November 10, 2005 | Read Time: 6 minutes
As a fresh-faced graduate of Duke University, 21-year-old Jerry Hauser got a firsthand tutorial in inequality as one of 500 charter teachers in the Teach for America program. For two years during the early 1990s, he taught math and history to high-school students in Compton, Calif., one of the nation’s poorest inner-city neighborhoods.
The experience had a profound influence on Mr. Hauser, the son of an astrophysicist, who had grown up with advantages that were not available to children in hardscrabble Compton.
“I saw students who had tremendous potential and were robbed by an educational system and set on a dead-end track,” Mr. Hauser says. “It infuriated me to see that loss of potential and loss of opportunity for those students.”
That anger has since inspired Mr. Hauser, the new chief executive officer of the Advocacy Institute, in Washington, to work to erase some of the conditions that prevent the nation’s poorest and most vulnerable people from improving their lives.
In his new role, he oversees an organization that works to help social-justice organizations plan and carry out successful advocacy campaigns, communicate their messages to the news media, and better manage their organizations. Mr. Hauser, 37, earns $130,000 annually in the position.
Richard Paisner, a business consultant who chairs the Advocacy Institute’s board, says Mr. Hauser was hired because he mixes his passion for social justice with a background in leading effective organizations.
Mr. Hauser, who served as Teach for America’s chief operating officer from 1999 to 2005, managed a $38-million program that trains 2,000 recent college graduates to teach in cash-strapped schools.
During his time as the organization’s chief operating officer, he expanded the number of applicants for its teaching jobs from 3,000 a year to 17,000, helped to increase annual donations from $8-million to $38-million, and created a series of quality-control systems aimed at making teachers more effective.
At the Advocacy Institute, he will be charged with helping social-justice groups achieve similar results while also managing an organization with a $4.4-million budget and 16 full-time employees. In addition, he is charged with helping the 20-year-old Advocacy Institute chart its own future. “His job is really to figure out the next 20 years of the Advocacy Institute,” says Mr. Paisner.
But Mr. Hauser says his biggest goal is to continue the Advocacy Institute’s work in helping like-minded groups reach their goals. Social-justice organizations often lack the financial backing and the organizational skills of the conservative groups that they often are campaigning against on public-policy issues. As a result, he says, many social-justice groups need outside help from organizations like the Advocacy Institute.
The Advocacy Institute, he says, can help social-justice groups become more businesslike in their approach — and successful in their results.
“I want to make sure we have even more social-justice organizations that are constantly high-performing,” he says. “If we did, the country would rally and support those issues. My job is ensuring we have a landscape of high-performing social-justice organizations fighting those battles.”
In an interview, Mr. Hauser discussed how social-justice organizations can become more effective in carrying out their missions:
What attracted you to a career in social justice?
I had been working with students in two inner-city high schools in Durham, N.C., in college, so I had seen firsthand the educational inequities. I had two mentees while I was there, one of whom had, largely through family connections, gotten an incredible education and was headed to Princeton. The other was a star basketball player for one of the high schools. He was an incredibly intelligent and motivated person. But he was in 12th grade and couldn’t read.
After seeing that, I wanted to roll up my sleeves and become part of a movement that would be helping that situation in the long run.
What do social-justice groups need to do to become more effective?
The social-justice community could be so much more effective if we adopted a more results-oriented approach. Organizations are coming under greater and greater pressure from funders to act that way. In the past, there was a worry that if we adopted some of these practices, we would lose something that made us unique. In my mind, the issues we work on and the passion for our work is what makes us unique.
If we adopt that approach, it would lead to highly energized and satisfied staffs and we would win more of those battles and make more of a difference in people’s lives.
How big a challenge is it to encourage that mindset?
My sense is that people are very ready for this, and a number of groups are headed in this direction and already doing this. More and more organizations are seeing that how you operate and how you manage yourself as an organization can ultimately have a huge impact on the results you achieve.
If you are running a business, how you run your business is going to affect your bottom line. The same is true for social-justice institutions. How you run yourself is going to have a direct result on what you are going to achieve at the end of the day.
Why haven’t more organizations already embraced this?
Part of the issue is you have unbelievably talented leaders in many social-justice institutions who are insightful about the issues, are incredible spokespeople, and are generally very talented, persistent people. But no one has taught them about management. I think they are very open to it and see a need for it. But they have not had the opportunity.
Because they are fighting for society’s least powerful, almost by definition they are fighting an uphill battle. We need to be more effective than the other side because the playing field is not even. We have to be much smarter in what we do than our opponents.
ABOUT JERRY HAUSER, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, ADVOCACY INSTITUTE
Education: Earned his bachelor of arts degree in political science from Duke University in 1990 and his law degree from Yale Law School in 1996. While at Yale, he was senior editor of the Yale Law Journal and co-president of the school’s Initiative for Public Interest Law.
Professional experience: Began his career as a high-school teacher through Teach for America in Compton, Calif. He later worked at the Washington office of the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, where he worked with business, government, and nonprofit clients. He spent the past seven years at Teach For America as its chief operating officer.
What he’s reading: The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. He’s also re-reading the management book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t, by Jim Collins.
