Nonprofits
After 10 years, National Center for Children in Poverty Director Larry Aber announced that he will be leaving the center, which is housed at Columbia University and run by a staff of 45. He’s off for New York University, where he will join the faculty of the Steinhardt School of Education in January. Aber will step down as director in September, and hang around until December to help with the national search for his replacement. Deputy Director Jane Knitzer will serve as acting director during the transition. Contact: NCCP (646) 284-9600, www.nccp.org.
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The National Urban League has ended its search to replace longtime CEO Hugh Price, who resigned in November. Hired to take over Price’s New York headquarters office (and the league’s $40 million annual budget) is Marc Morial, the former two-term mayor of New Orleans and president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Under Morial, once dubbed the Louisiana Statehouse’s “Education Senator of the Year,” New Orleans saw a 60 percent decrease in crime. Contact: (212) 558-5300, www.nul.org.
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Former Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend (D) was recently discovered to be the president of Operation Respect, a New York-based nonprofit dedicated to promoting character education. Townsend made her new job public in June while speaking at a high school graduation in Bethesda, Md., but revealed later that she had been with the 3-year-old organization since late April. Townsend lost her bid for governor in November to Republican Bob Ehrlich.
Operation Respect was founded in 2000 by Peter Yarrow (known to baby-boomers as one-third of the folk group Peter, Paul and Mary). It develops music, videos and curricula aimed at preventing bullying, taunting and school violence. Contact: (212) 904-5243, www.operationrespect.org.
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Nancy Jackson is stepping down after 18 years as executive director of the 100-plus-member New England Network for Child, Youth and Family Services (NEN). Jackson plans to work as a youth work consultant, with a particular interest in succession-planning issues. Melanie Goodman, who has served as executive co-director with Jackson for the past 10 years, will run the network from what previously was the satellite office in Burlington, Vt. The agency is funded primarily by the U.S. Family and Youth Service Bureau. Contact NEN: (978) 266-1998, www.nenetwork.org.
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The National Women’s Law Center is no longer shooting blanks when it comes to child care – or is it? Let go by the Children’s Defense Fund after heading its child care and development division for 24 years, Helen Blank has joined the center as a senior child care specialist. Blank will lobby lawmakers and organize grass-roots efforts to protect Head Start funding and to work against the Bush administration’s proposal to turn part of the $6.6 billion program over to state governments. Contact: NWLC (202) 588-5180, www.nwlc.org.
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Linda Harris has joined the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) as a senior policy analyst on disconnected and at-risk youth. Harris comes to CLASP from the mayor’s office in Baltimore, where she served for 15 years as director of the Office of Employment Development. CLASP is set to release a study on disconnected youth, “Leave No Youth Behind: Opportunities for Congress to Reach Disconnected Youth,” in July. The report assesses six programs up for reauthorization by Congress next year, including the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the Runaway and Homeless Youth Act and the Workforce Investment Act. Contact: (202) 906-8000, www.clasp.org.
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Junior Achievement (JA) in Colorado Springs, Colo., named Jack Kosakowski to be senior vice president of area relations, replacing 30-year JA veteran Jack Holladay, who retired. Kosakowski is no greenhorn himself: He joined the nonprofit youth entrepreneurship promoter in 1974 as a program officer, and most recently headed the organization’s Wisconsin program. During his tenure there, the number of students served yearly increased by 308 percent, to 121,000. Contact: (719) 540-8000, www.ja.org.
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YMCA, RadioShack, and the Alexandria, Va.-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) recently kicked off a pilot project called Street Sentz, a series of YMCA-hosted forums that will bring parents together with experts to discuss child safety.
YMCA spokeswoman Julie Mulzoff says the first two forums – in Plano and Waxahachie, Texas – were successes, and she expects Street Sentz to go national in the fall. NCMEC is serving as a content provider, recruiting experts to speak at the forums. Scheduled for the next event in Evanston, Ill.: NCMEC experts David Shapiro and Marsha Gilmer-Tullis and YMCA Executive Director Ken Gladish. RadioShack distributes a child ID kit that includes a CD photo and personal information sheet – basically, poster-making materials for the worst-case scenario. Contact: YMCA: (312) 977-0031, www.ymca.net.; NCMEC: (703) 274-3900, www.ncmec.org; RadioShack brochure available online at www.radioshackcorporation.com/cr/streetsentz_brochure.pdf.
Foundations
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Inner City Games Foundation (assets: $13 million), the Santa Monica, Calif.-based champion for after-school opportunities, has hired Frank Donaghue as its new CEO. Donaghue will traverse the country for his new post, leaving his CEO position with the Philadelphia office of the Red Cross of America, where he significantly expanded the city’s Red Cross youth programming. Donaghue replaces Harley Frankel, who left Inner City in December after three years. With Schwarzenegger considering a run for California governor, there will be plenty of intrastate power for Inner City, which operates in three California cities: San Diego, Los Angeles and San Jose. Contact: (310) 458-4411, www.icgf.org.
