HENRY R. KRAVISHenry Kravis is a leader in the social enterprise and social entrepreneur movement. The eponymous donor to and founding member of the Kravis Leadership Institute at Claremont McKenna College, Mr. Kravis believes in the positive change that can occur in the world through funding the ideas of responsible and innovative leaders.
A founding partner in the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Mr. Kravis has been involved in the largest, most successful acquisitions including RJR Nabisco, First Data, TXU, Beatrice, Safeway, Duracell, among others. His firm has completed more than 165 transactions with a total acquisition price of approximately $420 billion.
Mr. Kravis demonstrates the importance of supporting the social sector by serving or having served on a number of boards including the New York City Investment Fund, the Partnership for New York City, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mount Sinai Hospital, Public Television Channel 13, Columbia Graduate School of Business, Rockefeller University, and Claremont McKenna College. In 2005, he founded the Henry R. Kravis Prize in Leadership, recognizing a leader of a social sector organization who is making a true impact on society.
PAMELA HARTIGANPamela Hartigan is Director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Said Business School at the University of Oxford. She is also founding partner of Volans Ventures, an organization launched in 2008 and focused on building innovative scalable solutions to challenges affecting our future. Prior to starting Volans, Dr. Hartigan spent seven years as the first Managing Director of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, a sister organization of the World Economic Forum where she was also on the Forum Managing Board. The Schwab Foundation is focused on advancing the practice of social entrepreneurship globally, building and supporting its community of practitioners whose efforts have achieved transformational social change. Throughout her career, she has held varied leadership positions in multilateral health organizations and educational institutions as well as in entrepreneurial non-profits. She has been responsible for conceptualizing and creating new organizations, departments or programs across a variety institutional arrangements and multi-stakeholder platforms. A graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C., she also holds Masters' degrees in Economics and Public Health and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology.
Dr. Hartigan is a frequent lecturer on social entrepreneurship and innovation at graduate schools of business in the USA, Europe and Asia, and is an Adjunct Professor at the Columbia Business School. Her book, co-authored with John Elkington, founder of SustainAbility (UK) and entitled The Power of Unreasonable People: How Entrepreneurs Create Markets to Change the World has just been published by Harvard Business Press in February 2008.
PAUL RICEPaul Rice is the President & CEO of TransFair USA, the only Fair Trade certification organization in the U.S. today. Since launching the Fair Trade Certified label for coffee nine years ago, Paul has helped establish Fair Trade as one of the fastest growing segments of the food industry. This success is rooted in TransFair’s innovative approach which helps companies incorporate social responsibility into their business strategies by igniting consumer awareness and building demand for certified products. The result: a market-based model for poverty alleviation and sustainable development that actually boosts growth, profitability and brand reputation.
To date, TransFair has developed business partnerships with over 650 US companies (including such leading brands as Starbucks, P&G, Green Mountain and Dunkin’ Donuts), launched Fair Trade coffee into 50,000 retail outlets nationwide, certified over 160 million pounds of Fair Trade coffee, and reached $1 billion in retail sales in 2007. TransFair is rapidly expanding Fair Trade certification into tea, chocolate, rice, sugar, bananas, flowers and wine. Fair Trade certification has helped open the US market to over 1.4 million small family farmers around the world who are now getting a fair price for their harvests and making dramatic gains in their living standards.
Paul came to Fair Trade by way of the mountainous Segovias region of Nicaragua, where he worked for 11 years as a rural development specialist. He spent most of the 1980’s working directly in the field with cooperative farmers, creating and implementing training programs aimed at developing small farmers’ organizational and business capacity. This first-hand field experience gave him an understanding of the inherent weaknesses of the classic “development aid” model as well as insight into alternative, market-based approaches to sustainable development.
In 1990 Paul founded and became the first CEO of PRODECOOP, a highly successful Fair Trade organic cooperative representing almost 3,000 small coffee farmers in northern Nicaragua. He led PRODECOOP for 4 years, capturing market opportunities in the European Fair Trade and gourmet coffee markets, and introducing him to the power of Fair Trade as an innovative strategy for grassroots empowerment and sustainability. Subsequently, Paul served as strategy consultant and development advisor to 22 cooperative enterprises in Latin America and Asia. His first-hand experience over the last 25 years in the areas of global supply chain transparency, social auditing, sustainable agriculture and cooperative development is unique in the certification world. Paul is now a leading advocate of market linkage as a core strategy for farmer empowerment and sustainable development.
