Nonprofits
Judge Patricia A. Macías, presiding judge of the 388th Family District Court in El Paso, Texas, has been elected president of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ).
NCJFCJ, a Reno, Nev.-based nonprofit corporation with a $15 million annual budget, uses training and technical assistance to improve courts that exercise jurisdiction over families and children.
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Patricia Macias |
Macías has been on the bench for 13 years. She started as associate judge of the Children’s Court, and seven years ago became the district judge presiding over high-conflict custody and divorce, domestic violence and child support enforcement cases. Under her leadership, the children’s court became one of the standard-bearers for NCJFCJ’s Child Victims Act Model Courts Initiative.
Macías replaces Judge Susan Carbon, of Concord, N.H. Contact: (775) 784-6012, http://www.ncjfcj.org.
One of NCJFCJ’s major divisions, the Pittsburgh-based National Center for Juvenile Justice (NCJJ), hired Patricia Campie to be its new director.
NCJJ is the major provider of data and research in the juvenile justice field. It oversees the National Juvenile Court Data Archive for the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and also produces publications for the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI) and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Models for Change.
Campie has been executive director of Tucson, Ariz.-based LeCroy & Milligan Associates, a consulting firm that specializes in evaluating human service programs, since October 2007. She has a justice policy background and was trained at the University of Arizona’s Rombach Institute on Crime, Delinquency and Corrections.
She has a reputation for bringing in money. LeCroy & Milligan’s website calls her an “experienced grant-writer” who helped “secure more than $15 [million] in funding for state agencies and community-based organizations” during her work in the public sector. That included a stint as director of the Tucson-based Pima Prevention Partnership, which operates a charter high school and a teen court. Pima landed $6.7 million in federal grants alone between fiscal 2000 and 2007. Contact: (412) 227-6950, http://www.ncjj.org.
After 10 years embroiled in the national juvenile justice fray, former Justice Policy Institute Executive Director Jason Ziedenberg decided it was time to flee Washington for a job in the trenches.
It took Sheila Bedi less than 10 months to reach that same conclusion.
Bedi, who replaced Ziedenberg when he departed JPI in January, is leaving to return to state reform work.
“She wants to return to working in the South, do more hands-on work” says JPI spokeswoman LaWanda Johnson.
Bedi co-directed the Mississippi Youth Justice Project, a Jackson-based legal advocacy organization under the umbrella of the Southern Poverty Law Center. The project helped push through two pieces of legislation that banned incarceration of first-time nonviolent offenders, made money available for lock-up alternatives, and drastically revised standards for detention centers and juvenile defender training.
Bedi will leave the nonprofit as soon as its board finds her replacement. JPI uses research and media outreach to promote effective solutions to problems with justice systems, with an eye toward reducing incarceration rates.
Ziedenberg, who founded the organization with current D.C. juvenile justice boss Vincent Schiraldi, has landed in Oregon. He is the public relations coordinator for Multnomah County’s Department of Community Justice, which includes the juvenile programs that have made the county JDAI’s highest-profile model site. Contact: (202) 558-7974, http://www.justicepolicy.org.
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Shredding No Tears: National Youth Employment Coalition staff members held a paper-shredding party last month. The victim: A copy of NYEC’s mortgage and payment schedule for its Washington headquarters. NYEC and the American Youth Policy Forum purchased the building for about $900,000 in 1998, and its value has risen to about $3 million. Pictured at the gathering: NYEC Board Chairman Howard Knoll; Executive Director Mala Thakur; Joan Wills, senior policy fellow at the Institute for Educational Leadership; and Sam Halperin, founder of the American Youth Policy Forum. Photo: NYEC |
Kari Arfstrom started work last month as the new vice president for marketing, development and public policy at the St. Paul, Minn.-based National Youth Leadership Council (NYLC). The job was recently created, after CEO Jim Kielsmeier saw a need for stronger marketing and development efforts, says NYLC Managing Editor Caryn Pernu.
NYLC, with an annual budget of $3.2 million, is a prominent advocate of service learning and national service, striving to redefine the roles of young people in society by empowering them to become contributing members of a democracy.
