A roundup of people on the move in the field of youth work.
Nonprofits
American Humanics, the Kansas City, Mo- based group that prepares college undergraduates for careers in nonprofit youth-serving organizations, has named academic-world veteran Kala Stroup as its president. Stroup recently finished her term as Missouri’s commissioner of higher education. She formerly served as president of Murray State University in Kentucky, home to one of Humanic’s 10 original programs.
Stroup will run a group that has grown to 80 programs nationwide, requiring students to complete 180 hours of coursework and 300 hours as interns at community-based organizations. Former President Kirk Alliman left over the summer to assume the presidency of Christian Homes of Kentucky, an ecumenical group that works with the homeless and unprivileged. Contact: (816) 561-6415, www.humanics.org.
After a turbulent year at the National Network for Youth that saw accumulating debt and the abrupt ejection of former Director Brenda Russell (“Nose Knows,” July 2002), newly appointed Vice Chairman Larry Zeppin says things are starting to look up. “I think we’re getting there,” says Zeppin of the network’s plan to balance its budget by September under new Director Gretchen Noll. Also added to the board was new chair Lee Todorovich, who has 30 years experience in youth services. Todorovich served two terms as the representative to NNY for the Northwest Network for Youth based in Seattle. Resigning from the board were former board chair Nancy Leon and Rev. George Clements, founder of the D.C.-based One Church-One Child. Contact: (202) 783-7949, www.nn4youth.org.
After eight years at the helm, Independent Sector (IS) CEO Sara Melendez will depart and join the faculty at the George Washington University in Washington. Melendez, who will stay at IS until January, led the 22-year old umbrella group in expanding its outreach efforts and campaigned to include the advocacy voice of nonprofits in the political discourse. Melendez also was influential in enacting legislation allowing the IRS to sanction people who use their relationships with nonprofit organizations for personal gain. Contact: (202) 467-6100, www.independentsector.org.
The Ford Foundation’s Nancy Sconyers has left to join the Association for Children of New Jersey (ACNJ), an organization based in Newark with a staff of 17. Sconyers will oversee the use of a $150,000 grant from Philadelphia grant-maker PEW Charitable Trusts to expand pre-school services in New Jersey. The PEW initiative, Starting Early/Starting Strong, also provides grants to organizations in Illinois, New York and Massachusetts through its education department (15 grants for $13.8 million in 2001). Contact: ACNJ (973) 643-3876, www.acnj.org.
Derrick Len Span is the new executive director at the D.C.-based Community Action Partnership, a 30-year-old organization that links more than 1,000 local groups fighting poverty. Span came to the capital from Harrisburg, Pa., where he directed the Center for Community Building. He also served as CEO of Urban Leagues in Harrisburg and Broome County, N.Y. Contact: (202) 265-7546, www.communityactionpartnership.com.
Terry Langston has joined the staff of the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation in Ypsilanti, Mich., as a project director for the adolescent department. Langston will coordinate research opportunities and advocacy relating to educational needs of children, youth and families for the institution headed by CEO Art Stellar. Contact: (734) 485-2000, www.highscope.org.
The Alliance for Excellent Education (AEE), a new D.C. nonprofit working to ensure that at-risk youth meet challenging academic standards, named education policy veteran Scott Joftus as its director of public policy. Joftus was a lead author on “An Administrator’s Guide to ESEA Grants” (Thompson Publishing), and comes to AEE from the national education consultant McKenzie Group, where he was director of policy, research and evaluation. Contact: (202) 842-4888, www.all4ed.org.
Washington lobbyist and nonprofit consultant Susan Hoechstetter returned to the D.C.-based Alliance for Justice at her old position, director of the foundation advocacy initiative. The initiative, started in 1995 under Nan Aron, seeks to promote foundation giving to progressive groups working to influence policy and public opinion. Contact: (202) 822-6070, www.afj.org.
After 18 years as administrator for executive director John O’Toole at the Oakland, Calif.-based National Center for Youth Law (NCYL), Carol Babichuk has resigned. O’Toole credits Babichuk with keeping the liberal-minded group afloat while weathering an attack from the right in the 1980s. Babichuk left the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) in 1980 after hearing of former President Ronald Reagan’s nominees to the LSC board, then helped the NCYL prepare its accounting systems for scrutiny from what O’Toole called “hostile forces at LSC.” Contact: (510) 835-8098, www.youthlaw.org.
Also departing is Michael Mahoney, who ran the Chicago chapter of the prison reform advocacy group John Howard Association. He retired in late spring after 27 years with the organization. He was recently re-appointed by House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) to a five-year term on the Federal Coordinating Council on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, chaired by Attorney General John Ashcroft. Taking over for Mahoney at John Howard will be James Coldren. Contact: (312) 782-1901, www.johnhowardassociation.org.