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The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (assets: $142 million) in New York appointed Richard A. Insel, director of the Center for Human Genetics and Molecular Pediatric Disease at the University of Rochester Medical Center, to be executive vice president for research. Insel, who leaves Rochester after 26 years, will oversee the approximately $100 million in research grants annually awarded to universities and researchers by the foundation. Contact: (800) 533-2873, www.jdrf.org.
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After five tough years, Richard Schlosberg III announced his resignation last month as CEO of the Menlo Park, Calif.-based David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Schlosberg, the former publisher of the Los Angeles Times, replaced Cole Wilbur in 1999, who’d been CEO for 22 years. Packard was riding the technology boom, with $13 billion in assets. The next year, Packard made $616 million in grants. This year’s figures: $4.8 billion in assets, and about $200 million in grants. The foundation has hired a consulting company to search for Schlosberg’s replacement; his resignation is effective at the end of the year. Contact: (650) 917-7142, www.packard.org.
Feds
Department of Education Secretary Roderick Paige’s right-hand man, William Hansen, left his post in early July. Hansen, a father of six, says his return to the private sector is partly motivated by college tuition bills. The departure of the deputy secretary, who has served in the department for the last three Republican presidents, is a significant one for the administration, says former GOP House education committee aide Vic Klatt. “[Hansen] not being there leaves a big hole,” Klatt told Education Week in June. “He knows how to navigate all the various bureaucratic hurdles.”
Hansen’s resignation followed President George Bush’s announcement that he will nominate social scientist Robert Lerner to head the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Lerner leaves a consulting firm (Lerner and Nagai Quantitative Consulting Work) that he runs with Althea Nagai in Rockville, Md., whose clients include the abstinence-only youth program Best Friends, run by Elayne Bennett.
Lerner will be the first confirmed commissioner of NCES since Pascal Forgione departed in 1999. Nobody will be nominated to succeed Hansen until the second week of July. Contact: (800) 872-5327, www.ed.gov.
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Dr. Lloyd Kolbe is leaving the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Adolescent and School Health (DASH) after 17 years with the CDC. DASH was created by CDC to prevent risky health behaviors among youth, and Kolbe has been there almost the whole time, serving as director for 14 years. His legacy includes overseeing the division’s growth from infancy to a significant grant-maker for youth health projects. DASH began as a three-person, $300,000 operation in 1985. Last year, its 70 personnel helped distribute $45 million in grants.
“Dr. Kolbe has done more than any other person I know towards advancing school health, and towards strengthening the connection between educators and health officials with a common set of outcomes,” says Norah Howley, who has worked with Kolbe for the past five years as project director for school health at the Council of Chief State School Officers.
“He’s made an unmatched contribution” to the field of adolescent health, says Brenda Greene, director of school health programs at the National School Boards Association. “He pushed forward a vision that schools have an important role to play in health.”
Kolbe has accepted a faculty position at Indiana University, where he plans to continue researching adolescent health. Contact: DASH (404) 639-3286, www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dash.
Athletes
Widely recognized as one of the most generous athletes in history, youth philanthropist and future NBA hall-of-famer David Robinson officially ended his basketball career in June when his San Antonio Spurs won their second NBA championship. The Admiral, as he has been known throughout his career, donated $9 million through the David Robinson Foundation (assets: $1.5 million) to help create the Carver Academy. That is believed to be the largest single charitable contribution ever made by a professional athlete. Carver is an independent school that primarily serves low-income Hispanic and African-American youth on the east side of San Antonio. Robinson was inducted into the World Sports Humanitarian Hall of Fame in 2001. Contact: David Robinson Foundation (210) 696-8061; Carver Academy (210) 223-8885, www.carveracademy.com.
Passages
Christopher Fairfield Edley, 75, president of the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) from 1973 to 1991. Edley got his start in the foundation world in 1963, when he became the first black program officer at the New York-based Ford Foundation. UNCF raised more than $700 million during Edley’s watch, much of which can be attributed to his savvy advertising campaigns and his development of the TV telethon, “Lou Rawls’ Parade of Stars.”
Anndee Huber, 16, a volunteer firefighter in Newcastle, Wyo., who was killed when the fire truck she was riding in rolled over. Nearly one-third of the 3,000 townspeople came to Huber’s funeral, many of them still angry after finding out that the firehouse had a bar and the driver of Huber’s truck was under the influence of alcohol. While most states have labor laws setting minimum ages for various jobs, volunteer associations are generally not included under those statutes.
