Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government
     Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations

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		NEW!!! Harvard Module:  Building Effective Cross-sector Collaborations

Harvard University’s Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations partners with The Pew Charitable Trusts (PCT) under the auspices of their FASTEN initiative in contributing to PCT’s overall strategy in Religion and Social Welfare Policy.  In 2002, the Hauser Center launched an Executive Session on Faith-based and Community Approaches to Urban Revitalization which contributes to FASTEN’s efforts to equip public administrators for effective collaboration with local faith-based communities.

An Executive Session is a process developed at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government that enables practitioners and academics to work together to find the best possible ways to describe and act on an important public problem. 

This Executive Session is an ongoing and cumulative dialogue since August 2002, among 30 of the nation’s most innovative mayors, faith-based and civic leaders. Drawing on the expertise of these practitioners, Harvard scholars have researched innovative practices and explored the central question: When and how do cross-sector partnerships (i.e. collaborations among government, civic and faith-based organizations) generate better solutions to community problems?  Harvard’s unique contribution to FASTEN is through engaging public leaders to optimally leverage the value of working in partnership with the faith-based sector, and thereby creating a greater demand for the use of technical resources in this area.

HARVARD TEAM

Executive Session Co-Chairs                                                                            

Stephen Goldsmith, Professor, Practice of Public Management (Former Mayor of Indianapolis)

Mary Jo Bane, Thornton Bradshaw Professor of Public Policy and Management

Planning Team

Mark Moore, Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice Policy & Public

Management, Faculty Director, Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations

Brent Coffin is Director of the Joint Program on Religion and Public Life (JPRPL), a collaborative initiative between Harvard University’s Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations and the Divinity School. He is a member of the Hauser Center’s Intellectual Foundations project (IF-2) “The Social Role of Faith-Based Organizations” and moderates the Executive Session on Faith-Based and Community Approaches to Urban Revitalization. Before coming to the Hauser Center, Brent was Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at Harvard Divinity School from 1997 to 2000, and from 2000 to 2001 directed its Program on Religion, Civil Society and Democracy.

A minister ordained in the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., he served congregations in the South Bronx, Trenton and Minneapolis. Coffin did his undergraduate work in sociology and philosophy at Dartmouth College, received his M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, and his doctorate from Harvard University. He is a contributing author and co-editor of Who Will Provide? The Changing Role of Religion in American Social Welfare (Westview Press, 2000) and Taking Religion Seriously: Valuing and Evaluating Religion in American Democracy (Harvard University Press, in press).

Ronald Thiemann, Professor of Theology, Religion and Society

Xavier de Souza Briggs, Associate Professor of Public Policy

Anne Mathew is Assistant Director of the Joint Program on Religion and Public Life (JPRPL) at Harvard University's Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations. Anne has overall programmatic & financial responsibility for this multi-disciplinary program and serves a key role as a member of JPRPL’s management team and advisory committee.  She provides strategic and administrative leadership for all JPRPL's activities, including the Executive Session on Faith Based and Community Approaches to Urban Revitalization and the Intellectual Foundations Project. Anne has more than ten years of experience in academic and research administration both here at Harvard and at the Australian National University (ANU), Australia, where she earned her doctorate in General Psychology in 1990.

Julia Berger is a Research Associate for the Program on Religion and Public Life at Harvard’s Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations. Julia joined the Hauser Center in 2002 after completing a Masters Degree at the University of Toronto, focusing on religious nongovernmental organizations. Her article titled, “Religious Nongovernmental Organizations: An Exploratory Analysis” appeared in the March 2003 issue of Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations.