Bringing Management Expertise to Philanthropy:
New Approaches to long-standing problems

Owen Stearns ’89

“Lots of movement is happening quickly all over the world. Our job [at Monitor] is to facilitate good thinking and growth in a healthy, connected, cohesive way, and we’ve got signals that other organizations implementing change want that, too.”

Fast Company (the magazine and Web site) and Monitor Group named “Forty-three entrepreneurs who are changing the world” in their 2006 joint ranking. These entrepreneurs have “found a better way to do good: They’re using the disciplines of the corporate world to tackle daunting social problems.” If you, the individual donor, want to maximize the impact of your philanthropic dollar, give to one of these organizations, the article urges.
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Collaboration
aims at corporate social responsibility

Yeng Felipe Butler ’92

“Business for Social Responsibility helps companies develop responsible business practices. We proactively work with our member companies on a diverse set of issues related to corporate social responsibility; How do we do this? We encourage cross-sector collaboration between business and civil society. Obviously I’d rather work with companies that try to integrate these practices with overall corporate strategies, rather than with those for whom these are simply a part of PR strategy.”

Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) today is a unique hybrid organization that evolved in the early ’90s out of an advocacy organization started by former Stride Rite CEO Arnold Hiatt, who has long argued in numerous public pulpits that “the well-being of business cannot be separated from the well-being of the community and the nation.”
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Marketing to Underserved Audiences
Developing Civic Engagement

Susan Clark ’76

“Forty percent of people in the United States read at an eighth-grade level or less. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed literacy tests for voter registration, but if the only source of nonpartisan information about California ballot measures is a state-issued ballot pamphlet written at a twelfth grade level, that functions as a de facto literacy test.”

Susan Clark’s communications and social change organization, Common Knowledge, has an unusual track record and unique niche. Common Knowledge offers its clients traditional marketing expertise—strategic planning, campaign development, qualitative and quantitative research, training and technical assistance. What’s different is their emphasis on developing community and civic engagement, especially the participation of lesser-heard voices. Combining these elements yields the practice they call “community marketing.”
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Making good ideas useful
Beginning with building the Peace Corps

Sally Bowles ’56

Sally Bowles has lived her remarkable professional life at the intersection of big, bold ideas that would affect millions of people, and the challenge of implementation. She has focused on making change happen. She was a member of the small team that worked with Sargent Shriver to develop the Peace Corps. She worked with John Lindsay to decentralize New York City public schools. She was the director of Medicaid and then in charge of welfare programs for the state of Connecticut. Sally left the public sector in 1990 to assist the president of the Rockefeller Foundation on a major initiative with Nelson Mandela in South Africa and later served as a consultant to the Rockefeller Foundation on its $45 million program to build international leadership concerning the global environment and sustainable development. She now is a director of the Charles & Helen Schwab Foundation and a consultant to several national nonprofits. Prior to that, she was president of the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation. The Tremaine Foundation initiated the Coordinated Campaign for Learning Disabilities, the first national public-education campaign to inform Americans about learning disabilities. Sally has prolonged and enriched the legacy of public service established by her family.
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"GET ENGAGED"

Deval Patrick, Milton Academy Class of 1974, was inaugurated as the 71st Governor of Massachusetts on January 4, 2007.

He is Milton Academy’s first governor; he is the state’s first, and the nation’s second, African-American governor.

While his leadership has already earned historic markers, Deval’s journey to office broke new political ground as well. Marked by creativity and innovation, dogged optimism, and relentless grass-roots work, Deval and his core campaign staff galvanized a remarkably diverse group of volunteers and supporters.

Pundits across the country marveled that a candidate with little name recognition, little money, and (in the early days) a message from the party regulars that he should wait his turn (and his turn was not now) could come up with the elements of success. It was 56 percent worth of success, in a race that included the now-typical retinue of screened insults and innuendoes.
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OUR CLIENTS ARE AMONG THE HARDEST TO SERVE

Randy Quezada ’97

Nearly 35,000 individuals in New York City are homeless. That number represents 23 percent fewer children and 10 percent fewer families than in June 2004 when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced his commitment to reducing the number of homeless New Yorkers by two-thirds in five years (2009). Just this past December, Robert V. Hess, commis-sioner of the city’s Department of Home-less Services (DHS), announced an important initiative geared toward achievement of the mayor’s goal: “In an historic agreement between the City of New York and the Veterans Administration to help end veteran homelessness in the City…the City will place 100 veterans into permanent housing in 100 days. Veterans Affairs and the City will also convene a Task Force that will report back in 100 days with a strategic plan to end veteran homelessness in New York City.”

