Jr. (R-WI). Alex subsequently worked for a trade association where he used market incentives to encourage the use of recyclables. He also served as deputy director of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation for four and a half years and as acting executive director for another year and a half. |
|
Linda Evans is president, chief executive officer, director, and trustee of the Meadows Foundation. She is the great niece of founders Algur H. and Virginia Meadows. Ms. Evans also serves on the Legislation & Regulations Committee for the Council on Foundations and Independent Sector’s Panel on the Nonprofit Sector. A graduate of the University of Texas, Linda worked in Washington, D.C., from 1976 to 1983, where she served in the office of the late Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania and in the White House Office of Media Relations under President Ronald Reagan. Evans currently serves on the boards of RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community Service and the Institute for Public School Initiative at the University of Texas at Austin. She also serves on the Dallas Achieves Commission of the Dallas Independent School District. |
|
Chester E. Finn, Jr., is a scholar, educator and public servant who has been at the forefront of the national education debate for 25 years. Mr. Finn was born in Ohio, and received his PhD in education policy from Harvard University. During his career, Mr. Finn has served as a professor of education policy at Vanderbilt, as counsel to the U.S. ambassador to India, as a legislative director in the office of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and as an Assistant Secretary for Research and Improvement in the U.S. Department of Education. Apart from being President of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, he serves on the board of numerous organizations concerned with primary and secondary schooling. Mr. Finn is the author of 14 books and over 350 articles, and his work has appeared in The Weekly Standard, Christian Science Monitor, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, Education Week, Harvard Business Review, and The Boston Globe. Mr. Finn is the recipient of several awards from the Educational Press of America, Choice Magazine, the Education Writers Association, and the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge. He is also a member of the board of The Philanthropy Roundtable. |
|
Karen Flippo Karen F. Flippo is the chief executive officer of the National Association of Councils on Developmental Disabilities. She previously served as vice president of the Brain Injury Association of America, where she was responsible for managing government and affiliate relations, information and resources, and education and training departments. She has also served as director of the national United Cerebral Palsy’s Special Projects Division and worked at the Rehabilitation and Training Center on Supported Employment at Virginia Commonwealth University. Ms. Flippo has 30 years of experience in rehabilitation and disability that spans direct service, grants management, organizational management, public policy, education and training, research, evaluation, and federal government service. |
|
Frederic Fransen is executive director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education. He previously served as director of higher education programs at The Philanthropy Roundtable. From 1996 until 2006, Mr. Fransen was variously a program officer, fellow, and senior fellow at Liberty Fund, Inc., a private operating foundation. From 2001 to 2006, he also served as director of grants for the Pierre F. and Enid Goodrich Foundation. From 1988 to 1991, he worked in Brussels, Belgium, as a researcher studying European Community and NATO security policy. Mr. Fransen has a Ph.D. in social thought from the University of Chicago and has written on topics ranging from the origins of the European Community and the interplay between literature and politics to bioethics, markets, and the future of health care policy in China. |
|
Gary W. Goldstein, M.D. is president of the Kennedy Krieger Institute, which serves children with developmental disabilities such as cerebral palsy, traumatic brain injuries, mental retardation, autism, and learning and behavioral disorders. The institute has a specialty hospital, a special education school, family support services and a research institute. The research institute focuses on developmental brain disorders and supports diverse interdisciplinary approaches, including molecular neuroscience, neurotoxicology, neurogenetics, neurobehavior, motor analysis and brain imaging with facilities for laboratory and clinical projects. Dr. Goldstein is also professor of neurology, pediatrics and environmental health science at Johns Hopkins University. He previously served as director of the pediatric neurology section at the University of Michigan Medical Center at Ann Arbor. Dr. Goldstein is the scientific adviser to the newly-formed foundation, Autism Speaks. |
|
Michael W. Grebe Michael W. Grebe is president and CEO of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee. Mr. Grebe served on the Bradley board of directors for six years before being named as president. Prior to joining the foundation, Mr. Grebe was the chairman and CEO of Foley & Lardner, one of the country’s largest law firms, where he was a partner for more than 25 years. An Army veteran of Vietnam and former Republican National Committeeman for Wisconsin, Grebe has served on numerous boards, including stints at the United States Military Academy, the Wisconsin Board of Veterans Affairs, the University of Wisconsin’s Board of Regents, Stanford’s Hoover Institution, the Oshkosh Truck Company, and the Milwaukee Brewers Baseball Club. He currently serves on the board of The Philanthropy Roundtable. |
|
Michael Guillen Michael Guillen is president of Fillmanthropy Media, Inc. For fourteen years, he was the Emmy-award-winning science correspondent for ABC News. He was also a physics instructor at Harvard University for eight years. Mr. Guillen currently hosts Where Did It Come From? a weekly, one-hour, prime-time series for The History Channel. He is the author of two books on mathematics for the general public: Bridges to Infinity: the Human Side of Mathematics and Five Equations that Changed the World: the Power and Poetry of Mathematics. His latest book, Can a Smart Person Believe in God?, tells of his lifelong efforts to reconcile his scientific career with his deeply religious upbringing. |
