Foundations
William Bell, vice president of child and family services for Seattle-based Casey Family Programs (assets: $2 billion), will replace the retiring Ruth Massinga as CEO. Massinga has led the 40-year-old foundation, which focuses on providing and improving foster care options, since 1989. She will remain with Casey for several months to ease the leadership transition.
Bell has been with Casey since 2004. Before that, he served as New York City’s commissioner for the Administration for Children’s Services – work that garnered him the Betsey R. Rosenbaum Award for Excellence in Child Welfare Administration, given by the National Association for Public Child Welfare Administrators. Contact: (206) 270-4995, www.casey.org.
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At the Baltimore-based Annie E. Casey Foundation (assets: $3 billion), William O’Hare has stepped down as director of Kids Count, Casey’s data-gathering project that has emerged as one of the best tools for measuring the success of states in serving youth and families. His replacement has not been named. O’Hare says he will stay on as a senior fellow and consultant. Contact: (410) 547-6600, www.aecf.org.
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The Troy, Mich.-based Kresge Foundation (assets: $2.9 billion), which helps finance capital campaigns through challenge grants to nonprofits, will replace retiring CEO John Marshall with McKnight Foundation President Richard “Rip” Rapson. Rapson, who will take over in June, was the deputy mayor of Minneapolis in the early 1990s.
Kresge made 217 grants totaling $131.8 million in 2005, and is getting ready to return to its renovated headquarters. Contact: (248) 643-9630, www.kresge.org.
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Philadelphia-based Pew Charitable Trusts (assets: $4.9 billion) has hired Jim O’Hara as director of policy initiatives and of its health and human services program. He takes over for Maureen Byrnes, who left Pew to head Human Rights First in New York.
O’Hara comes to Pew via I-95 North: He leaves his position as executive director of the Washington-based Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth (CAMY), a tiny group housed at Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute that calls out alcohol companies that market to youth.
His two primary jobs will be to oversee Pew’s national health policy program and its funding of programs for vulnerable populations in the Philadelphia area.
Taking over for O’Hara at CAMY is David Jernigan, an associate professor at Georgetown and an adviser on alcohol issues to the World Health Organization. Contact: Pew (215) 575-9050, www.pewtrusts.com; CAMY (202) 687-1019, http://camy.org.
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The Kansas City, Mo.-based Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation (assets: $1.6 billion) named Dennis Cheek to serve as vice president of education. Kauffman’s education division funds efforts to make Kansas City a model community in math and science preparation for youth, and makes national grants to support academic achievement for disadvantaged youth.
Cheek, who began his career as a science and social studies teacher, was vice president for venture philanthropy at the West Conshohocken, Pa.-based John Templeton Foundation, which funds scientific research into areas of theological significance. Contact: (816) 932-1046, www.kauffman.org.
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The McCormick Tribune Foundation’s Communities and Journalism programs both fund work to develop youth, and the Chicago-based grant maker (assets: $1.4 billion) decided in December to hire some young locals to help disburse the money. Amanda Cage was brought on as communities program officer, while Sara Melillo was tapped to head the journalism program.
Cage, who received her master’s degree in public policy from the University of Chicago, will help Community Program Director Catherine Brown oversee part of the foundation’s annual grant-making effort ($109 million in 2004). Cage has interned with Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and at the Chicago Community Trust.
After graduating from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism and Tulane University’s public health school, Melillo worked as a researcher for the Media Management Center/Readership Institute and for the Global AIDS program at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. At the foundation, she will work for Journalism Director Clark Bell. Contact: (312) 222-3512, www.rrmtf.org.
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The Gill Foundation in Denver named Patrick Flaherty to be its senior program officer for state-based programs. Headed by Rodger McFarlane, the grant-making foundation seeks to secure rights for gays and lesbians around the country.
Flaherty served from 1997 to 2004 as executive director of Project Angel Heart, a Denver area nonprofit that provides nutrition services to HIV/AIDS patients. He is credited with saving the charity from a major financial crisis. Contact: (303) 292-4455, www.gillfoundation.org.
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Kimberlee Andrews is the new program director at the Battle Creek, Mich.-based W.K. Kellogg Foundation (assets: $6.8 billion). Andrews was a program officer at the Michigan Community Service Commission, which oversees the state’s AmeriCorps funding. Contact: (269) 968-1611, www.wkkf.org.
Nonprofits
The Boston-based Education Development Center named Luther Luedtke to succeed retiring CEO Janet Whitla. Luedtke comes to the East Coast from Thousand Oaks, Calif., where he served as president of the California Lutheran University. EDC promotes early child development, work force preparation and community development.
Whitla left after 40 years with the organization, 25 of which she spent running it. Since 1981, when Whitla took over as president, the center’s annual revenues have increased from $4.5 million to more than $100 million. Contact: (617) 969-7100, www.edc.org.