As special assistant to Commissioner Hess, Randy’s job is to “make sure what the Commissioner wants to happen, happens.” From policy and program development to implementation of new strategies and initiatives, Randy “connects the dots.” His challenge is to achieve real progress through “informal” management; that is, to get things done through DHS staffers who actually report to other leaders, such as deputy and assistant commissioners of the agency.
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From Distressed Neighborhoods,
Building Healthy Communities

Kate Grossman Sutliff ’91
Director of Housing, LISC New York

Jennie Bartlett ’00
Assistant Program Officer, Office of the Chief Operating Officer, LISC Washington, D.C.

Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) has generated $7.1 billion in community building investments, which in turn leveraged $16.7 billion in total development. These funds have helped build or rehabilitate 196,000 affordable homes and nearly 27 million square feet of retail, community and education space across the country.

In New York, Kate works with LISC where the concept was born

After the nation viewed the 1977 devastation and arson in the South Bronx, the need to regenerate the country’s poorest urban neighborhoods was brought into urgent focus. To support the resident-led community groups on the frontlines combating the increasing blight, the Ford Foundation helped found a new type of organization in 1979: the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, more commonly known as LISC.
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Stewardship of the Earth:
A Matter of Fairness and Responsibility

Theo Spencer ’84

“People tend to think of global warming as a huge, overwhelming problem. The truth is that there are common-sense solutions that we can adopt to solve the problem—solutions that are both good for the economy and good for the health of our environment. We need to think and act optimistically. We need to look toward new technologies rather than relying on the old ones.”

The National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) defines its work as maintaining the integrity of nature’s resources. It “seeks to establish sustainability and good stewardship of the earth as central ethical imperatives of human society.”
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William C. Janeway Earns the 2006 Advocate Award from
Environmental Advocates of New York

As director of New York Government Relations for The Nature Conservancy, Willie is a powerful and respected voice on conservation issues, helping to build coalitions such as the Friends of New York’s Environ-ment and leading, with others, the charge for state funding to protect New York’s endangered lands and waters.

His distinguished environmental career includes service as executive director of the Greenway Conservancy for the Hudson River Valley, executive director of the Albany Pine Bush Preserve Commission, and director of North Country operations for the Adirondack Mountain Club.
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Citizen Schools

Eric Schwarz ’79

Co-founder and CEO of Boston-based educational program, Citizen Schools

Citizen Schools began in Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1995 with a vision of helping to improve student achievement by blending real-world learning projects and rigorous academics after school. The name comes from the idea that citizens within the community—lawyers, chefs, reporters, architects—would donate their time to working with a group of students in an apprenticeship relationship, sharing their strengths and teaching children some of the skills necessary to succeed in that particular career.
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"Lights-on"
in Denver after school

Chris Myers ’80

Founder and CEO, OpenWorld Learning

“The children keep exceeding our expectations of what’s possible. They keep pushing us to develop a more advanced and more challenging curriculum in order to keep up with them.”

When Chris Myers ’80 describes OpenWorld Learning, the education nonprofit that he founded seven years ago, his smile and excitement are infectious. OpenWorld Learning (OWL) is an after-school program for children in grades 3 through 5 that combines learning about computer programming with peer teaching. Chris launched the program “to give back for what [he] was given, by giving something important to other children.”
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Faculty Advisors
Shepherd Young Strategists

According to Janet Lin ’97, the 28-year-old chief of staff for Massachusetts Secretary of Housing and Economic Development Dan O’Connell, activities outside of class are what help you define who you are; they help you come to an understanding of yourself as a distinct person. At Milton today, announcements and exhortations positioned to catch the passing eye crowd the walls as they always have. Add to that email conferences laden with debate, information, schedules, assignments and deadlines. Opportunities outside of class, say faculty who advise the many organizations and projects, seem to be multiplying.
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"That energy clearly paid off."

The students fanned out across the stadium to distribute pamphlets about little-known gubernatorial long shot Deval Patrick. Even from across the arena, they could identify each other by the neon green tee-shirts they had received from the campaign that morning. Despite the long train rides to and from the Paul A. Tsongas arena in Lowell, the group of high school students had given up a sunny Saturday in May to work the annual Democratic State Platform Convention. They knew that, in the man who gave his speech that afternoon to a standing ovation, they had found a candidate who was an inspiration, not just an alternative. As Eliza Heath, Class II, a F.L.A.G. member who heard Deval speak for the first time that day, reported, “Hear-ing Patrick speak won me over completely…When he didn’t agree with a view that someone brought up, he said so, but he also explained how he had gotten to his decision and how he planned to work with people who disagreed with him.” Zachary Schwab, Class I, agrees, saying, “After getting to know him, you feel like you can invest absolute trust in him…I hooked on to his campaign [in May 2005] because I trusted him, and he ran his campaign in the way I would have hoped he would.”
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