Arfstrom was associate executive director of the Association of Educational Service Agencies (AESA) from 2001 to 2007. Contact: (651) 631-3672, http://www.nylc.org.
Elizabeth Schroeder has been appointed executive director of Answer, a
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Elizabeth Schroeder |
national organization based at Rutgers University’s Center for Applied Psychology that promotes comprehensive sexuality education.
Schroeder has consulted for Answer for years, and was an assistant professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey. She is also the former associate vice president of education and training at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and she chairs the board of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States.
Schroeder replaces Beth Kraemer, who was appointed in September 2007. (732) 445-7929, http://answer.rutgers.edu.
Chuck Jackson was promoted to chief program officer by Starr
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Chuck Jackson |
Commonwealth, an Albion, Mich.-based child and family services provider serving counties in Michigan and Ohio. Jackson has been with Starr since 1988; he was named vice president of community-based programs in 2005 after running the organization’s Detroit operation for four years. Contact: (800) 837-5591, http://www.starr.org.
Julie Kudrna has helped the Campaign for Youth Justice get its message out, at no charge, serving as a Jesuit volunteer for a year with CEO Liz Ryan. Kudrna published her last newsletter for the organization last month, and is moving out West. Kudrna singled out the prosecution of juveniles as adults as the issue that most affected her. “The stories and the numbers in the research and statistics show that this is a lose-lose situation,” she wrote in her farewell message. “It hurts our children, it hurts our families, and it does not make our communities safer.” Contact: (202) 558-3580, http://www.campaignforyouthjustice.org.
Bill Bentley was elected chairman of the board at American Humanics, a
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Bill Bentley |
Kansas City, Mo.-based nonprofit that helps colleges and universities develop nonprofit leaders, especially in the youth services field. It’s been a great summer for Bentley, who is CEO of D.C.-based Voices for America’s Children, the predominant network of youth advocacy organizations in the country. Atlantic Philanthropies gave Voices a three-year, $3 million grant at the end of July to coordinate and strengthen advocacy work. It is the second such grant that the organization has received from Atlantic, which bodes well for Voices as the New York-based grant maker begins to spend down the remaining $4 billion of founder Chuck Feeney’s wealth. Contact: (816) 561-6415, http://www.humanics.org.
D.C.-based America’s Promise Alliance, the national advocacy organization run since 2004 by CEO Marguerite Kondracke, elected two new board members over the summer. John Maupin Jr. is the president of the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta and Richard Stephens is senior vice president of human resources for airline manufacturing giant Boeing, based in Chicago. Like the organization’s patriarch, Colin Powell, both men have backgrounds that include military service; Maupin in the Army, and Stephens in the U.S. Marine Corps. Contact: (202) 657-0600, http://www.americaspromise.org.
The Alliance for a Healthier Generation, a partnership between the American Heart Association and the William J. Clinton Foundation that is headed by Executive Director Bob Harrison, has selected 20 young people to join its “Youth Advisory Board.”
The Alliance’s primary mission is to eliminate childhood obesity, a condition it says affects about 25 million youth between the ages of 2 and 19 (nearly one-third of all youth in that age group). A list of the new board members, who are all between 8 and 16 years old, is available on the organization’s website.
The advisory board convened its first meeting in Kansas City, Mo., but will meet monthly, using social networking software. Contact: http://www.healthiergeneration.org.
Foundations
As the Battle Creek, Mich.-based William K. Kellogg Foundation (assets $8.4 billion) develops a new framework for spending (it will focus its grant making on Michigan, Mississippi and New Mexico), it loses one of its most knowledgeable voices on youth work to retirement. Senior Program Officer Bob Long, who went to Battle Creek 15 years ago, will leave in December.
Long was a professor of youth leadership studies at the University of
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Bob Long |
Northern Iowa before beginning his tenure with Kellogg, and he also directed Iowa’s Division of Youth and Human Service Administration. Before that, he spent 11 years in Illinois and Nevada working to transform 4-H youth programs, helping an organization typically focused on rural youth to develop inner-city programs, including a youth development program partnership with Las Vegas’ public housing corporation.