Audrey Haynes has been named public policy director for YMCA of the USA, the national resource office for the country’s 2,493 YMCAs. Haynes will be based in the Washington office and plans to expand the Y’s presence and leadership role at the national and state levels. She most recently served as director of Kentucky Gov. Paul Patton’s (D) Washington office. Contact: (202) 835-9043, www.ymca.net.
Seth Turner joined the D.C.-based National Youth Employment Coalition (NYEC) in July as manager of policy and advocacy. Turner comes to the NYEC after eight years at Catholic Charities USA. Contact: (202) 659-1064, www.nyec.org.
Outward Bound USA, headquartered in Garrison, N.Y., dropped the “interim” from John Read’s title, making him the permanent head of the group. Read came to Outward Bound in January 2002 from Heavy Duty Holdings in Minneapolis. Outward Bound conducts hundreds of wilderness programs annually, many for youth, while conducting classroom-based training through two urban centers. Contact: (845) 424-4000, www.outwardbound.org.
New York grant-maker the Rockefeller Foundation has awarded Indiana Youth Institute CEO Bill Stanczykiewicz a fellowship in its Next Generation Leadership (NGL) program. NGL’s mission is to “create a diverse network of inter-sectoral leaders, develop problem-solving models and identify solutions to the … disparities which threaten democracy.” Stanczykiewicz’s youth institute promotes healthy development through service-learning. Contact: (800) 343-7060, www.iyi.org.
“Talk means more from a man of action” is the slogan being used to promote the new talk show hosted by John Walsh, president of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and host of the long-running “America’s Most Wanted.” Walsh has taken his tough guy/compassionate advocate act to the daytime air with “The John Walsh Show.” Walsh will broach “topics that are meaningful and compelling to the daytime audience.” The show airs on NBC affiliates.
Foundations
Health policy expert Risa Lavizzo-Mourey was named the CEO of the Princeton, N.J.-based Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (assets: $8 billion) in late July. Lavizzo-Mourey, who was named an RWJF Clinical Scholar 20 years ago, joined the foundation last year as director of its health care group, leaving a professorship at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. She will replace RWJF’s CEO of 12 years, Steve Schroeder, at the end of the year, when he leaves to head the University of California-San Francisco. Contact: (888) 631-4989, www.rwjf.org.
The Seattle-based Casey Family Programs, a grant-maker and direct service organization, has created a new foundation called the Marguerite Casey Foundation (MCF). The philanthropy, founded last October, has begun giving $30 million in grants annually. Serving as CEO for MCF is Luz Vega-Marquis, former director of Community Technology Foundation of California and board member for The California Wellness Foundation (TCWF). Ruth Massinga, CEO of Casey Family Programs, will have a close eye on the new foundation as its board chair.
What’s one more responsibility to Massinga? She is already co-chair of the board for the D.C.-based Finance Project, a policy advisory board member for the Urban Institute and a member of the National Research Council Committee on Integrating the Science of Early Childhood Development. Also serving on the MCF board is former U.S. Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.), CEO of Association of American Publishers. Contact: MCF (206) 691-3134, www.casey.org.
Tom David, vice president of The California Wellness Foundation (TCWF) and a recent winner of the Grantmakers In Health’s Terrance Keenan Leadership Award, resigned his post in July after seven years with TCWF. Contact: (818) 593-6600, www.tcwf.org.
Pam Stevens has joined the staff of the AOL Time Warner Foundation in New York. Stevens was the program director for the youth development program of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation until 1999, and before that was a program director in charge of youth worker development initiatives for the DeWitt Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund in New York. Contact: http://aoltwfoundation@aol.com.
The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee (assets: $580 million) has elected Thomas Rhodes chairman of the board. Rhodes is president of the conservative-minded National Review magazine in New York. Bradley has been a major supporter of charter schools, school vouchers and abstinence education. Former foundation President Michael Joyce has been a big promoter of President George W. Bush’s faith-based initiative. Contact: (414) 291-9915, www.bradleyfdn.org.
The Francis Families Foundation (assets: $100 million) in Kansas City, Mo., hired Jerry Kitzi as its first executive director. Kitzi previously served as the executive director of the Kansas City Metro Fund at the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation, and as a program officer responsible for youth development funding at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. Contact: (816) 531-0077, www.francisfoundation.org.
Shell Oil Company CEO Steven Miller will serve as vice chair of the board of directors for the Points of Light Foundation. Shell has donated $1 million to the Points of Light Foundation’s Connect America, a national partnership initiative. Contact: (202) 729-8000, www.pointsoflight.org.
