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Activity Update
Religion,
Politics and Public Life Faculty Seminar Series
On March 13th, the Program on Religion and Public Life (PRPL) held
its second seminar in the Religion, Politics and Public Life Faculty
Seminar Series. A dynamic presentation from the featured presenter
Mark Noll, titled Evangelicals: Theology and Politics: Domestic and
International Implications was followed by an energetic and
stimulating group discussion. Prof. Noll is the Mc Manis Professor
of Christian Thought at Wheaton College, and a Senior Advisor to the
Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals (ISAE.) To view a
seminar transcript,
click here. This (by invitation only) faculty seminar series is
co-convened by J. Bryan Hehir and Mary Jo Bane and is a primary
activity of the Program on Religion and Public Life.
Joint Catholic Church Civic Asset Mapping
Project
This newly-launched project is a joint initiative between the
Program on Religion and Public Life at the Hauser Center and the
University of Pennsylvanias Program for Research on Religion and
Urban Civil Society (PRRUCS). The project aims to explore how
Catholic institutions deploy their human, financial and physical
plant assets has a bearing on how the nation's nonprofit sector as a
whole meets civic needs and creates public value. The projects
first conference, Catholics in the Public Square, was held April
5th, at Saint Joseph's University, in Philadelphia and featured
panels and discussions moderated by John DiIulio with Mary Jo Bane,
Mark Moore, and Father J. Bryan Hehir, among other distinguished
speakers. To view reports and papers from the conference,
click here. For information
please email
Anne Mathew.
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People
In Action
In the interest of space, the E-News does not
include titles for Hauser faculty, researchers or staff.
For titles and bios, please click
here.
On February 2nd, Stephanie
Bell-Rose, member of the Hauser Center Advisory Board and
managing director and president of The Goldman Sachs Foundation,
presented a roundtable at the Kennedy School of Government, and
organized by the Hauser Center, on trends and practices in
philanthropy.
Also on February 2nd, Marion Fremont-Smith presented and
discussed her award-winning book, Governing Nonprofit Organizations:
Federal and State Law and Regulation at the Harvard Square Coop
bookstore.
Peter Dobkin Hall participated in a roundtable discussion
hosted by Contribute Magazine on February 9th of New York City's
philanthropic culture with a group of area nonprofit leaders. His
participation was later featured in the inaugural issue of
Contribute: The People and Ideas of Giving.
On February 10th, Marshall Ganz gave a talk to students
enrolled in the community development program at Southern New
Hampshire University. The talk, entitled Practicing Democracy:
Leadership, Community, Power, focused on the practice of organizing
- the knowledge of how to combine around common interests and
mobilize resources to act on common interests.
Several Hauser people took part in the annual
International Bridge
Builders Conference that took place February 27-March 3 at the
Kennedy School of Government. Marshall Ganz led a discussion
on youth, the arts, and organizing -- focusing on the work of
Peruvian artist/organizer Rafael Virhuez in one of Lima's poorest
barrios. Dave Brown facilitated a workshop on "Building
Partnerships across Sectors. And Tiziana Dearing delivered
the workshop The Fundraising Workshop, on fundraising strategies.
On March 1st, Elizabeth Keating and Jim Honan
presented the panel Transparency and Accountability - Current
Challenges and Opportunities at the National Business Officers
Association Annual Symposium, on current issues and challenges to
financial transparency and accountability.
Also on March 1st, Xavier de Souza Briggs gave a public
address on his book, The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing
Choice in Metropolitan America at the Harvard Graduate School of
Design, organized by the student group
HousingGSD.
Marion Fremont-Smith and Peter Dobkin Hall
participated in a roundtable on governance hosted by the staff of
the U.S. Senate Finance Committee on March 3rd in Washington, DC.
Fremont-Smith participated in the panel on Proposals on Governance
and Transparency, addressing general issues of nonprofit governance
in terms of law, regulation, and self-policing mechanisms; Hall
participated in the panel on Red Cross governance, which focused
more specifically on the Red Cross problems and how they might be
addressed.
Hauser Center provided sponsorship for the 7th annual student-run
Social
Enterprise Conference at the Harvard Business School that took
place on March 5th. At the conference Chris Letts facilitated
the panel The Next Generation of Venture Philanthropy, and
Elizabeth Keating facilitated the panel Creating a
High-Performance Culture in Social Enterprise.
On March 10th Hauser Center provided sponsorship for the
panel on Reintegration of former child soldiers at the student-run
conference Children on the Frontlines: A Crisis in International
Security.