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Planned Parenthood Federation last month named Cecile Richards as its new president. She takes over for Karen Pearl, who has filled in since President Gloria Feldt and Vice President Susanne Martinez left last February.
Richards, the daughter of former Texas Gov. Ann Richards (D), goes to Planned Parenthood after serving as president of America Votes. That umbrella group of some 30 grassroots organizations spent $350 million on voter mobilization in 2004. Before that, Richards was deputy chief of staff for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Contact: (800) 230-7526, www.plannedparenthood.org.
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The Columbia University-based National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) named Rush Russel to serve as chief operating officer. Russel comes to the organization, headed by the ever-controversial Joe Califano, after a nine-year tenure at the nonprofit he founded, Trenton-based Children’s Futures, which is funded primarily by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Contact: (212) 841-5200, www.casacolumbia.org.
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Richard Mittenthal took over as CEO of the New York-based TCC Group (formerly The Conservation Company) in January, after the retirement of founder John Riggan. Mittenthal has been with TCC since 1989, when he left his post as vice president of programs at the New York Community Trust. TCC’s youth-serving clients include the Ford and Annie E. Casey foundations and the Children’s Defense Fund. Contact: (212) 949-0990, www.tccgrp.com.
The New York-based Jackie Robinson Foundation (JRF), founded in 1973 by the baseball great’s wife, Rachel, named E. Ramone Segree as chief development officer. Segree will head the foundation’s effort to expand its marketing and communications partnerships, as well as a subsequent major national fundraising campaign. Segree has specialized in landing major gifts for universities, which he has done through his own fundraising consulting firm, Segree Associates. Before that,Segree served as executive director of the Pennsylvania National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
JRF provides college scholarships to minority high school seniors. The foundation gave $1.8 million to 266 Jackie Robinson scholars last year. Contact: (212) 290-8600, www.jackierobinson.org.
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Hugh Price, who left his post as CEO of the National Urban League in 2003 after tripling the organization’s endowment, joined the Brookings Institution as a senior fellow in January. Price’s focus at the Washington think tank will include nonprofit governance, education and criminal justice. Contact: (202) 797-6467, www.brookings.org.
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The Dallas-based Center for Nonprofit Management (CNM) hired Cynthia Nunn to serve as president. Each year, the 25-year-old CNM helps some 1,500 nonprofits improve their management and governance skills.
Nunn, who once served as CNM’s director of management consultant services, has been in the center of big-time nonprofit management. As president of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Dallas, she oversaw a 140-person staff at 12 local branches, operating on a total budget of $4.1 million. Nunn takes the helm on Feb. 16. Contact: (212) 826-3470, www.cnmdallas.org.
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Kids Voting USA, based in Tempe, Ariz., named Terry Pickeral to serve as chairman of the board. Pickeral was the director of the National Center for Learning and Citizenship at the Education Commission of the States in Denver.
He inherits the position at an unlucky time for the 18-year-old nonprofit. Like so many other programs that rely on earmarks from congressional patrons on the Appropriations labor, health and human services and education subcommittees, Kids Voting lost its usual support when all of the pork was stripped from the spending bill this year. Kids Voting, headed by CEO Chris Heller, has received $1.7 million in earmarks since 2002. Contact: (866) 500-8683, www.kidsvotingusa.org.
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The National Youth Advocate Program hired Joan Wilson to oversee its Ohio Youth Advocate Program. The organization provides services to disadvantaged youth, including counseling, family preservation, specialized foster care and independent living. Wilson was promoted from her post as chief operating officer. Contact: (304) 363-4237, www.nyap.org.
States
Jim Davy was hired by former New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey (D) in 2004 to lead the way toward reforming the state’s troubled child welfare system. Two years later, he has been forced out as human services commissioner under pressure from the nonprofit that forced the reforms, Children’s Rights (CR).
Early on, Davy won the respect of CR and of the panel that was formed to oversee the reforms. Davy told the Newark Star-Ledger that the system is less than a year away from “the promised land,” but CR is unhappy with the speed of progress and has hauled the state back into court. Facing CR’s demand for new leadership, new Gov. Jon Corzine (D) let Davy go. Replacing him is former state child advocate Kevin Ryan, a vocal critic of Davy during his tenure. Contact: (609) 292-3703, www.state.nj.us/humanservices.
Passages
Stanley “Tookie” Williams, 51, founder of the vicious Crips street gang. Williams was sent to death row for four murders in 1979, and was later nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his anti-gang work, mostly aimed at youth. Despite a celebrity-studded outcry seeking to change his sentence to life in prison, Williams was executed by the state of California.
Cynthia McLachlan, 65, founder of the Girl’s Best Friend Foundation in Chicago, one of the first philanthropies in the nation to focus exclusively on empowering young women. The foundation plans to spend the rest of its $15 million endowment by 2008.