Kellogg has added Susan Katz Froning as a special assistant to President Sterling Speirn. Katz Froning was CEO of the Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Nonprofit Enterprise at Work, which provides management support services to charities in southeastern Michigan. Contact: (269) 968-1611, http://www.wkkf.org.
New York-based Open Society Institute (assets: $1.3 billion) hired Leonard Noisette to be program director for its new Criminal Justice Fund, which will commit about $800 million over the next 10 years to addressing issues including juvenile justice. Noisette was executive director of New York’s Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem. He reports to Open Society’s director for its U.S. programs, Ann Beeson, who took Gara LaMarche’s place when he left to run Atlantic Philanthropies last year.
Internally at OSI, Access to Justice Program Manager Raquiba LaBrie is now program director for the Equality and Opportunity Fund. Contact: (212) 548-0600, http://www.soros.org.
Public Welfare Foundation (assets: $536 million) has hired Baltimore Sun editor and former Annie E. Casey Foundation official Diane Camper to oversee communications. A veteran journalist, Camper managed public affairs for Casey President Doug Nelson from 1997 to 2004, and then joined the staff of the Baltimore Sun as assistant editorial page editor. (202) 965-1800, http://www.publicwelfare.org.
The Ford Foundation (assets: $12.3 billion) hired Maya Harris to be vice president of its Peace and Social Justice grant-making division. Harris was executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, based in San Francisco. Contact: (212) 573-5000, http://www.fordfound.org.
Government
Terry Cline, administrator of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) is leaving this month to become the next health attaché and representative for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
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Terry Cline |
Prior to his SAMHSA appointment in December 2006, Cline served as Oklahoma’s secretary of health and commissioner of the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services. He was also a provider at a community mental health center, and served as an instructor in clinical psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
Eric Broderick, SAMHSA’s deputy administrator, will become the agency’s acting administrator, replacing Cline. In addition, Kana Enomoto will become SAMHSA’s acting deputy administrator. Contact: (240) 276-2130, http://www.samhsa.gov.
Crime
Caren Brown is the executive director of a Virginia group called Children Without A Voice (or so she says). Apparently, she does not care quite as much about the voice of adults. She was arrested early last month by Virginia state police, who allege she tried to silence her former boyfriend and his wife … forever.
Brown, who ran an insurance agency in Warrenton, Va., allegedly paid $2,000 to an undercover police officer to kill a former boyfriend, with whom she was upset over a custody arrangement involving their 11-year-old son. Brown faces attempted capital murder charges.
Children Without A Voice was founded in 2006 by Karen Estelle, and Estelle told a local television station that the organization has been defunct for some time; she stopped working with the charity because of Brown’s increasingly bizarre behavior, she says, and never officially handed leadership over to Brown.
Note: This organization is not affiliated with Children Without a Voice USA, which is based in Alpharetta, Ga.
News of massive financial pilfering at two major national nonprofits surfaced over the summer. Acorn, a 1,200-chapter community organizing group with headquarters in New York, New Orleans and Washington, disclosed the embezzlement of $1 million by Dale Rathke, the brother of Acorn founder Wade Rathke, who was on the Acorn payroll.
Management tried to keep the problem internal, passing the $1 million off as a loan to an officer on the books of an Acorn affiliate. Tides Foundation founder Drummond Pike, whose foundation has supported Acorn, bailed out Acorn by buying the loan with his own money.
In Atlanta, the Points of Light Institute and its CEO Michelle Nunn found out that the independent contractor hired to run its online eBay store, Maria Herrman, had been auctioning off phony travel packages on the site. The organization, which auctions donated goods and services on the website, is making good on those trips out of its own accounts. No estimate of the cost has been released. Contact: Acorn (866) 672-2676, http://www.acorn.org; Points of Light Institute (404) 979-2900, http://www.pointsoflight.org.
A lesson for anyone involved with local youth sports clubs: Make sure more than one set of eyes sees the books! Deborah Angilley, the treasurer of the Fie-Milton-Edgewood Soccer Club in Washington state was charged with 13 counts of theft after allegedly stealing $50,000 from the accounts of the club, which operates on $67,000 a year.
