Shena Ashley

As Vice President and the Director of the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy (CNP) at the Urban Institute, Shena Ashley leads research, technical assistance, and advisory services to provide evidence and insights that inform the social impact sector and advance effective strategies to achieve better outcomes for people and communities nationwide. Dr. Ashley has led the expansion of the Center’s policy research and programmatic initiatives including projects related to democratizing charitable giving, impact investing, and equitable grantmaking while spearheading the transformation of the National Center on Charitable Statistics (NCCS) to a freely accessible, open-data platform. She is committed to making the Center a model for training the next generation of diverse, engaged scholars who can work to elevate the voice and expertise of the practitioners on the frontlines of social change.

Dr. Ashley currently serves on the board of ARNOVA and the editorial boards of the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (NVSQ) and The Nonprofit Quarterly. Before joining Urban, Dr. Ashley held academic positions at Syracuse University and Georgia State University and led research and policy at the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Atlanta Civic Site.

Tina Dacin

Tina Dacin is the Stephen J.R. Smith Chaired Professor of Strategy and Organizational Behavior in the Smith School of Business. She is the Director of the Centre for Social Impact where she is faculty director for professional development program offerings in Social Finance and Leading with Impact. Tina’s teaching interests are in the areas of social innovation, social finance and impact investing as well as strategy, organizational change and leadership.

Tina’s research interests include cultural heritage, traditions and place-making, social entrepreneurship, and strategic collaboration. Her work has been published in leading management journals and she has served in a variety of editorial positions for these journals. Tina received her doctorate from the University of Toronto and prior to joining Queen’s University, she spent nine years at Texas A & M University. She has most recently been a Visiting Professor and Fellow for several years at the Judge Business School at University of Cambridge.

James M. Ferris

James M. Ferris holds the Emery Evans Olson Chair in Nonprofit Entrepreneurship and Public Policy in the Sol Price School of Public Policy at USC and is the founding director of The Center on Philanthropy and Public Policy. He specializes in the economics of the public and nonprofit sectors, public finance and public policy. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.

Dr. Ferris’ research focuses on the shifting roles of the public, nonprofit and for-profit sectors in governance and the economy. He is currently investigating the changing landscape of philanthropy; roles and strategies for foundation engagement in public policymaking; philanthropic-government partnerships; place-based philanthropy; and philanthropic leadership as reflected in the shared governance between boards of trustees and CEOs of philanthropic foundations. He serves as a member of the editorial boards of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly and the Nonprofit Policy Forum and has served as a member of the Independent Sector’s Programs and Practice Committee, the Philanthropy and Partnerships Committee of the National Park Service and the editorial board of the Journal of Public Administration and Theory.He is a former Vice President of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action, and was a member of the Grants Advisory Committee of the Aspen Institute’s Nonprofit Sector and Philanthropy Research Fund, the academic council of the National Center on Nonprofit Enterprise, and Independent Sector’s John Gardner Award Selection Committee.

Dr. Ferris served as Vice Dean (1995-97) of the Price School and as founding Director of its Program in Public Policy (1989-93). More recently, he spearheaded the Master’s degree in Nonprofit Leadership and Management (MNLM), which launched in 2015. Professor Ferris teaches courses in public policy, philanthropy and nonprofits, public finance, and political economy of institutions at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Elizabeth Graddy

Elizabeth Graddy holds the Jeffrey J. Miller Chair in Government, Business, and the Economy and is Professor of Public Policy in the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. Prior to her appointment as Executive Vice Provost, Dr. Graddy served as the Vice Provost for Academic and Faculty Affairs, the Vice Dean of the Price School and as Senior Associate Dean of Faculty and Academic Affairs. Dr. Graddy is the recipient of several teaching awards at USC.

Dr. Graddy’s expertise is in institutional economics, public and nonprofit organizations, and public policy analysis. Her research focuses on the role of private organizations in serving the public interest, how industry and organizational structure affect performance, and how information asymmetry and uncertainty affect institutional design and effectiveness. This work has led to over 50 scholarly publications. She is currently a co-editor of the Journal of Policy Analysis & Management and on the editorial board of the Policy Studies Journal. She is a past public member of the California State Board of Podiatric Medicine. She received her Ph.D. in Public Policy Analysis from Carnegie-Mellon University. Dr. Graddy was elected to the National Academy of Public Administration in 2016.

Brayden King

Brayden King is the Max McGraw Chair of Management and the Environment and a professor of Management and Organizations in the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He is also affiliated with the Department of Sociology. Professor King’s research focuses on how social movement activists influence corporate social responsibility, organizational change, and legislative policymaking. He also studies the ways in which the reputations and identities of businesses and social movement organizations emerge and change. Professor King is an international research fellow at the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation.

Professor King has published research in the American Journal of Sociology, Administrative Science Quarterly, American Sociological Review, Organization Science, and numerous other scholarly journals. He is currently a senior editor at Organization Science and a consulting editor at Sociological Science. He has been a guest editor at Organization Studies and Research in the Sociology of Organizations. Professor King received his PhD in 2005 from the University of Arizona in sociology.