When the opportunity arose in 1998 to launch TransFair USA and open the specialty coffee market to small family farmers, Paul found his current role to be a natural evolution of his years in the field. Over the last eight years, TransFair has sought to reframe the industry’s conventional wisdom about the most effective response to poverty in the coffee communities, building innovative partnerships for sustainable solutions. Increasingly, the coffee industry is using Fair Trade as a business model that promotes sustainability, delivers value back to farmers and consumers, and builds profitability.
Paul has received numerous prestigious international awards for his pioneering work as a social entrepreneur in the Fair Trade movement, including: the Ashoka Fellowship (www.ashoka.org), the Klaus Schwab Foundation Award for Social Entrepreneurship (www.schwabfound.org), Fast Company magazine’s Social Capitalist of the Year award (four-time winner), and the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship (www.skollfoundation.org). Paul holds a Political Science degree from Yale University and an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.
David GreenDavid Green has worked with many organizations to make medical technology and health care services sustainable, affordable and accessible to all, particularly to the poorer two thirds of humanity. David is a MacArthur Fellow, Ashoka Fellow and is recognized by Schwab Foundation as a leading social entrepreneur. He will be honored as the 2009 recipient of the “Spirit of Helen Keller” award, given by Helen Keller International for humanitarian efforts in blindness prevention. His most significant work is the development of an economic paradigm for making health care products and services available and affordable to the poor. This paradigm of ‘humanized capitalism’ utilizes production capacity and surplus revenue to serve all economic strata, rich and poor alike, in a way that is both financially self-sustaining and affordable to all members of society.
In 1992, David directed the establishment of Aurolab (India), the first non-profit manufacturing facility in a developing country to produce affordable intraocular lenses (IOLs), suture, pharmaceuticals and eyeglasses. Aurolab is one of the largest manufacturers of IOLs in the world (close to 10% of global market share), with sales to 109 countries. David also directed the establishment of suture (wound closure product) manufacturing at Aurolab in 1998 and is now developing a social enterprise company based in Chicago to make hearing devices available and affordable via social enterprise channels in developing countries.
In addition to establishing medical manufacturing, David has helped develop high-volume, quality eye care programs that are affordable to the poor and self-sustaining from user fees. He helped develop Aravind Eye Hospital in Madurai, India, which performs 300,000 surgeries per year, making it the largest eye care system in the world. 70 percent of the care is provided free of charge or below cost, yet the hospital is able to generate substantial surplus revenue. David has replicated this cost recovery model in Nepal, Malawi, Egypt, Guatemala, El Salvador, Tibet, Tanzania, China, Bangladesh and Kenya and has assisted the Lions Aravind Institute for Community Ophthalmology to build their capacity to provide this assistance to well over 200 programs worldwide which have become self financing.
He is now collaborating with the International Agency for Prevention of Blindness and Deutsche Bank to create an “Eye Fund” that will improve financing for sustainable eye care. David also is a Vice President of Ashoka, where he works to develop more abundant and efficient financing for the social sector and leads an initiative to make solar energy affordable to low income communities. He works with Pacific Vision Foundation to develop an eye hospital serving N. California where revenues from insured patients cover care for the uninsured; collaborates with Grameen Health in Bangladesh to develop eye hospitals; works with California Health Care Foundation to develop affordable retinal imaging for eye disease detection and monitoring; and has developed with Venture Strategies an affordable drug impregnated IUD.
ROY PROSTERMANRoy Prosterman, President left a rising career with one of the nation’s top law firms, Sullivan & Cromwell, in 1965 for a teaching post at the University of Washington School of Law. Led by an interest in doing something about the poverty and under-development he had seen first-hand in Liberia and Puerto Rico while representing clients, he sought to apply the law to building a better world.
As a young professor teaching property law—troubled by poverty and violent conflicts in developing countries—he began to use the law to help reshape the world. In an article titled “How to Have a Revolution Without a Revolution,” he proposed a program of democratic land reform to satisfy the grievances of the rural landless poor in developing countries.
Prosterman’s idea caught the attention of U.S. policy-makers who were seeking a political settlement to the conflict in Vietnam. Soon he found himself in the middle of the Vietnam War, drafting legislation for a “land-to-the-tillers” program—carried out between 1970 and 1973—that provided land ownership to one million tenant farmer families. Since then, Prosterman and his RDI associates have gone on to apply and develop variants of this peaceful approach to land reform in 37 developing countries around the globe.
