Nonprofit Executive Leadership Institute Faculty

Session III Faculty
Session III Seminar Descriptions

Organizational Cultural Competency
Donna Harris, MA, MSW, LCSW. Ms. Harris is currently on staff at the Bryn Mawr College Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research as the Field Instruction Specialist and an Instructor. She teaches Issues of Cultural Diversity; Foundation Practice; and Practice with Individuals, Families and Groups. She has also taught Cultural Diversity and been involved in field instruction at New York University and Yeshiva University. She has 20 years experience working in the social services industry as a clinician, supervisor, clinical director and consultant. As a consultant, she has conducted workshops and trainings in the areas of Clinical Supervision, Team Building, Chemical Dependency, Traumatical Stress Syndrome, Multicultural Issues, Interpersonal Psychoanalysis and Parenting Skills. In addition, she maintains a private practice in Springfield, PA, specializing in multiculutral challenges, traumatic stress and women's concerns.

Strategic Thinking For Leadership
Ann W. Martin, Ed.D. is a Senior Consultant with Praxis and a part-time faculty member at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology.  She has taught and facilitated dialogue, conflict resolution, and organizational development using knowledge of these fields as a resource whether a client organization’s needs are for better communication, strategic planning, leadership development, or the productive use of conflict.  The common approach in all of her work is to include participants in defining and shaping the changes needed for improvement.

Ann was a senior extension faculty member at Cornell University’s School Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) for 19 years, an experience that provided a grounding in labor-management cooperation and the systems approach to organizational development.  In addition to conflict and organizational change work, she taught and led interest-based negotiation and problem-solving for most of those years.  Ann’s clients include schools, both public and collegiate, manufacturing, and the service sector.  A recent client is the Erie County Association of School Boards, where she led a participatory research project to propose avenues for collaboration to improve education for all students in the City of Buffalo and the 28 surrounding school districts.  Other clients have been the Unified Court System of New York, Planned Parenthood of New York City, the Mead Paper Company and the UPIU, the Ryder Corporation, the New York City Public Schools, and the AAUP and Rutgers University.

Ann has a BA from Middlebury College, an MAT from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, an MILR from the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and an Ed.D. in Adult and Organizational Learning from Teachers College, Columbia University.

Measuring Organization Effectiveness and Performance
Susan Schoolfield, MSS, MLSP, MBA

Ms. Schoolfield is founder and president of Creative Healthcare Strategies, a healthcare and human service management consulting firm. She has over 20 years working with individuals, teams and organizations in organizational development, change management and performance improvement. She is a consultant and trainer to hospitals, healthcare and human service provider agencies, County and State Offices of Mental Health, Mental Retardation and Dr4ug and Alcohol, and Managed Care organizations, as well as to the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services. She also provides executive coaching to executive directors and administrators and is certified in various career and organizational development methodologies including the Myers Briggs Type Inventory.

Networks and Connectors
Dr. Karen Stephenson, Ph.D., hailed in B2.0 as “The Organization Woman”, is a corporate anthropologist and lauded as a pioneer and "a leader in the growing field of social-network business consultants."  She was awarded the first Houghton Hepburn Fellow at Bryn Mawr College for her groundbreaking contributions to civic engagement. Her consulting firm Netform was recognized as one of the top 100 leading innovation companies by CIO in 2001.   In 2000, she was featured in a New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell that focused on the social dynamics of office spaces. Even before these accolades, Stephenson had been recognized internationally for her pioneering work in detecting, diagnosing and designing human networks to solve a variety of complex problems. Her work has been featured in The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company and Wired. Stephenson has taught at the UCLA Anderson Graduate School of Management and the Harvard University School of Design; she now lectures at the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University. Dr. Stephenson was engaged by Leadership Philadelphia to conduct Philadelphia's Connector Project, which identified effective leaders throughout the greater Philadelphia area, and studied those leaders to find out how they lead so effectively.  Currently, Dr. Stephenson is leading a second round of this project to identify the next generation of connectors.