January 8, 2004 | Read Time: 9 minutes
Suzanne Marcus spent five years as a senior official at My Sister’s Place, a Washington shelter for
battered women and their children.
In her job, she worked closely with many social-change and community groups to train women to avoid abuse and get help leaving violent homes. She saw close up how her organization and others struggled to meet their management and financial goals without compromising their missions or their commitments to clients, she says. As she, her colleagues, and other activists were involved in such struggles, they often got in heated debates about “what it means to be a social-movement organization in terms of management, mission, and structure,’” she recalls.
Last year, she decided to stop debating the issues, and start learning how to solve them. With the hope of gaining a broader perspective about the nonprofit world and its functions, as well as concrete skills in financial management, fund raising, advocacy, and policy analysis, the 27-year-old left her job and enrolled as a full-time student in the nonprofit-management program at the Robert J. Milano Graduate School of Management and Urban Policy at New School University, in New York.
“I chose Milano specifically because of its bent toward social responsibility and justice,” says Ms. Marcus. “Compared with other management and policy programs that I looked at, Milano’s perspective was distinctly different.”
Promoting Social Change
She notes that New School offers courses such as “Managing for Social Impact” and “Advocacy, Public Policy, and Social Change.” The latter class is taught by Gara LaMarche, vice president and director of U.S. Programs at the Open Society Institute, the philanthropic umbrella for the foundations established by the financier George Soros, and a former associate director at Human Rights Watch, and by Michael Seltzer, president of the New York Regional Association of Grantmakers and a former Ford Foundation program officer.
What’s more, as part of their course work, many students conduct research and undertake other tasks for organizations that promote social change or provide services to the needy.
Students also have the opportunity to work with faculty members to develop and maintain two Internet sites designed to make it easier for small groups of all kinds to get free access to information about running and leading a nonprofit group.
Aida Rodriguez spent a decade overseeing grants at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Equal Opportunity Division before she became chairwoman of Milano’s nonprofit-management program.
“At a very basic level,” she says, “the mission of our program is about empowering people to create social, economic, and political change, whatever they think that change should be. People come to our school because they deeply care about learning how to help their communities and the people who live in those communities.”
Helping Fund Raisers
The master’s of science program in nonprofit management at the Milano Graduate School is one of the oldest, most comprehensive programs of its kind in the country. It began in the late 1970s as a master’s of professional studies in fund-raising management.
In 1984, responding to demand for training for jobs that went beyond fund raising, the New School broadened the curriculum and transformed the program into a master’s of science in nonprofit management. While the school continues to offer courses in fund raising, and many alumni do go on to successful careers as fund raisers, students today have a broad array of choices in completing the 14-course, 42-credit curriculum.
In addition to courses in nonprofit management, students are permitted to take courses offered through other Milano graduate-degree programs, such as those in urban policy, human resources, or health-services management. And unlike most other programs in nonprofit management, the New School requires its students to get exposure to how nonprofit organizations work overseas.
New School’s nonprofit program has four full-time faculty members and relies heavily on adjunct professors — mostly executives of charities, foundations, or businesses that serve nonprofit groups — to teach many of the courses. Students say the background of the faculty members helps ensure that students learn more than just theories from textbooks.
“Milano is no ivory tower,” says Ann Lynn, a former advertising executive and part-time student at Milano. “Most professors here hold real-world jobs in addition to their teaching positions, so their perspective evolves as quickly as the ‘market.’ They know people who actually do what we study and can direct us to real-world applications for our concepts.”
Ms. Lynn fully expects her professors’ connections to help her after she graduates. “Milano people know people, and that provides entree to job interviews. The rest is up to us.”
In addition, students get plenty of hands-on instruction by doing research and other work for local nonprofit organizations. Toward the end of the program, students spend a semester applying their knowledge and problem-solving skills to focus on a specific problem a nonprofit group is facing.
The school also offers students on-campus jobs running two Web sites for nonprofit groups.
Milano MiX (Management Information Exchange) is part of an effort run by Living Cities: the National Community Development Initiative, a national organization that provides resources to community-development groups. The Web site, http://www.lcmmix.org, was started in June, with the help of Milano students. It offers free articles and tools that can be downloaded and adapted to a group’s circumstances, such as job descriptions or evaluation forms.
