Nonprofit-Studies Program at Case Western Draws From Variety of Fields

Mark Klemens was a lawyer eager to make a career switch. In the late 1990s, he first found himself considering

a business degree. But while his wife served on the faculty of Case Western Reserve University’s School of Medicine, he learned about the institution’s master’s degree in nonprofit management and enrolled in that program instead.

“I’ve always cared about what nonprofit organizations can do for the community,” he says. “People who are really interested in quality-of-life issues naturally gravitate toward the nonprofit sector rather than the business sector.”

Today, his career transition is complete. He runs American operations for the British scholarly publisher Boydell & Brewer. Working from the for-profit company’s office in Rochester, N.Y., Mr. Klemens oversees the publisher’s contract work for several nonprofit institutions, including the University of Rochester Press. “It’s my dream job,” he says.

Even though he works for a business and not a charity, he says, he found that his nonprofit-focused course work — and the internship he did through the program for the Cleveland chapter of the British-American Chamber of Commerce — gave him the springboard he needed after he earned his degree from Case Western’s Mandel Center for Nonprofit Organizations in 2002. “I use something from nearly every class every week in my working life,” he says.

He credits his degree with helping him land his job. “The people who interviewed me were, I think, impressed by the broad range of issues addressed by the Mandel program,” he says. “Because a substantial part of their relationship was with the nonprofit press, they wanted someone who was aware of those issues.”

A Hybrid Approach

Since it was founded in 1984, the Mandel Center has focused on the increasingly tight relationships among nonprofit, for-profit, and government organizations, says Susan L. Eagan, the center’s executive director. The center’s curriculum is a hybrid that draws faculty members from four other schools within the university: the School of Law, the College of Arts & Sciences, the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, and the Weatherhead School of Management. With a large pool of labor to draw upon, the center offers more than 25 classes a year specifically focused on nonprofit organizations.

The quality, as well as the quantity, of instruction is another advantage that Case Western offers nonprofit-oriented students, says Naomi Wish, director of the Center for Public Service at Seton Hall University. “Case Western,” she says, “uses the best scholars from throughout the university to teach nonprofit management.”

The multidisciplinary approach helps the center prepare students for flexibility in their careers, says Carol K. Willen, the center’s director of education. While most alumni of the program work in the nonprofit field — 70 percent, according to a 2002 survey of the center’s graduates — others, like Mr. Klemens, simply find that their jobs include collaboration with charities, says Ms. Willen.

Even for those students who never leave the nonprofit world, she says, Mandel’s method allows for specialization while also preparing students to work for many different kinds of charities. It focuses on “not just management, but leadership and management,” says Ms. Willen. “What we’re trying to accomplish is the creation of someone who cannot simply manage a nonprofit organization but one who has vision, foresight, the ability to plan, the ability to anticipate trends and issues, and address those issues as they come to the fore.”

This credo inspires students, says Sondra Reis, associate director of the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits, an umbrella organization in St. Paul, who graduated from the program in 2002. She says that the curriculum has prepared her for her current work, which often involves translating nonprofit law and regulations into easy-to-understand language for the council’s members, and has helped ready her for her future. “I see myself being an executive director,” Ms. Reis says, “and they tell you in almost every class, ‘We are training you to be executive directors of organizations.’”

Ties to Local Charities

The center offers both a master’s degree in nonprofit organizations and a certificate in nonprofit management; the master’s can be combined with a dual degree in law, business, social work, or the arts and sciences. (An executive doctor of management degree, which can include studies of nonprofit management, can also be obtained in the business school.) Recently, the Mandel Center increased the master’s requirement from 45 credits to 60, adding several practice-related courses taught by local nonprofit professionals.

The growing popularity of business methods in charity management has shaped the curriculum, says Ms. Eagan. For instance, she says, the center has in recent years deepened its courses on fund raising, emphasizing nontraditional sources of money such as social-purpose businesses.

It also emphasizes real-world application of its lessons, with several courses incorporating projects that take students out to local charities. In addition, although most program participants have already worked in the nonprofit field before their time at Case Western, or are working in it while attending the program, they are encouraged to perform internships, and the Mandel Center also matches interested students with local nonprofit managers who serve as their mentors while they work toward their degrees.