Professor Prosterman has conducted field research and provided technical assistance in myriad developing countries throughout Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and Latin America. He is a leading world expert on land reform, and has authored numerous publications on land policy, hunger, and agricultural development, including Land Reform and Democratic Development (Johns Hopkins University Press, co-authored with Jeffrey Riedinger), and articles in The Wall Street Journal, International Herald Tribune, and Scientific American. He has received many awards and distinctions, including two nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Professor Prosterman is a graduate of the University of Chicago (B.A., 1954) and Harvard Law School (J.D., 1958).
JOEL L. FLEISHMANJoel L. Fleishman, Professor of Law and Public Policy Studies, is a graduate of the University of North Carolina(A.B., 1955, J.D., 1959) and Yale University (LL.M., 1960).
In 1971, Mr. Fleishman joined the faculty of Duke University where he combined his background in public policy and law as founding Director of the Institute of Policy Sciences and Public Affairs (now called the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy), a position he held until 1983. He has been Professor of Law and Public Policy Studies since 1974. Mr. Fleishman was appointed Chairman of the Capital Campaign for the Arts & Sciences and Engineering in 1982, which succeeded in raising more than $200 million in endowment and a total of $500 million over-all. He became Vice President of the University in 1985, Senior Vice President of the University in 1988, and First Senior Vice President of the University in 1991. In September of 1993, Mr. Fleishman relinquished his administrative duties at Duke University to become President of The Atlantic Philanthropic Service Company, Inc. in New York City, the U.S. program staff for Atlantic Philanthropies, which he held until January, 2001, at which time he was appointed Senior Advisor at APS Company. Through his years with APS, Mr. Fleishman continued as part-time Professor of Law and Public Policy Studies and Director of the Sam and Ronnie Heyman Center for Ethics, Public Policy and the Professions within the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke University and returned to full-time status in those positions effective July 1, 2003. At that time, he launched the Duke Foundation Research Program, of which he served as Director until July, 2008, at which time he became the Faculty Chair of Duke’s newly established Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society.
Mr. Fleishman was a founding member of the Board of Trustees of Mesorah Heritage Foundation, the charitable affiliate of ArtScroll Publications, was a founding Trustee of the American Hebrew Academy in Greensboro, NC, and continues to serve as a member of both boards. He is also a Trustee Emeritus of Brandeis University and a Trustee of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He is also a Trustee of the American Friends of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.
Mr. Fleishman serves as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Urban Institute, Chairman of the Visiting Committee of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, a founding Trustee of the Partnership for Public Service, a Trustee of the Center for Effective Philanthropy and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In Fall 2004, Mr. Fleishman was appointed by the Independent Sector as co-convener of the Expert Advisory Group, an eight-person group assembled to advise its Panel on the Nonprofit Sector, an entity composed of leaders from charities and foundations across the country. The Panel was formed at the encouragement of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee to prepare recommendations for Congress on how to improve the oversight and governance of charitable organizations. Again, in March 2006, Mr. Fleishman was appointed co-chair of Independent Sector’s Special Advisory Committee on Self-Regulation of the Charitable Sector, the purpose of which was to formulate recommendations on self-regulation of the charitable sector to recommend to the Panel on the Nonprofit Sector. Mr. Fleishman is a member of the Board of Advisers of the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. Mr. Fleishman is a former member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Foundations.
Having authored and co-authored numerous articles, chapters, and books which reflect his interest in ethics, public policy, and not-for-profit organizations, as well as urban studies, the postal service, and the financing of federal elections, Mr. Fleishman has focused the writing of his most recent articles on public trust in not-for-profit organizations. His book on the role and impact of foundations in America was published in January 2007, and is now in 6th printing. Its title is The Foundation: A Great American Secret—How Private Wealth Is Changing the World (New York: PublicAffairs Books, 2007). In response to that book, Mr. Fleishman gave about 50 speeches to national and regional organizations and foundation boards of trustees. In October, 2007, Mr. Fleishman delivered the Inaugural Thomas W. Lambeth Lecture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which has now been published. Its title is “Ethics, Self-Interest and the Public Good.”
In addition to his academic activities, Mr. Fleishman is a member of the Board of Directors of Boston Scientific Corporation and the Polo Ralph Lauren Corporation.
