People

Hauser Center Researchers and Staff

William P. Ryan

Research Fellow

William P. Ryan is a research fellow at the Hauser Center and a consultant to nonprofit organizations and foundations.  Both his consulting and research focus on nonprofit organizational effectiveness.  He has explored how several forces -- including board governance, access to capital, foundation grantmaking practices, and competition with for-profit firms -- shape the capacity of nonprofits to deliver on their missions.  He currently directs the Nonprofit Governance and Accountability Project, a joint initiative of the Hauser Center and Harvard Law School aimed at engaging Harvard researchers in critical questions related to nonprofit governance.

He is co-author, most recently, of Governance as Leadership:  Reframing the Work of Nonprofit Boards (John Wiley & Sons, 2005), which has been honored with awards from the Association of Fundraising Professionals, Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, and Independent Sector.  He is also co-author of High Performance Nonprofit Organizations: Managing Upstream for Greater Impact (John Wiley & Sons, 1998) and of Virtuous Capital: What Foundations Can Learn from Venture Capitalists, Harvard Business Review (March-April, 1997), and is author of The New Landscape for Nonprofits, Harvard Business Review (Jan.-Feb., 1999), which analyzes the rise of for-profit social service organizations. 

He holds a BA from Columbia University and MPA from the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.