|
Jack Hafer is president of Boulevard Pictures and producer of the feature film To End All Wars, winner of the Grand Prize for Dramatic Feature at the Heartland Film Festival. Mr. Hafer previously served as vice president and general manager of GMT Studios in Culver City, which is known for film projects such as Wag the Dog, LA Story, Predator, Minority Report, Tequila Sunrise, Blade 1 & 2, and The Fan. During his tenure there, Mr. Hafer formed the Culver City Film Studio Consortium, which included the heads of MGM Distribution, Culver City Studios, Columbia Pictures/Lorimar Studios, and GMT Studios. |
|
Kevin Hall is chief operating officer of the Broad Foundation. He is also a co-founder and former senior vice president of business development of Chancellor Beacon Academies, which manages public charter and private schools across the United States. Mr. Hall previously served as senior vice president of infoUSA, a publicly traded information services company. He also held positions at McKinsey & Co., Goldman, Sachs & Co., and Teach For America. Mr. Hall has served as an elementary school teacher and as a teaching fellow at Harvard University. He received a bachelor’s degree with honors in political science and economics from Swarthmore College and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. |
|
Frank J. Hanna III is a merchant banker in Atlanta and has started and backed a number of successful businesses. He has also been highly involved in promoting educational liberty for the last 24 years, helping to start three new Catholic schools in Atlanta, leading various efforts for school reform, and chairing the President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans. Mr. Hanna has been a frequent speaker on business and stewardship. He is author of the soon-to-be-published book, What Your Money Means. Mr. Hanna is also the founder of the Solidarity Foundation. Among other efforts, the Solidarity Foundation recently obtained the oldest extant copy of portions of the Gospels of Luke and John and then gave it to the Vatican. |
|
Charles L. Harper Jr. is senior vice president of the John Templeton Foundation. His primary responsibilities are in the areas of strategic planning, program design and development, vision casting, philanthropic network development, and talent scouting. He has worked to transform philanthropy by developing innovative entrepreneurial practices in grantmaking and has created more than $150 million in new grant-based programs, ranging widely from the study of forgiveness and reconciliation and enterprise-based solutions to poverty to projects on foundational questions in physics and cosmology. He is the founding Chairman of Geneva Global, Inc., an innovative new philanthropic organization making grants worldwide within the developing world. Mr. Harper earned a B.S. in engineering at Princeton University and a D.Phil. in planetary science at Oxford. In his research career, he was a National Research Council Fellow at the NASA Johnson Space Center and a research scientist at the Harvard Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and at the Harvard College Observatory. Mr. Harper has published more than 50 research articles in scientific journals, including Nature, Science, and the Astrophysical Journal. |
|
Michael Hartmann is the director of research and evaluation at The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee. He is also past visiting fellow of the Philanthropy Roundtable in Washington, D.C., for which he researched and wrote Helping People to Help Themselves: A Guide for Donors. Before joining the Bradley Foundation in 1998, Mr. Hartmann was director of research at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, and he has been a consultant to education-reform organizations. He is a graduate of the law school at the University of Minnesota, where he earned his bachelor’s degree, as well. |
|
Steven Hayward is the F.K Weyerhaeuser Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., where he writes AEI’s regular newsletter Environmental Policy Outlook, and is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco. Mr. Hayward is also a visiting lecturer in the government department at Georgetown University. He is the author of four books, and writes frequently on a wide range of current topics, including environmentalism, law, economics, and public policy for publications including National Review, The Weekly Standard, The Public Interest, the Claremont Review of Books, and Policy Review. Mr. Hayward is the author of the annual Index of Leading Environmental Indicators, released each year on Earth Day. |
|
Thomas R. Hefty is president of the Kern Family Foundation. He previously served as counsel at Reinhart, Boerner, Van Deuren, S.C., and as an adjunct faculty member in business and economics at Ripon College. Mr. Hefty has also served 17 years as chairman and chief executive of Cobolt Corporation and its subsidiary, Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Wisconsin, effective January 1, 2007. He has chaired the Wisconsin Council on Long Term Care Insurance, and he served on Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson’s advisory committee on regulatory reform in 2002. Mr. Hefty received an honorary doctorate from the Medical College of Wisconsin in 2006. |
|
Paul A. Herdman is president and CEO of the Rodel Foundation of Delaware. He previously served as vice president for accountability and evaluation services at New American Schools, where he provided support to states, districts, and charter school authorizers. Mr. Herdman co-founded a school-within-a-school that integrated wilderness, theater, and service experiences into one of the largest high schools in New York City. In the mid-1990s, he was the acting undersecretary of education and director of charter school accountability in Massachusetts. Mr. Herdman is a contributor to The Charter School Landscape: Politics, Policies, and Prospects and It Takes a City: Getting Serious About Urban School Reform. He received his bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Delaware and his master’s degree and doctorate in education administration and planning from Harvard University. |