For eight years, from 1984 to 1992, he wrote a monthly wine column for Vanity Fair magazine.
RICK AUBRY Rick Aubry, PhD, is the President of Rubicon Programs Inc., one of America’s pre-eminent nonprofit organizations that has had a significant and measured impact on the lives of over 40,000 people confronting homeless, poverty, and the challenges of living with mental health disabilities. Rubicon is a three-time winner of the Fast Company Magazine “Social Capitalist Award for its impact and innovation in addressing these issues. Rick has been Rubicon’s leader since 1986, overseeing the growth of the agency from a staff of 12 serving a handful of clients with a $980,000 annual budget to an organization serving more than 3,000 people annually with over 250 full time staff and over $15 million in annual revenues in 2005.
Rick is also faculty member and Lecturer in Management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business where he is a fellow of Stanford’s Center for Social Innovation. He is one of the coauthors of Generating and Sustaining Nonprofit Earned Income (Jossey Bass, 2004). Rick has also authored several Stanford case studies on social entrepreneurial organizations. He has lectured on social entrepreneurship at Stanford, UC Berkeley, the London Business School, Bainbridge Graduate School, The Indian Institute of Planning and Management in Delhi and at numerous international conferences. Rick’s work at Rubicon has been cited in the Harvard Business Review, the Brookings Institute Journal, and the New York Times.
Rick was selected in 2001 by the World Economic Forum and the Schwab Foundation as one of the world's leading Social Entrepreneurs, as one of the inaugural Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur fellows. Since 2001 he has regularly presented the work of Rubicon, the Schwab Foundation, and social entrepreneurs at the World Economic Forum Annual meeting in Davos. Rick’s work with the Schwab Foundation has helped build the field of social entrepreneurship.
Rick earned his BA from Syracuse University, his MA in Psychology from West Georgia University, and his PhD in Psychology at the Wright Institute Berkeley. Rick is a graduate of the Stanford Graduate School of Business Program for Nonprofit Leaders. He lives with his wife and two sons in the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S.
Rick Aubry has lead one of America’s leading social enterprises, Rubicon Programs, for over 20 years. His work at the GSB focuses on social entrepreneurship to effect positive social change throughout the world. His class focuses on social entrepreneurs creating change in the most challenging communities internationally and the U.S. Social entrepreneurs as guest lecturers are the core classroom experience. Students work directly, in class and on projects, with the world's leading practitioners, learning from these amazing world changers, inspiring unexpected action and thinking amongst students who might never have imagined they could be a part of changing the world.
CHRISTIANA THORPEChristiana Thorpe is the chief electoral commissioner for the National Electoral Commission of Sierra Leone. She is the founding chair and former chief executive officer of the Sierra Leone branch of the Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE-SL). A former nun, Thorpe left convent life to devote herself to the protection and education of girls. She was appointed deputy minister of education in late 1993 – the only woman in a cabinet of 19 members. After establishing FAWE-SL in 1995, the group created Emergency Camp Schools in the capital, Freetown, for children displaced by the civil war. Unrest in the country forced her into exile in Guinea, where FAWE-SL developed non-formal education programs for children. The organization later counseled and rehabilitated women and girls who had been raped by the fighting forces, particularly those victimized during the rebel attack on Freetown in 1999.
Through her duties as chief electoral commissioner, Thorpe restructured electoral processes within Sierra Leone for the nation’s second post-conflict presidential and parliamentary elections. Thorpe was responsible for registering political parties and citizen voters and organizing and monitoring the voting process. In addition, she ensured the involvement of all stakeholders including civil society and security forces in the election planning process. She conducted a series of civic education trainings with women’s and youth groups to educate them on election processes. With the successful training of over 8,000 youth, Thorpe employed them to monitor the elections. In a final effort to minimize election-inspired violence, she conducted trainings of peaceful conflict resolution with village chiefs. Thorpe is also a member of the National Security Council, which elevated her capacity to institute free and fair elections within the country.