Feds
U.S. Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP) Director Dr. Ruth Sanchez-Way has left the agency, leaving Deputy Director Elaine Parry as an interim replacement. Sanchez-Way is assigned to the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Contact: CSAP (301) 443-5356, http://www.samhsa.gov/centers/%20csap/csap.html.
Karen Morison, who helped put together the National Youth Summit while on temporary assignment at HHS’s Family and Youth Services Bureau, will join the Heritage Foundation. Prior to her assignment at HHS, Morison was director of public policy at the Institute for Youth Development, led by Shepherd Smith. Contact: Heritage (202) 546-4400, www.heritage.org.
Raymond Uhalde, deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration, is retiring after 28 years of federal service. Uhalde was critical in the development of PEPNet, which promotes best practices in youth employment and development. Contact: PEPNet www.nyec.org/pepnet.
Dr. Richard Carmona, despite a somewhat turbulent confirmation hearing, will be the country’s new surgeon general. Carmona is the first surgeon general to have a background that includes law enforcement as well as medicine. Before becoming a professor of surgery at the University of Arizona, Carmona served for 17 years on an Arizona SWAT team and as a trauma surgeon, a combination of experience that drew the ire of university colleague David Putnam.
Calling into question the contradiction between the duties of law enforcement and the doctor’s oath to do no harm, Putnam sent the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee a letter recalling an incident in which Carmona shot and killed a mentally ill man involved in an altercation. “It is patently clear that Sheriff Carmona … not Dr. Carmona was at center stage in that emergency,” Putnam wrote. “Could not a physician have recognized the behavior of a mentally ill individual and responded in kind?” Carmona was confirmed one month after his June 25 hearing. Contact: (301) 443-4000, www.surgeongeneral.gov.
Dr. Julie Gerberding was appointed director of the Atlanta-based U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Gerberding, a 46-year-old research scientist who lead the CDC’s investigation and containment of anthrax, is first woman to head the agency. The agency has been without a permanent director since March, when Jeffrey Koplan resigned. A four-person interim team has run the agency since, with David Fleming as acting director. Contact: (800) 311-3435, www.cdc.gov.
Michelle Guillermin was nominated in July to be CFO of the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNS). She is the president and co-founder of the Guillerman Group, a consulting firm specializing in project and customer management. CNS announced $10.3 million in grants last month to 43 nonprofit and public organizations that will serve as a citizens’ component to homeland security efforts, including neighborhood watches and training youth to cope with disaster. Contact: (202) 606-5000, www.cns.gov.
The White House announced July 19 that Office of National AIDS Policy Director Scott Evertz was being replaced by Baltimore physician Joseph O’Neill. It was rumored that Evertz, who, like O’Neill, is openly gay, lacked the ability to address complicated medical issues surrounding AIDS. If so, then it’s strange that Evertz was named special assistant HHS secretary on HIV/AIDS.
Contact: (877) 696-6775, www.hhs.gov.
Crime Beat
An international investigation by the U.S. Customs CyberSmuggling Center, Interpol and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, led to the arrest of 20 people charged with posting child pornography. Eleven of the arrested members of what was known as “the club” are U.S. citizens, although Sean Bradley, a suspect from Reno, Nev., killed himself before formal charges were filed. “These crimes are beyond the pale,” said U.S. Customs Commissioner Robert Bonner. “What is particularly disturbing … is that the majority of people who have been charged were actually the parents who were sexually exploiting their own children.” One of the men arrested – Paul Whitmore of San Diego – was a youth counselor and school director.
Charles “Andy” Williams, the teenager who used his father’s handgun to kill two students and wound 13 at his high school in Santee, Calif., last March, was sentenced to 50 years in prison. Judge Herbert Exarhos’ ruling was mild in comparison to the maximum sentence of 425 years requested by prosecutors, who say the rampage was planned well in advance.
Former New Jersey rabbi and Orthodox Union (OU) official Baruch Lanner was convicted in Freehold, N.J., of abusing two teenage girls. Lanner, once lauded for his work with Jewish education and with the OU, an association of more than 1,000 synagogues, has been accused by an internal investigation of physically and emotionally abusing dozens of teenage girls and boys. Lanner faces a sentence of more than 20 years in prison.
Passages
John Wallach, 59, founder of the Seeds of Peace camp that brought teens from conflict zones to the United States. Wallach, the son of German Jews who escaped the concentration camps, began Seeds of Peace in Otisfield, Maine, after the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. The program promotes peaceful understanding between youth on different sides of conflict.
Max Schneier, 85, founder of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. Schneier was a successful businessman in 1969 when his mentally ill daughter was discharged from a mental hospital to take care of herself. A layman on the subject of psychiatry before his daughter was diagnosed, Schneier became an authority on mental health and the foremost advocate for families of the mentally ill.