Jack Meyers

Jack Meyers is President and CEO of the Rockefeller Archive Center, an independent operating foundation that sponsors research on the philanthropic sector and holds the largest collection of foundation and civil society records in the country. He has served as Assistant to the Provost at Yale University, and as a Senior Program Officer and later Deputy Director of the Getty Foundation, as well as Director of Education Policy at the J. Paul Getty Trust. Prior to his appointment at the Getty, he was an Assistant Director at the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington, DC. He has been a Senior Fellow at the Center for Philanthropy and Public Policy at the University of Southern California and taught for over 10 years at the Yale School of Management. He received his B.A. from Yale University and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Michelle Shumate

Michelle Shumate is a Professor of Communication Studies, the Delaney Family University Research Professor an Associate Faculty at the Institute for Policy Research, and the founder and director of the Network for Nonprofit and Social Impact (nnsi.northwestern.edu). Her research investigates the dynamics of interorganizational networks designed to impact large social issues, developing and testing theories to visualize, understand, and enable effective interorganizational networks in a variety of contexts including nongovernmental organization (NGO)-corporate partnerships, development and disease NGOs, expert-NGO partnerships in sustainable development, and interorganizational networks for healthy communities.

Professor Shumate has published in a range of journals including Human Communication Research, Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Management Communication Quarterly, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Nonprofit Management and Leadership, Business & Society, and the Journal of Business Ethics. She was awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER award and a Beckman Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois. She holds a Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California and a Bachelor’s Degree from Pepperdine University.

Patricia Strach

Patricia Strach is professor in the Departments of Political Science and Public Administration & Policy and director for policy and research at the Rockefeller Institute of Government, the public policy think tank for the 64-campus State University of New York (SUNY) system. She is PI on Stories from Sullivan, which examines how opioid misuse affects local communities and what local communities are doing to address it. Strach is an expert in public policy and mass politics and is the author of Hiding Politics in Plain Sight: Cause Marketing, Corporate Influence, and Breast Cancer Policymaking (Oxford 2016) and All in the Family: The Private Roots of American Public Policy (Stanford 2007) as well as numerous articles. She was a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at Harvard (2008-2010) after receiving her doctorate in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2004).

Edward T. Walker

Edward T. Walker is Professor, Vice Chair, and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Sociology at University of California, Los Angeles. His research investigates the mobilization and outcomes of advocacy both by social movement organizations and by business firms and trade associations; his focus in recent work is on contention surrounding hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, as well as efforts by activists to pressure companies to improve their political disclosure practices (in a new National Science Foundation-funded project). He is author of Grassroots for Hire: Public Affairs Consultants in American Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2014), which won the 2015 Charles Tilly Award from the American Sociological Association. He is also co-editor of Democratizing Inequalities: Dilemmas of the New Public Participation (NYU Press, 2015). His research has appeared in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Problems, and other journals, and has been covered in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, The Atlantic, Time, and other outlets.

Christine Beckman

Christine Beckman is a Visiting Professor at the USC Price School of Public Policy. She is an Associate Editor at Administrative Science Quarterly and Past Division Chair of the Organization and Management Theory division of the Academy of Management. She previously served on the faculty at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, and the Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine. At Maryland, she was the Academic Director for the Center for Social Value Creation, Diversity Officer, and facilitated a peer network for junior faculty women. At UC Irvine, she was a Chancellor’s Fellow from 2008-2011 and Faculty Director of the Don Beall Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. She was the 2006 Western Academy of Management Ascendent Scholar.

Professor Beckman has published over 20 articles in peer-reviewed journals. She is known for her research on organizational learning, interorganizational networks, inequality, and entrepreneurship, particularly on how collaborative relationships and diverse experiences facilitate organizational change. Her research sites are varied and include F500 companies, Silicon Valley start-ups, mutual funds, law firms, the U.S. Navy, German football teams, and American baseball teams. She is currently working on a book project and conducting new research on urban charter schools. She is a native Californian and received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Stanford University.

Peter Frumkin

Peter Frumkin is Professor of Social Policy & Practice at the University of Pennsylvania and holds the Mindy and Andrew Heyer Chair in Social Policy. He is Faculty Director of the Center for Social Impact Strategy and Director of the Nonprofit Leadership Program. His research and teaching focus on philanthropy, nonprofit management, and social entrepreneurship.

Frumkin has written numerous books and articles on all aspects of philanthropy and nonprofit management. His 2006 book, Strategic Giving: The Art and Science of Philanthropy, has been touted by reviewers as the “benchmark text for the field” and “the most penetrating exploration of contemporary philanthropy now available.” Other books include On Being Nonprofit (Harvard University Press, 2002), which won the best book award from the Academy of Management’s public and nonprofit section; Serving Country and Community co-authored with JoAnn Jastrzab (Harvard, 2010), which examines the effectiveness of the national service programs AmeriCorps and VISTA; The Essence of Strategic Giving: A Practical Guide for Donors and Fundraisers (University of Chicago Press, 2010), which provides a roadmap for how to improve the effectiveness of philanthropy; The Strategic Management of Charter Schools (Harvard 2011), co-authored with Bruno Manno and Nell Edgington, which develops a systematic way of thinking about and handling the many management challenges associated with starting and sustaining a charter school; and Building for the Arts (co-authored with Ana Kolendo; University of Chicago Press, 2014), which considers the management challenges associated with the recent cultural building boom in America.

Prior to coming to Penn, Frumkin was Professor of Public Affairs and Director of the RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community Service at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin. He has taught at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and served as a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. Before academics, Frumkin worked as a foundation program officer, a nonprofit manager, and as a program evaluator in both nonprofit and public agencies. Frumkin received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago.

Nicole Esparza

Nicole Esparza is an associate professor at USC’s Sol Price School of Public Policy, where she teaches courses on public policy and management and program evaluation. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University in 2007 and was a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar at Harvard University.
Professor Esparza’s dissertation examined homeless assistance nonprofits in twenty-six metropolitan areas with a special focus on organizational networks in Los Angeles, Detroit, and Philadelphia. Her current research asks two major questions: How do social, economic, and political forces shape the size and growth of the urban nonprofit sector? How do interorganizational dynamics influence the effectiveness and distribution of services? Her work has been published in the American Sociological Review and has received support from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.