In addition, students help operate the Milano Nonprofit Management Knowledge Hub (http://www.milanoknowledgehub.org), which provides links to online information that students, faculty members, and nonprofit officials have evaluated and determined to be useful.
Cross-Cultural Requirement
Perhaps the most unusual aspect of Milano’s program is the cross-cultural requirement it adopted three years ago. To fulfill this requirement, many students take a course during which they travel abroad to observe how nonprofit organizations are managed in other parts of the world, and compare those practices to the way things are done in the United States. Travel costs are underwritten by the university.
“Even if you intend to work in one square block of New York City your whole life, you still have to understand how what you do fits into a larger global sector,” says Ms. Rodriguez. “You can’t assume that your community-development model is best if you haven’t compared it to what else is out there. And you also have to understand that many of the people you are working with or are providing services for come from other parts of the world.”
During their week abroad, students observe the interplay among government, business, and nonprofit groups as well as how charity financing works in other countries.
Students who do not want to travel may fulfill their requirement by taking courses that have an international dimension, either through other Milano courses or New School University programs.
Additionally, students have the option to work with an academic adviser to develop their own independent study abroad, though such students must pay their own expenses to travel and study outside the United States.
Keeping Up-to-Date
Ms. Rodriguez says that even though the New School’s program is one of the oldest, it tries to make sure its curriculum does not get outdated as the needs of the nonprofit world change. For example, she says, five years ago nonprofit-management students didn’t necessarily need to understand mergers, partnerships, and alliances, but now they must know how to collaborate with businesses, governments, and other nonprofit organizations.
“We don’t assume that the courses we’re offering right now are the ones that will be needed a year from now,” she says.
The program is also flexible in how it allows its students to fulfill degree requirements. The vast majority of Milano students are working while they attend school, and many have family obligations as well. To accommodate their strained schedules, Milano offers many classes at night, on weekends, and online. Over the next few years, one of the program’s goals is to develop even more ways to accommodate busy students.
For instance, the school is planning to add more courses during the January intercession between semesters, and is considering offering summer “institutes” that will permit students to do course work in a concentrated period of up to four weeks. In addition, administrators are working on a plan to make it easier for students to get credit for doing homework while at their day jobs, such as writing a strategic plan or a grant proposal.
“This helps students with time management, and by applying what they learn, it also helps them improve their professional work,” says Ms. Rodriguez. “We are working to do more of this type of integration in classes.”
Focus on Nonprofit Issues
While alumni value the efforts to integrate theory and practice, they also like the fact that New School is focused exclusively on nonprofit issues. Cori Hymowitz Read, who graduated in 1997 and is now associate director of development at Sponsors for Educational Opportunity, in New York, says she looked at many business and public-affairs master’s programs, and even turned down a scholarship offer from one of them, before deciding on Milano.
“As much as there is to learn from other sectors,” she says, “I realized I really wanted to be in a program that provided a more focused nonprofit perspective, where I would be among other students and professors devoted to the nonprofit sector. In other types of programs, professors might use only one or two nonprofit case studies in their teaching, and the rest wouldn’t have applied at all to my interests.”
Milano’s location in New York, where so many charities are based, and its network of alumni give graduates an edge when looking for jobs, says Suzy Stein, who graduated from Milano in 1992 and is now the school’s director of program development. Most important, the school gives its students a feeling of connection, she says. “The Milano program really helped me to see myself not just as an employee of x organization,” she says, “but as a part of a much larger nonprofit community.”
Lara L. McDavit contributed to this article.
NEW SCHOOL UNIVERSITY
Program: Master of science in nonprofit management
Offered by: Robert J. Milano Graduate School of Management and Urban Policy
Location: New York
Number of enrolled students: 150
Average number of students admitted each year: 60
Percentage of students who apply who are admitted: 80
Tuition costs: $850 per credit
Percentage of students who receive financial aid: 68
Percentage who attend full time: 40
Average age of students: 29
Average class size: 16
Web site: http://www.newschool.edu/milano/Npm/
