A National Animal Charity Offers Its Own Nonprofit-Management Instruction

TOOLS AND TRAINING

By Heather Joslyn

In November 2000, Phil Morgan, head of the Escondido Humane Society, returned to his Southern California charity after completing an undergraduate program in nonprofit management at a Johns Hopkins University satellite campus. Only two months later, a tragedy put his newly acquired skills to the test: The shelter burned down, killing more than half of the 200 animals it housed.

Mr. Morgan, who had come to nonprofit work only two years previously after decades spent running pet stores and a pet-supply company, found himself immersed in a crisis. His shelter had to be rebuilt. The group’s operations needed to be temporarily farmed out to new locales. And somebody had to decide what to do about all the donations that came pouring in after the fire, including many that arrived without donors’ instructions on how to use the money. “Business-wise, it’s better to put the nondesignated checks into the general fund,” he says. “But I knew what the people’s intent was.” That sensitivity to ethics issues, he says, came about not only because of the classroom instruction but also because of his classmates, themselves all animal-advocacy managers. “I use them as role models,” he says, “and I use them in how I make my daily decisions.”

Today, in fact, Mr. Morgan looks forward to the completion of his group’s new $3.6-million facility in March, and to the eventual raising of three more buildings — a renewal of his charity that he says would not have been possible without his nonprofit-management studies.

The program Mr. Morgan completed was created three years ago by Johns Hopkins at the request of the Humane Society of the United States, in Washington. In an effort to expand its educational offerings to animal-advocacy managers, the society’s educational division, Humane Society University, is now teaming up with Regis University, in Denver, to begin a new graduate-level online program in January. The six-course, 18-credit program results in a certificate in nonprofit management-humane and environmental studies; credits can be used toward completion of Regis’s 36-credit master’s degree in nonprofit management.

Applicants to the program are required to hold a bachelor’s degree and at least two years of nonprofit experience. Students will number between 12 and 24 per session, says Valerie S. Sheppard, Humane Society University’s director. Students will take classes in leadership and the history of the nonprofit field, complete an independent-study project, and choose from electives that cover such topics as human-resources management, financial management and resource development, organizational governance, and public relations.

‘Something for Everybody’

Humane Society University was formed three years ago to foster management skills among people who work in animal advocacy. The goal, says Ms. Sheppard, is to create a greater sense of professionalism in the field. Many executive directors of animal shelters, she says, are trained in animal care but not in business or management. “A lot of times people get promoted without necessarily having the skills to run an organization, to maintain a staff,” she says. “So this was an effort to give them the skills they need to run a successful business.”

The Hopkins program, which began in 1999, is designed to include students who don’t have undergraduate degrees. The Regis certificate, Ms. Sheppard says, will allow students to complete about half of the work toward a graduate degree and will permit a larger and more challenging range of courses. “We wanted to have something for everybody, regardless of their educational background,” she says.

Humane Society University also offers a few stand-alone online courses, which last six weeks, and it is planning to offer a master’s in education that focuses on humane education and character development, which would prepare graduates to teach children about caring for animals. Ms. Sheppard says the group has not yet settled on a university to offer the program. In December 2001, the Humane Society of the United States announced plans to create a master of science degree in humane and environmental nonprofit management at Trinity College, in Washington, but those plans fell through, Ms. Sheppard says, when the organization decided instead to devise a graduate program that consists of online courses.

Humane Society University has made online learning a key component of its mission in response to surveys of shelter managers assessing why more of them weren’t taking advantage of workshops. Many respondents said they simply couldn’t afford to take time away from their jobs to attend classes. “We realized that we had to give people another option,” Ms. Sheppard says. The organization began to devise a program that would make training more accessible and convenient.

However, says Ramon Del Castillo, chairman of the master’s program in nonprofit management at Regis, students in the new program won’t be entirely isolated. Regis’s effort will work on a “cohort model,” he says, in which groups of no more than 15 students will be organized to go through the program together. The university is considering other ways to create community among classmates, such as holding a week-long session in Denver that would allow students to take some of their instruction in person.

Blending Online and In-Person

The Johns Hopkins program is currently on hiatus to allow it to be retooled to make online learning a greater proportion of the instruction, says Toni Ungaretti, director of the university’s division of undergraduate studies. Previously, the year-long program had required students to supplement their online learning by attending three sessions at its Rockville, Md., campus. The residency requirement — a total of 32 days — was often difficult for students to meet. The goal of revamping the program, she says, is to maintain the connection between classmates and to keep students engaged in their studies. An approach that blends online and in-person learning, she says, is gaining currency among institutions that offer educational programs to midcareer students. Dropout rates for online-only programs are high, she says. A hybrid approach, she says, combines the convenience of distance learning with the camaraderie of the classroom, and serves the curriculum thoroughly. “Some instruction is best conveyed in person,” she says, “and some is well-conveyed online.”

Credits earned online, however, may not be equal in the eyes of all students or universities. Mr. Morgan, who had hoped to apply the credits he earned at Johns Hopkins to a graduate-degree program in public administration, says he encountered some difficulty in transferring the credits to San Diego State University. He eventually got them transferred, he says, but as elective credit only. San Diego State, he says, had a problem with the credits being derived from online learning, and thus didn’t accord them the weight he had expected — a situation that he acknowledges may vary from college to college.

Gordon G. Willard, a 19-year veteran of the animal-advocacy field who heads the Animal Protective Foundation of Schenectady, in New York State, entered the Johns Hopkins program to burnish his management skills. The grant-proposal-writing instruction he received, he says, helped his organization win $50,000 from the William Gundry Broughton Charitable Foundation, in Glenville, N.Y., to start a mobile clinic for spaying and neutering cats and dogs — the largest single grant Mr. Willard’s group has ever received.

He says he wouldn’t want to see the university drastically diminish the amount of in-person instruction it offers. “I found a great advantage in the intensified learning,” says Mr. Willard, who earned a bachelor’s degree in animal science from Cornell University. “I worked harder in this program than I did in college.” Online learning might be more convenient for some students, he says. “But you’d lose the advantage of having that intensity, and being able to flush out your ideas and talk to an instructor who has great experience — as you’re hearing an answer, it’s answering all your questions, and as you’re giving a question, it’s answering everybody else’s.”

More information about and application materials for Regis University’s certificate in nonprofit management-humane and environmental studies are available online. Applications must be received by December 6 for the spring 2003 semester.

Is distance learning a good way for people who work at nonprofit organizations to pick up management training? Tell us what you think in the Share Your Brainstorms online forum.