|
Heather Richardson Higgins is president and director of the Randolph Foundation in New York City. Ms. Higgins is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and also serves on the boards of the Independent Women's Forum, the Hoover Institution, and The Philanthropy Roundtable. In addition, she is a trustee of the Committee for Economic Development. Previously, Ms. Higgins was a portfolio manager and vice president at U.S. Trust. Prior to working in finance, she was an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal and assistant editor at the Public Interest. |
|
Mary Jo Hooper is the executive director of Children’s Health Initiative of Orange County, where she implements the organization’s vision for all children in Orange County to have basic health insurance and access to comprehensive healthcare services. Ms. Hooper previously served as chief executive officer of Providence Speech and Hearing Center in Orange, California, where she was responsible for clinical services, two preschools and fund development. Prior to her move to California in 2001, she was director of therapy services for the Cleveland Clinic Children’s Hospital for Rehabilitation. Her specialties are organizational development psychology and speech pathology. |
|
David Horowitz is the founder of Students for Academic Freedom (SAF), which has over 200 chapters in American universities. SAF promotes intellectual diversity on campus; defends the right of students to be treated with respect by faculty and administrators, regardless of their political or religious beliefs; promotes fairness, civility and inclusion in student affairs; and works to secure the adoption of Mr. Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights as official university policy. Mr. Horowitz also founded the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which defends the principles of individual freedom, the rule of law, private property, and limited government. He is the author of Radical Son, Uncivil Wars, Unholy Alliance, and most recently, The Professors: the 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. |
|
Howard Husock is vice president of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, where he also serves as director of the Social Entrepreneurship Initiative. Mr. Husock is a former research fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University. His writing on philanthropy and nonprofit management has appeared in Philanthropy, the Chronicle of Philanthropy, and the Wall Street Journal. |
|
Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser is chairman of the board and a founding member of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD), a think-tank formed by a small group of Phoenix Muslim professionals to support the expression of Islam that is in synergy with American democracy, the U.S. Constitution, and the clear separation of religion and state. AIFD maintains that the development of this ideology at the core of American and global Muslim consciousness is the central mission necessary to defeat the threat of Islamism and jihadism. Dr. Jasser is the son of Muslim-Syrian immigrants and a native of Wisconsin. He served seven years in the United States Navy, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Commander and receiving the Meritorious Service Medal in 1999. Dr. Jasser currently has a private practice in internal medicine and nuclear cardiology in Phoenix, Arizona. He formerly served as president of the Arizona Medical Association and currently chairs the Bioethics Committee for Banner Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center. In 2000, Dr. Jasser founded, with a local Rabbi, the Children of Abraham, an active Muslim-Jewish dialogue group in Scottsdale, Arizona. He has also served as the Muslim representative on the board of directors of the Arizona Interfaith Movement since December 2001. |
|
Edward B. Kacic is president of the Irvine Health Foundation (IHF), which works to improve the physical, mental, and emotional health of the residents of Orange County, California. He was previously the founding executive director of the FHP Foundation (now Archstone Foundation) in Long Beach, California. Mr. Kacic is currently chair of the Health Funders Partnership of Orange County. He also works on the investment committee of the Mardan Foundation of Educational Therapy and State Senator Lou Correa’s healthcare advisory committee. Mr. Kacic has served twenty-five years as a grantmaker at corporate and private foundations and has managed both domestic and international grantmaking efforts. Before entering the grantmaking profession, he worked as a consultant to several local, state and national organizations and corporations in the fields of politics and public affairs. Mr. Kacic is a former member of the boards of directors of Women & Philanthropy, the Irvine Chamber of Commerce and Southern California Grantmakers. |
|
Amy Kass is a senior lecturer in the humanities at the University of Chicago. For many years, she has directed nationwide seminars on civic leadership and philanthropic practice, beginning with the “Tocqueville Seminars on Civic Leadership” at the University of Chicago, and, most recently, in the “Dialogues on Civic Philanthropy” at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., where she is also a senior fellow. Ms. Kass is the author of The Perfect Gift: The Philanthropic Imagination in Poetry and Prose and the editor (with Leon Kass) of Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying and Giving Well, Doing Good: Readings for Thoughtful Philanthropists. She has served on the National Council on the Humanities of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Council of Scholars of the American Academy of Liberal Education. |
|