Thorpe received the 2006 Voices of Courage Award from the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children and the Special Token of Appreciation for Remarkable Services Award of Sierra Leone for her service to humanity. COLLEEN GROSS EBINGERColleen Gross Ebinger is the director of Public Innovators, a non-partisan Root Cause initiative that supports a new wave of government leaders at the city, state, and federal levels to identify and continuously support the most effective, efficient, and sustainable solutions to pressing social problems. BEVERLY SCHWARTZBeverly Schwartz, M.S., is a behavioral scientist with an extensive career in marketing both for the private, non-profit and public sector. She has a background in advertising and communications and she has devoted her career to working on some of the world’s most challenging social issues. She has held a variety of social and consumer marketing positions encompassing both domestic and global perspectives on issues as diverse as smoking and lung diseases, to eye sight, drugs, children’s health, gender equity, education, environmental reform and HIV/AIDS. Currently, Beverly is the Vice President of Global Marketing for Ashoka, the world’s largest association of leading social entrepreneurs. Her present behavioral challenge is to empower all people, everywhere, to be a positive force for change in the world.
Beverly is a veteran of managing large scale national social marketing campaigns. As a Senior Vice President at Fleishman Hillard International Communications she directed and managed the non – advertising portion of the US “Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign” under the auspices of the U.S. Drug Czar and the Executive Office of the White House. She also served as Project Director for the Food Stamps National Media Campaign, under the auspices of the US Department of Agriculture. As Vice President for Social Marketing at the Academy for Educational Development she managed multiple contracts and campaigns for the World Bank, USAID and the US Department of Health and Human Services. As Social Marketing Specialist for the Deputy Director for HIV/AIDS at the US Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta she helped design and manage the “America Responds to AIDS” media campaign in it’s beginning and critical growth years of 1987-1992. At CDC, she also served as Acting Director of Public Information for the Office on Smoking and Health. During the 3 years she lived in Minnesota, she worked for the St. Paul Lung Association and helped write and pass the Minnesota Clean Indoor Air Act, the nations’ first non smoking in public places law.
She is well known in the public health, education and social marketing fields. She frequently conducts seminars and workshops on various aspects of social entrepreneurship as well as “intrapreneurship”, social marketing and behavior change. Her recent presentation, delivered at the international Mental Health Association of America’s (now Mental Health America) national meeting was entitled “The Freedom to Innovate: Giving Yourself Permission to Think Big.” It is a companion to her book chapter (The Contributions of Social Entrepreneurs to Global Public Health, Springer Scientific Publications, Spring 2009).
ROBERT LANGRobert (Bob) Lang is CEO of the Mary Elizabeth & Gordon B. Mannweiler Foundation, Inc. and CEO of L3C Advisors L3C. He is responsible for innovative projects including the L3C, the new legal structure designed to incorporate socially beneficial activities under a for profit umbrella. One of the major projects has been the L3C, which is based on the use of for profit LLCs to perform socially beneficial services and use PRI funding as a source of capital, particularly equity. Vermont passed the L3C bill on April 30, 2008. Michigan made the L3C law in January 2009 and the Crow Indian Nation has passed the bill and it awaits the Chairman’s signature. Bills to create L3C s are now before several other state legislatures. He created the first L3C - L3C Advisors L3C to work with the philanthropic community and the world’s largest financial institutions to create new, unique financial product for social impact investing. An allied project is the creation of a Social Impact Investment Bank. Its purpose will be to structure, finance and facilitate deals only in the social sector. He is leading an international group in a project to develop social finance structural harmonization around the world and facilitate investment in L3C type structures worldwide. He is an active board member of Naumburg Orchestral Concerts, which presents free classical music concerts at the Naumburg Bandshell in Central Park in NYC. He is also a cosmetic chemist and CEO of Fabrique Cosmetique Inc and designs and develops cosmetic systems and machinery. He is a member of the American Chemical Society, the National Association of Watch & Clock Collectors, and on the Advisory Board of the Empowerment Resource Network. He lectures frequently and participates in seminars and on panels worldwide. He has been published in trade publications, popular magazines, on the web and newspapers.
JEFF MENDELSOHNJeff Mendelsohn is the founder and president of New Leaf Paper, a company whose mission is to transform the paper industry toward sustainability. He has developed a vision of a sustainable paper industry, and created a wide selection of cutting edge environmental papers that fit this vision. Since it was founded in 1998, New Leaf Paper has seen a shift in the marketplace through its efforts, and has had particular influence on book publishing. Jeff’s interest in socially responsible business transcends the goals of New Leaf Paper, and he actively works to support the growth of the socially responsible business community.
