► Newsmakers

Newsmakers for November 2002

Nonprofits

After 35 years, Center for Community Change (CCC) Director Andy Mott has left the organization to pursue other personal interests in the field. In a departing message to colleagues and contacts, Mott made it clear that he is not doing so to hang out on the golf course.

“At this stage in life my greatest concern is with the weakness of the infrastructure for learning in this field,” Mott writes. “Little is written about lessons learned, most academic institutions ignore the field, and the nonprofit world has little funding for the kind of long-term, intensive training and educational programs [we] desperately need.”

Mott, a ’62 Harvard grad (cum laude) and a ’65 grad of the University of Michigan Law School, began a three-week tenure as a visiting fellow at the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Sussex in England in mid-October. His successor at CCC is Deepak Bhargava, the agency’s director of public policy since 1994. Born in Mysore, India, Bhargava is a former legislative director at the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Like Mott, he is a Harvard man. Contact: (202) 736-5834, andy.mott@aspeninst.org.

Anne Hoover, with the Franklin, Ind.-based Community Partnerships with Youth (CPY) since its beginnings in 1994, has retired from her position as executive director. According to her replacement, Janet Wakefield, Hoover “will be retiring to enjoy her grandchildren and her two homes.”

Wakefield, also with CPY since ’94, had been director of the Habits of the Heart project for the past five years. Prior to that, she says, she was a consultant in the youth field for 10 years. Four new CPY board members were also appointed: Mike Ferry, Joe Smith, Jan Stanton and Lynn Sygiel. Contact: (317) 736-7947, www.cpyinc.org.

Over at the Family Research Council (FRC), two more doctorates have been squeezed in: Pia de Solenni and Allen C. Carlson. Solenni, who writes a regular column for the National Catholic Register and received her doctorate in sacred theology from the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, is an FRC fellow for human life studies who will focus on a “new feminism,” the council says.

Carlson, founder and president of the Rockford, Ill.-based Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society, is the distinguished fellow for family policy studies. He will present six public lectures at FRC on “specific public policy proposals for affirming the sanctity of marriage and family.”

Carlson was general secretary and coordinator of The World Congress of Families (WCF) in Prague in 1997, and for WCF II in Geneva in 1999. He was also a President Reagan appointee to the National Commission on Children.

FRC has also promoted Alan R. Crippen II to vice president of public policy and academic affairs and hired Kristie Rutherford as director for state and local government. Contact: (202) 624-3019, www.frc.org. A couple of promotions have also taken place at the D.C.-based Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), benefiting Jodie Levin-Epstein and Mark Greenberg. Prior to joining CLASP in 1988, Levin-Epstein was deputy director of the Center for Population Options (now Advocates for Youth). She is now deputy director at CLASP, where in 1996 she established the organization’s reproductive health project, which focused on the interaction of pregnancy prevention and welfare policy.

Also a CLASP veteran dating back to ’88, Greenberg assumed his new post of director of policy after years of writing extensively on federal social welfare policies and an array of new state initiatives arising from them. Before CLASP, he worked for 10 years in legal services programs at, among others, the Jacksonville Area Legal Aid in Florida and the Western Center on Law and Poverty in Los Angeles. Contact: (202) 906-8013, www.clasp.org.Donna Mitroff has taken the helm at L.A.-based Mediascope.
As president, she will continue Mediascope’s mission to promote issues of social relevance within the entertainment industry.

Mitroff’s extensive background includes running her own company, Mitroff Media Makers (M3), which developed and produced educational TV entertainment for children, in addition to providing educational consulting services to media companies.

From 1997 through April of this year she worked at Fox Family Worldwide; first as vice president of policies and practices, then as senior vice president. After the company’s April acquisition by ABC/Disney, Mitroff became a consultant to the ABC Cable Networks Group. Contact: (818) 508-2080.

The Children’s Aid Society, founded in 1853, is beginning to celebrate its sesquicentennial; the New York agency officially turns 150 next year. Calling itself “one of the nation’s oldest and largest nonsectarian agencies,” the society serves more than 120,000 children and their families through a network that includes community schools, neighborhood centers, camps, adoption and foster care agencies, and health, education and recreation programs. Contact: (212) 949-4938, www.childrensaidsociety.org.

