Foundations
After only a few months with the Ypsilanti, Mich.-based High/Scope Educational Research Foundation, Terry Langston got an offer he couldn’t refuse. Langston left his project director post in High/Scope’s adolescent department to become executive director of the Michigan 4-H Foundation (assets: $8.5 million) in East Lansing. Staff at High/Scope say there are “no hard feelings” about the move. Michigan 4-H serves 267,000 youth with 24,000 community volunteers. Charles Hohmann will fill Langston’s spot while the foundation searches for a replacement. High/Scope also added literacy specialist Andrea De Bruin-Parecki to run the Early Childhood Reading Institute with co-director Lea McGee. Contact: 4-H (517) 353-6692, www.mi4hfdtn.org.
Rick Little, founder and CEO of the Baltimore-based International Youth Foundation (IYF), announced that he will step down early next year. Since Little established IYF 12 years ago with three staffers, the agency has established operations in 65 countries, forged corporate alliances with groups ranging from the Gap to USAID, and this year invested $135 million in children and youth programming this year. Little plans to develop a smaller organization that will work with IYF on global advocacy, and will remain on its board of directors. Now holding the reins is COO Bill Reese, who has been running IYF since Little took a leave of absence a year ago. Contact: (410) 347-1500, www.iyfnet.org.
The Flint, Mich.-based Charles Stewart Mott Foundation (assets: $2.5 billion) named three new staff members in late summer. Mary Gailbreath, a former business service manager with Arthur Andersen in Ann Arbor, Mich., is Mott’s new manager of grants administration. Elizabeth Cho, fresh from completing a Jane Addams-Andrew Carnegie Fellowship at Indiana University’s Center on Philanthropy, and Mott intern Yazeed Moore, were hired as program assistants on the Pathways Out of Poverty team. Contact: (810) 238-5651, www.mott.org.
The Girl’s Best Friend Foundation (assets: $2.9 million) named Alice Cottingham to replace former executive director Karen Zeitlin, who left in April. Cottingham comes to the Chicago-based organization – which funds young women’s projects in Illinois – from the Fund for Immigrants and Refugees at the Donors Forum of Chicago. Contact: (312) 266-2842, www.girlsbestfriend.org.
Michele Cahill, director of the New York-based Carnegie Corp.’s Schools for a New Society program, has joined New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Stein’s staff as senior counselor for education policy. Replacing Cahill as head of the urban high school reform initiative is Connie Warren. Warren was hired away from her seven-year stint as senior program officer at the Academy for Educational Development (AED), where she recently directed technical support of Schools for a New Society. Contact: Carnegie (212) 207-6273, www.carnegie.org.
The New York-based Edward Hazen Foundation named Nat Chioke Williams as program officer for youth development. Williams – who has a background in community psychology and has an article due out soon, in the American Journal of Community Psychology, about young African-American activists – serves on the grant-making committee for the Funders’ Collaborative on Youth Organizing, a group that Hazen was instrumental in creating. He comes to Hazen from the New York Foundation program office. The foundation also named Center for Third World Organizing executive Daniel HoSang to its board of trustees. Contact: (212) 889-3034, www.hazenfoundation.org.
Philadelphia’s Public/Private Ventures shifted Vice President for Faith-Based Programs Fred Davie Jr. to the VP post in its public policy and community partnerships. Contact: (215) 557-4400, www.ppv.org.
Nonprofits
Tracy Schmidt, after spending eight years on the staff of Denver’s National Conference of State Legislatures, has joined the D.C.-based American Youth Policy Forum (AYPF). She will help lead a cooperative effort with the National Youth Employment Coalition to conduct a series of eight meetings about Learning Exchanges for Youth Systems as part of the Workforce Investment Act. Meetings will be held in each of the country’s six U.S. Department of Labor regions, with supplementary meetings on rural and Indian issues. Schmidt hopes that attendees will include WIA youth council members, program coordinators and the executive directors of the work force boards. The website for the WIA sessions, which are set to kick off in New Haven, Conn., on Nov. 13, is www.dtiassociates.com/wiaexchange. Contact: AYPF (202) 775-9731, www.aypf.org.