PETER THUMPeter Thum is a business and social entrepreneur. He is the founder of Ethos™ Water (www.ethoswater.com) and Giving Water (www.givingwater.org). Currently, he advises various for-profit and non-profit organizations and is pursuing a new venture.
Thum had the idea for Ethos in 2001 while working in South Africa, where he saw water issues firsthand. In 2002, he left his job to pursue his vision. He led Ethos as its President through its acquisition by Starbucks in 2005. From 2005 to 2008 he managed Ethos and other businesses as a Vice President of Starbucks and served as a Director of the Starbucks Foundation. Thum currently serves as Senior Advisor to Starbucks on the Ethos brand and mission.
Ethos is sold in Starbucks and marketed by Pepsi to other retailers across North America. Ethos grants to humanitarian water programs exceed $6 million, and are helping over 420,000 people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to get safe water, sanitation, and hygiene education. Ethos will grant at least $10 million to such programs by 2010.
Various media have profiled Thum, including: USA Today, National Public Radio, CBC News, Fortune Small Business, The New York Times, Business 2.0, Business Week, and The Yale Journal of Public Health. He speaks regularly about the founding of Ethos Water, social entrepreneurship, ethical branding, and corporate responsibility. He has been a guest lecturer at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, among others.
Thum is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College and of the Advisory Board of Impossible to Possible, a non-profit organization that organizes and undertakes ultra-athletic adventures to actively inspire and educate young people to protect the planet and its people.
Prior to founding Ethos, Thum was a consultant with McKinsey & Company in London. He previously held various marketing and sales roles with Gallo Winery in the US and Europe. Before Gallo, Thum was an English teacher for Siemens A.G. in Munich, Germany.
Thum holds a Master of Business Administration from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a Bachelor of Arts in government from Claremont McKenna College.
FAYE WASHINGTONFaye Washington has Iong history of distinguished public sector service. Her history of service began as a clerical employee of the City of Los AngelesFor the city, see Los Angeles, California. The City of Los Angeles was a streamlined passenger train jointly operated by the Chicago and North Western Railway and the Union Pacific Railroad. Thirty two years later, Faye's record included such accolades as Assistant General Manager and CAO of the Department of Water and Power, General Manager, Department of Personnel, General Manager, Department of Aging and Assistant Chief Legislative Analyst for the LA City Council, to name only a few of her accomplishments there.
Faye retired from the City of Los Angeles in 1998, with a determination to take time to smell the roses. When called to service at the YWCA as CEO, she quickly made the transition from retirement to lining the pathways for high-risk high-risk youth with hope, self-esteem and career development.
IRA A. JACKSONIra A. Jackson is the Henry Y. Hwang Dean of the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University, where he is also a professor of management. The Drucker School engages in extensive research and teaching designed to produce more effective managers and more ethical leaders. While offering the MBA and EMBA and joint degrees in financial engineering, arts and cultural management, and politics, business and economics, the Drucker School considers itself an “M” School and an “L” School not just a traditional “B” School, as it prepares managers and leaders for all sectors of society. Recently ranked among the top ten business schools in the country, Drucker focuses both on competence and compassion, analysis and intuition, leadership and teamwork, success and significance, and doing good and doing well.
Throughout his career, Jackson has brought entrepreneurship and excellence to business, government, higher education, and the nonprofit sector, and has focused his personal and professional life at the intersection of business, government and civil society, where he has been a bridge builder. At the age of 26, he was chief of staff to Boston’s Mayor Kevin White. At 32, he was the Senior Associate Dean of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he helped lead the School during its period of rapid growth and institutional transformation.
He left the Kennedy School to become Commissioner of Revenue for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, where he was credited with being one of the architects of the “Massachusetts economic miracle.” Jackson established an innovative model of “honest, fair and firm” tax administration that restored public confidence in the integrity, professionalism, and responsiveness of the agency through vigorous reforms. His leadership was recognized by the Massachusetts Taxpayers’ Association with their first Lyman Ziegler Award for Outstanding Public Service, and his management style and experience is the subject of a widely used management case study written by Prof. Robert Behn of Duke University.
Jackson served as Executive Vice President of BankBoston for a dozen years. During his tenure at BankBoston, the company consistently received Outstanding Community Reinvestment Act ratings from federal regulators for leadership in strengthening inner-city communities. This leadership was recognized by the Conference Board with the Ron Brown Award for Corporate Citizenship at a ceremony at the White House.