Natasha Kamrani Natasha Kamrani is executive director of the Arnold Foundation and a member of the Houston Independent School District’s board of trustees. She previously served as the executive director of the Teach For America office in Houston. Upon graduation from Miami University of Ohio in 1990, Ms. Kamrani applied to and was accepted into Teach For America as a corps member, teaching English as a second language to recent immigrants from Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala in the Houston Independent School District (HISD). She currently sits on the advisory board of Teach For America and the Houston Heights Association’s Education Committee. Ms. Kamrani was a member of the task force that helped establish HISD’s Woodrow Wilson Elementary Montessori School. |
|
Wendy Kopp is the founder and president of Teach for America (TFA), a national corps that recruits outstanding recent college graduates to teach for two years in America’s neediest urban and rural schools. Over the past 17 years, Ms. Kopp has transitioned TFA from a tiny operation funded by grant money she raised while in college to a prestigious program. Today, 4,400 corps members teach approximately 375,000 disadvantaged students across the country. She is the author of One Day, All Children: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach for America and What I Learned Along the Way and a recipient of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson Award, the highest honor the school confers on its undergraduate alumni. In 2006, she was named one of America’s best leaders by US News and World Report, and in 2003 she was appointed to the President’s Council on Service and Civic Participation. |
|
Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey is president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a national leader in transforming America’s health systems so people can live healthier lives and receive the health care they need. She previously served as the Sylvan Eisman Professor of medicine and health care systems at the University of Pennsylvania and director of Penn’s Institute on Aging. She was also deputy administrator of what is now the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality in Washington, D.C. Dr. Lavizzo-Mourey earned her medical degree from Harvard Medical School and an M.B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. |
|
Arthur Levine is the sixth president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. He previously served as president and professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He has also been chair of the higher education program, chair of the Institute for Educational Management, and senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Mr. Levine recently published When Hope and Fear Collide: A Portrait of Today's College Student (with Jeanette S. Cureton). He was president of Bradford College from 1982 to 1989 and senior fellow at the Carnegie Foundation and Carnegie Council for Policy Studies in Higher Education from 1975 to 1982. Mr. Levine received his bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University and his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo. |
|
Leo Linbeck is president and CEO of Aquinas Corporation, the parent company of seven values-driven enterprises: construction and development management, stone and masonry installation, turnkey concrete structures, strategy consulting, patented products for the highway construction industry, medical products manufacturing, and life science preventure technology development. Mr. Linbeck is deeply involved with the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) and has been leading the effort at KIPP Houston to formulate a bold strategic growth plan. He also teaches MBA students as an adjunct faculty member at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Management and Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. |
|
Aaron Lobel is founder, president, and board chairman of America Abroad Media (AAM). He previously served as a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, a national security fellow at the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University, and a national security fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, where he edited Presidential Judgment: Foreign Policy Decision Making in the White House. Mr. Lobel currently serves on the advisory board of Business for Diplomatic Action and of Securing America’s Future Energy (SAFE). He earned a Ph.D. in International Affairs from Harvard University, where he was also awarded the university’s top teaching award, the Joseph P. Levenson Prize. |
|
Mary E. Lyons, Ph.D. is president of the University of San Diego. She previously served as president of the College of Saint Benedict in St. Joseph, Minnesota, the California Maritime Academy, and a campus of the California State University in Vallejo, California. She was also academic dean and professor of rhetoric and homiletics at the Franciscan School of Theology, Graduate Theological Union, in Berkeley, California. During her twenty-five year career as a U.S. Naval Reserve Officer, Ms. Lyons held an active duty position teaching at the Naval Training Center in San Diego and two appointments as commanding officer of Naval Reserve units. She retired in 1996 as a captain in the U.S. Naval Reserve. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Sonoma State University; her Master of Arts degree in English from San Jose State University, and her Ph.D. in rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley. |
|
|
|
Next Page: Biographies (M-Z) |
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
John Agresto
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
Barbara Barrett
Steve Beck
Paul Brest
James E. Canales
Donald M. "Bubba" Cathy
Richard Chambers
Clayton M. Christensen
Frederic H. Clark
Bruce Cole 
William Damon
Peter Diamandis
Thomas E. Dillon
Bill Drayton
Alex Echols
Linda Perryman Evans.jpg)
Chester E. Finn Jr.
Fredric Fransen
Dr. Gary Goldstein
Jack Hafer
Kevin Hall
Frank Hanna
Charles L. Harper Jr. 
Michael Hartmann
Steven F. Hayward
Thomas Hefty
Paul A. Herdman
Heather Richardson Higgins
Mary Jo Hooper
David Horowitz
Howard Husock
M. Zuhdi Jasser
Edward Kacic
Amy Kass
Wendy Kopp
Risa Lavizzo-Mourey
Arthur Levine
Leo Linbeck
Aaron Lobel
Dr. Mary Lyons