The St. Louis-based Parents as Teachers National Center, headed by recently hired CEO Sue Stepleton, named Lynn Tiede as its public policy manager. The position was created, Stepleton said in a prepared statement, to bolster the national presence of an organization that is often “perceived as a Missouri program.” Tiede comes from a senior policy office at the Missouri Family and Community Trust, and has worked at the national level with the Center for Prevention Research and Development (University of Illinois) and at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (Washington). Contact: (314) 432-4330, www.patnc.org.
The New York-based National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD) named Diana Holbrook as its new program director for “Get Ready to Read!”, an early literacy program for preschool children. Holbrook comes to NCLD from across town at Union Settlement, where she was the director of child care services. Contact: (212) 545-7510, www.getreadytoread.org.
The New York-based Asia Society named Michael Levine, former executive director of movie director Rob Reiner’s I Am Your Child Foundation in Beverly Hills, Calif., to direct its National Campaign for International Education in the Schools. Prior to signing up with Reiner’s early-childhood-oriented group, Levine was an education program officer at the Carnegie Corp. Contact: (310) 285-2385, www.iamyourchild.org.
Feds
In an interoffice letter, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) Director Charles Curie bid farewell to Bernard Arons, longtime director of SAMHSA’s Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS). Curie says Arons will work closely with his former employer, the National Institute of Mental Health. Gail Hutchings, a former senior adviser to Curie, will serve as interim CMHS director while the agency conducts a national search to replace Arons. Contact: CMHS (301) 443-0001, www.samhsa.gov/cmhs.
In what some consider a controversial decision, Attorney General John Ashcroft nominated two foes of the Violence Against Women Act to serve on the National Advisory Committee on Violence Against Women last month. Nancy Pfotenhauer is president of the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), a group that has actively supported U.S. Supreme Court cases that challenge gender crime provisions that the group believes threaten “the preservation of our liberty.” Of the Violence Against Women Act, an IWF website article says the legislation will “do nothing to protect women from crime,” and is “not only unconstitutional, but often harmful to the victims it purports to help.” The other nominee, Boston police detective Margot Hill, is an IWF national advisory board member. Contact: IWF (800) 224-6000, www.iwf.org.
J. Russell George was sworn in last month as inspector general for the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNS), directed by Les Lenkowsky. George moves to CNS from Capitol Hill, where he was staff director of the House Subcommittee on Government Efficiency, Financial Management and Intergovernmental Relations under Rep. Stephen Horn (R-Calif.). Contact: CNS (202) 606-5000, www.cns.gov.
Pageants
Here she comes … Miss Youth Worker of America.
Well, 22-year-old Erika Harold’s new title is actually just Miss America. But after winning the crown last month, the youth-work volunteer plans to use her new bully pulpit to advocate for youth issues that she’s been working on for years – primarily sexual abstinence and stopping violence.
Harold will serve as a spokeswoman for the D.C.-based Fight Crime: Invest in Kids. Born in Urbana, Ill., Harold worked in the agency’s Chicago office. “I know her to be a very intelligent and dedicated young woman who will do a lot of good for young people,” says Fight Crime spokesman Phil Evans.
Harold says that as a child she was often a victim of racial and sexual harassment. So as one of her first duties, she embarked on a tour to speak out against bullying and school violence. “Youth violence stops with us,” she says.
As Miss Illinois, Harold’s issue of choice was abstinence, which she spoke about in classrooms and before the Illinois state legislature.
Harold also served as youth coordinator in a recent state gubernatorial campaign. When her one-year reign is up, she plans to use her $50,000 scholarship to attend Harvard Law School. Contact: Fight Crime (202) 776-0027, www.fightcrime.org.
Passages
Thomas Gordon, 84, founder of the 40-year-old Gordon Training International. Gordon developed an “active listening” approach to parent-child conflict resolution, and his organization has tutored more than 1 million people worldwide in conflict resolution skills. Gordon’s “Parent Effectiveness Training: The No-Lose Way to Raise Responsible Children” sold more than 5 million copies.