Jackson’s role in helping to support and expand CityYear earned him their “Big Citizen Award.” For his work in the public, private and nonprofit sectors, the Kennedy School presented Jackson with its Outstanding Alumni Award in its second year.
Jackson returned to Harvard as the Director of its Center for Business and Government at the Kennedy School and later became the first president of the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation in Atlanta.
Prior to coming to Claremont, he was President and CEO of the Arizona State University Foundation. Under Jackson’s leadership, the Foundation achieved close alignment with the University, restructured and strengthened its board and governance structure, and made strides toward becoming a highly professional, donor-centric, and entrepreneurial institution. During Jackson’s tenure the foundation grew ASU’s endowment 45% to $403 million, investment returns on the Foundation’s pooled endowment fund increased 22%, and fundraising from individuals, corporations and foundations doubled from its historic base, to $150 million.
Throughout his career in business, government, and the university, Jackson has been active in civic and community life and has assumed leadership roles in a number of innovative nonprofit organizations, including CityYear, Jumpstart, and Facing History and Ourselves. He chaired the United Way’s award-winning Success by Six campaigns in Massachusetts, chaired the program and grants committee of the Boston Foundation, and has been a leader in a wide variety of other organizations, from the Boston Municipal Research Bureau to the South Boston Neighborhood House. For many years, he chaired the New England Council and the World Affairs Council. He also served on the boards of Cambridge Neuro Science and Bank of Vermont.
Jackson received an A.B. from Harvard College and an MPA from the Kennedy School of Government, and attended the Advanced Management Program at the Harvard Business School. He is co-author (with Jane Nelson) of Profits with Principles: Seven Strategies for Delivering Value with Values (Doubleday, 2004), described by Tom Peters as “a stunning achievement….and a survival guide for business executives and a survival guide for capitalism itself.”
Jackson is married to Martha White Jackson, a teacher and community activist. They have four children: Kate, Joseph, Matthew, and Alex.
RICK WARTZMANRick Wartzman is the director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University. By advancing the ideas and ideals of the late Peter F. Drucker, the Institute seeks to stimulate effective management and ethical leadership across all sectors of society.
Wartzman is also a columnist for BusinessWeek online and an Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy think tank.
Wartzman's most recent book, Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, was published by PublicAffairs in September 2008. It was picked as a Borders "Original Voices" selection and named by the Los Angeles Times as one of its 25 favorite nonfiction books of the year.
He is also the co-author, with Mark Arax, of the best-seller The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire, which was selected as one of the 10 best books of 2003 by the San Francisco Chronicle and one of the 10 best nonfiction books of the year by the Los Angeles Times. It also won, among other honors, a California Book Award and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.
Before joining the Drucker Institute, Wartzman spent two decades as a newspaper reporter, editor and columnist. He began his career at The Wall Street Journal, where he served in a variety of positions, including White House correspondent and founding editor of the paper's weekly California section. He joined the Los Angeles Times in 2002 as business editor and, in that role, helped shape "The Wal-Mart Effect," which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. Wartzman later became editor of the newspaper's Sunday magazine, West, which under his leadership was named by the Missouri School of Journalism as the best newspaper supplement in America.
KIM JONKERKim Jonker spent the past 15 years in a variety of roles in the nonprofit sector. As Director of the Kravis Prize, Kim leads the effort to identify extraordinary nonprofit leaders and celebrate their accomplishments.
Kim serves as an independent consultant to nonprofits and foundations on topics of strategy, board governance, evaluation, and organizational effectiveness. She established her nonprofit consulting practice in 2003. Previously, Kim consulted to private sector firms as well as nonprofit organizations while at McKinsey & Company in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Kim also worked for the Roberts Enterprise Development Fund (REDF) as a Farber Fellow.
She holds an M.B.A. from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, an M.Sc. in International Relations from the London School of Economics, an M.Sc. in Economics for Development from the University of Oxford, and a B.A. from the University of Arizona.
JACK EDWARDSJack joined Ashoka in 2003 after working for 31 years as an executive with Cummins Engine Company. He has lived and worked in Latin America for more than fifteen years, starting as a Peace Corps volunteer in Colombia, and then in Mexico and Brasil. Jack came to know about Ashoka through Cummins, which sponsored fellows in three different countries. Jack's work with Ashoka includes helping the Latin American group develop partnerships, with his initial work focusing on Mexico.
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