Stepping down after 10 years as managing director of the San Francisco-based Roberts Enterprise Development Fund is Jed Emerson. The youth enterprise-promoting group is sponsored by the Roberts Foundation (assets: $50 million) and has been run for the past year by Managing Director Melinda Tuan, while Emerson was a research fellow in philanthropy at Harvard Business School. Emerson is looking forward to “not having to run anything.” In a February letter to colleagues, he wrote, ” I look forward to running the marathon instead of the sprint.” The former youth worker at the Larkin St. Youth Center in San Francisco will teach at Stanford. He’ll also work concurrently as a senior fellow at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (assets: $9 billion), which is still squatting serenely in the blocks, awaiting the starting gun for its plans to become a major national grant-maker in the youth field.
Contact: Roberts Enterprise Development Fund (415) 561-6677 or www.redf.org; Hewlett Foundation (650) 329-1070 or www.hewlett.org.
Paul Grogan, former president of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), and since January 1999 the vice president for government, community and public affairs at Harvard, has a new job. In July he’ll succeed Anna Faith Jones, president of the Boston Foundation (assets: $700 million). The appointment was something of a surprise since Deborah Jackson, the foundation’s senior vice president for network development and community services, was the heir apparent. Perhaps Grogan, after 12 years at LISC, found the Harvard job dull. While many colleges secretly fret about “There goes the neighborhood” problems, Harvard (endowment: $ 19 billion) simply says: “There, buy the neighborhood.” That strategy was most recently manifested in its purchase of the 770,000-square foot Arsenal on the Charles River, which will knock up to $3.5 million off the tax rolls of neighboring Watertown. Grogan’s name is also being mentioned as a candidate for mayor – not of Watertown but Boston.
Contact: (617) 723-7415 or www.tbf.org