Marshall Ganz was a featured speaker at the annual Toxics
Action Citizens conference, Environmental Action 2006 that took
place on March 18th. Ganz spoke about the importance of social
movements in shaping public policy and developing political strategy
on the basis of moral claims, committed leadership, and the
organizational capacity to engage large numbers of people in
collective action.
Xavier de Souza Briggs presented work from his study,
Democracy as Problem-Solving: Civic Capacity in Comparative
Perspective, at the
Planning Africa 2006 conference in Cape Town, South Africa from
March 22nd 24th. The work looks at cross-sector effort--by civil
society, market, and government players--to tackle urgent local
problems, such as restructuring the job economy when industries
become obsolete, managing population growth without ignoring
sustainability, and investing in children.
Marshall Ganz and his research team kicked-off the Leadership
Development Project with the Sierra Club on March 25th-26th with a
two-day workshop in San Francisco. The purpose of the workshop was
to begin training a team of trainers to lead future leadership
development workshops with focus groups from the Sierra Club.
From March 29th -31st, Mark Moore and Gordon Bloom
attended the third annual
Skoll
World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, Leveraging assets,
growing social capital markets: Sustainable routes to wealth and
well-being, at Oxford University. At the forum, Bloom chaired the
panel Mobilising Underutilized Assets to Realise Social and
Environmental Value: Next Generation Models.
From March 30th -April 2nd Peter Dobkin Hall participated in
the Philanthropy in
History: German and American Perspectives conference sponsored
by the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. At the
conference Hall presented the paper, Philanthropy, the Welfare
State, and the Transformation of American Public and Private
Institutions since 1945.
Hauser Center Associate Prabha Kotiswaran is organizing a
Workshop on Law and Social
Movements, in India June 26-27, which will bring together
activists, lawyers and academics from various disciplines in order
to deepen the extant theorizing on the relationship between social
movements and the law.
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Hauser
People in the News
Dutch Leonard
was on WBUR's radio program Morning Edition on February 1st,
speaking extensively on Boston's evacuation plan.
Peter Dobkin Hall was quoted in the February 26th Washington
Post article Red Cross Spent Heavily on Image; Agency paid firm in
Houston to raise CEO's profile as it laid off staffers, documents
show.
On March 9th the Wall Street Journal published the Op-Ed piece by
Howard Husock, Privatize the Welfare State. Link to
full
text here.
Dutch Leonard was quoted in the Times-Picayune March 9th
article Senator Wants Answers on 2,000 Missing in Katrina. Link to
full text here.
In the March 13th The Chronicle of Philanthropy article Top White
House Officials on the Red Cross Board Rarely Attend Meetings,
Peter Dobkin Hall was quoted on his opinion of the conduct of
the board members. Link to
full text here.
Paul Hodge critiqued how current policies will affect the
aging population in the March 15th Reuters article Happy 150th
birthday: a new era looms for old age.
Peter Dobkin Hall was quoted critiquing the improvement
efforts of the Red Cross, in the March 21st article in the
Washington Post The Clock's Ticking on Red Cross Overhaul. Link to
full text here.
The article Who Pays the Phone Bill? in the Spring 2006 edition of
the Kennedy School of Government Bulletin describes Elizabeth
Keatings research on the overhead funding debate between
nonprofits and foundations.
In the Spring 2006 edition of the Harvard Political Review,
Father J. Bryan Hehir was quoted in the article Blasphemous
Ink on his opinion of the storm of controversy in Europe
surrounding publication of cartoon depictions of the prophet
Muhammad. Link to
full
text here.
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Featured Research
Spotlight on
Financial Transparency in the
Archdiocese of Boston"
In mid-April,
the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston released a full disclosure of its
finances to the public. The report was the first of its kind for
Boston, and appears to be the first of its kind by any Catholic
diocese or archdiocese in the United States. Jack McCarthy
chaired the independent commission, assembled by Boston Cardinal
Sean OMalley in early 2006, that worked with the Archdiocese and
its financial staff in pulling the report together. This work
combined Jacks decades of experience in financial accounting and
auditing for nonprofit organizations with his understanding of the
functioning of the Catholic Church as a nonprofit in Boston. It is
also consistent with the Hauser Centers interest in both the
governance and accountability of religious denominations and
organizations as nonprofit institutions. Jack will have an
opportunity to speak in several large cities around the country
regarding how to guide a diocese through the process of full
financial disclosure, and to codify a methodology. The report and
Jacks work in it received extensive media coverage, including The
Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, The New York Times, Washington Post
and WGBH Boston. For an article about the disclosure
click here.
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