Covenant House New York’s executive director, Bruce J. Henry, has made room for newly appointed Associate Executive Director Georgia Boothe, who has been with CHNY since 1993. Boothe, who has a master’s degree in social work from Columbia University, will run day-to-day operations and oversee five major divisions: Crisis Services, Rights of Passage, Community Programs, Health/Mental Health and Funding Finance. “She will be a good fit for the [agency’s] future challenges,” Henry said.
Contact: (212) 613-0300, CHNY@covenanthouse.org.

Thomas K. Craine, former president and CEO of the YMCA of Metropolitan Denver, has been named director of the North American Urban Group of the YMCAs – a network of the 35 largest Ys in the United States, Canada and Mexico. Craine headed the Metropolitan Denver Y from 1998 through June of this year, when he became president emeritus of external affairs. Contact: (312) 419-8418, arnold.collins@ymca.net.

Carol Kellerman, former president of Learning Leaders Inc., a New York City-based nonprofit that organizes volunteers to tutor and mentor students in the city’s public schools, has been named the president of the September 11th Fund, which was created by the United Way of New York City and the New York Community Trust on the day of the tragedy. The fund has distributed $336 million to support victims of the attacks and help rebuild devastated communities. Kellerman, who will oversee the distribution of the fund’s remaining $170 million, replaces Joshua Gotbaum, who returns to the private sector. Contact: www.uwnyc.org/sep11.

The Alexandria, Va.-based World Federation for Mental Health has taken on Preston Garrison as its new secretary general/CEO. Garrison comes over from the D.C.-based National Practitioners Network for Fathers and Families, where he had served as founding executive director since 1998. He was chief executive of the National Mental Health Association (1984-1991), and before that the head of mental health associations in Florida, metropolitan Atlanta and Tennessee.

The world federation, founded in London in 1948, has organizational and individual members in 90 countries and serves as a consultant to the United Nations. Garrison’s special concerns have been children’s issues and rural mental health. Contact: (703) 838-7543, wfmh@erols.com. Andrew Hahn, professor at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., has been named the Howland Family Endowed Chair in Youth Leadership Development for the 2002-03 academic year at the University of Minnesota’s 4-H Youth Development Center. Hahn (also a Youth Today columnist) will focus on youth policy issues in Minnesota and will lend his expertise to a wide range of strategic policy efforts. “Sometimes it takes an outsider to help us see and appreciate what we have,” declares center spokeswoman Lisa Kimball. Contact: (612) 624-8192, kimba014@umn.ed.

The National Association of Workforce Boards named Stephanie Powers as CEO. Powers, who will lead the organization along with President Robert Knight, has 30 years of nonprofit and public program management, including the last three years as a Clinton appointee as director of the National School to Work Office. Before that, Powers was with the U.S. Department of Labor, where, she says, “I held many titles.” Powers’ priorities in her new office: expanding membership services and promoting the interests of members in the reauthorization of the Workforce Investment Act of 1998. Contact: (202) 775-0960, www.nawb.org.

Feds

Deborah J. Daniels, assistant attorney general for the U.S. Office of Justice Programs and sister of OMB Director Mitch Daniels, has been named national AMBER Alert coordinator by Attorney General John Ashcroft. Since 1996, 66 AMBER (“America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response”) Alert plans, designed to locate missing and abducted children, have been established at the local, regional and state level by law enforcement agencies and public broadcasters.

AMBER is credited with the safe return of 31 children. The program was created in Dallas-Fort Worth as a legacy for 9-year-old Amber Hagerman, who was kidnapped and murdered.

Daniels was the first director of the executive office of Weed and Seed, the Justice Department program initiated in 1991. Ashcroft says the department will provide “approximately” $3 million to deliver “high- quality” AMBER education, training and technical assistance. Contact: (202) 514-2000, www.nttac.org.

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