Mary Stewart Hall
| Brief
Biography |
Good morning. It's a pleasure to welcome you
all to this sixth annual conference for leaders of nonprofit organizations.
Creating opportunities for colleagues from throughout the sector to
learn from experts and from each other has been an important part
of the mission of the Not-for-Profit
Leadership Program at Seattle University since the start.
We are very pleased to be joined this year in offering today's sessions
by the NW Forum
and the
Nonprofit Concentration of the Daniel J. Evans School of Public
Affairs at the University of Washington and by The
Evergreen State Society. The collaboration of these four
organizations has not only been an enjoyable experience, it has added
to the quality of the sessions throughout the day ahead.
Looking over the participant list and visiting with many of you over coffee
for the past hour makes clear that we have already achieved one of our goals for
the day. You are a broadly diverse group: Long-term executives
of established organizations; Students just beginning to explore the excitement
of a career in the not-for-profit sector; Board members who bring a wealth
of community experience to the challenges of overseeing the work of nonprofits; Funders from both corporations and foundations, along with
some individual donors who have made great contributions to our
communities. People have come from Thurston, Pierce, Kitsap, Snohomish,
Whatcom, and King counties, plus a few from even further away. It is a
pleasure to see familiar faces and a great opportunity for us all to meet new
people. Having a broad range of participants is one of our key goals because of
the importance of the sector working together to understand and meet the
challenges we face every day and, just as importantly, to seize the new
opportunities that open up for us as new ways of understanding our work are
found by innovators, academic scholars and, of course, our particular emphasis
today, creative entrepreneurs.
We have been fortunate in putting this conference together to have early
financial support from Bank of America and a recent and very welcome grant from
the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership at the Ewing Marion Kauffman
Foundation of Kansas City. These funders have made it possible for us to
invite out-of-town speakers and to keep the cost of the day affordable. We
are also grateful to the Henry M. Jackson Foundation here in Seattle for their
on-going support for the NW Forum project at the Evans School, which has made it
possible for staff and graduate students from the University of Washington to
help in myriad ways. CharitableWave provided online registration services
for the conference as an inkind contribution; I want to thank Christine Cronin
for attending to the details of those arrangements and making sure everything
went smoothly.
At the NW Forum, Mary Donovan brought long experience with conference
planning to the leadership of a team that included Jenni Amundson, Ellen Loy, Sylvia Pertzborn,
Andrea Adams and Lisa Webb. Other graduate students from the Evans school will
be working alongside current and former students from our program at Seattle
University as note takers, moderators, session facilitators and in other
important ways throughout the day. All of us on the planning committee are
grateful for this very important help.
The members of the planning committee had no difficulty picking this year's
topic: Building the Entrepreneurial Nonprofit. More and more nonprofits
are exploring these ideas -- as a way of addressing ever-growing demands for
revenue and as a way of providing new services to the community. Observers
of the sector combine enthusiasm about the power of these new ideas with
cautions about the stresses and risks that accompany new ventures, especially
those that require deep and broad changes in central elements of organizational
culture. The program today brings together careful students of the
nonprofit sector, articulate advocates for new approaches to traditional tasks,
and seasoned practitioners with much knowledge to share. Before we begin
I'd like to thank them all for taking the time to be with us today and
contribute to increased understanding of our chosen topic.
The first of our speakers is Jim Pitofsky, the Executive Director of SEA
Change, a new organization devoted to building a learning community for
social entrepreneurs. At the Echoing
Green Foundation, where he worked previously, he directed a comprehensive
study of this emerging movement and which included a needs assessment
based on the experience of more than 300 social entrepreneurs in this country
and abroad.
Thank you again for coming today. Now please join me in welcoming Jim
Pitofsky to get the program underway.