One way that the center ties its classroom to day-to-day life in the nonprofit world is through its mandatory, yearlong projects, says Barbara Clemenson, director of finance and administration at the City Mission, a religious organization that serves Cleveland’s homeless. The Mandel Center requests proposals from local charities seeking assessment and planning help, and students are assigned to provide consulting.

“They are providing vital services to nonprofits — and we didn’t have to pay for it,” she says. The City Mission, she says, benefited from such a team of students in the mid-’90s, and sometimes still refers back to the students’ final report to gauge the charity’s progress in meeting its goals.

Amy Clatworthy, who expects to finish her Mandel degree in the spring, says that giving students opportunities to put theory into practice by working with local charities is one of the program’s strengths. She was an intern at Towards Employment, a Cleveland group that provides services to low-income clients, and she now works there part time. She has written grant proposals and helped develop programs for the charity, relying on the tools she acquired in the classroom.

She applied to Case Western’s program two years ago while working for a Boston nonprofit organization that advocated on behalf of family homelessness issues. At the time, she says, she had her heart set on creating her own charity. But the degree program caused her to rethink her career plans. She still wants to become a manager of a social-services organization, she says, but is giving more thought these days to how, and whether, she wants to start one from scratch. Mandel’s curriculum, she says, “has helped me think critically about the challenges nonprofits face and how to prevent those and combat those in the future. I feel confident now that I can go to a nonprofit and provide leadership and management as an executive.”

Career Progress

The Mandel Center may boost more than its graduates’ faith in their abilities: A study the center commissioned in 2002 that was conducted by the Triad Research Group, in Cleveland, found that 80 percent of the Mandel Center’s graduates got a raise or a promotion or moved to a new job after earning a master’s degree.

Ms. Reis’s story is a case in point: She was promoted to her current position at the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits after taking a leave of absence to complete her degree. She turned to the program, she says, to fill in gaps in the lessons she was learning on the job, and feels that the five years she had spent in the nonprofit field before she entered the Mandel Center’s classrooms dovetailed with the formal instruction she received.

The program can accommodate students with a variety of levels of experience in the nonprofit field, she says, but she has come to believe that those who have at least three years in the nonprofit trenches would get the most from the Mandel Center’s offerings.

“It helps you have a well-rounded base of experiences from which to draw when you are learning and trying to analyze what you’ve learned from textbooks and professors and comparing it to your own experience,” she says.

Case Western’s hybrid curriculum creates well-rounded professionals who can be assets to charities, says Kenneth C. Roberts, vice president of human resources and equal opportunity at United Way Services of Greater Cleveland. His group, he says, currently employs about four Mandel Center graduates in management roles, and as many as nine other Mandel graduates serve on his group’s board and governing committees. And, he notes, many other charities in the Midwest are led by Mandel alumni.

He believes his fellow nonprofit employers in Cleveland seek job candidates who have the credential, and thus has sometimes counseled job candidates and co-workers to seek it. Small charities, which need to operate “lean and mean,” he says, may especially benefit from leadership by a Mandel graduate. “People have to have the ability to wear a lot of hats,” he says, “and I think that’s where that program excels.”

The Mandel Center has in recent years made some additions and changes to its offerings. Like other universities that offer nonprofit-management degrees, it has also begun creating customized, noncredit executive-education programs for local and national charities, such as Mr. Roberts’s group, the National Kidney Foundation, and Opera America.

The center is continuing to find ways to improve the master’s curriculum, Ms. Eagan says, especially by providing more in-depth instruction on fund raising and program evaluation.

Case Western, says Mr. Roberts, is “willing to look at itself. Some organizations can be thought of as ivory towers — you know, you come to me. But I know the people at Case Western Reserve are willing to listen. They are willing to make changes to the curriculum, and have it evolve to meet the external environment.”

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

Program: Master of nonprofit organizations

Offered by: Mandel Center for Nonprofit Organizations

Location: Cleveland

Number of enrolled students: 55

Average number of students admitted each year: 57

Percentage of students who apply who are admitted: Not available

Tuition costs: $1,004 per credit, or $24,100 for full-time enrollment

Percentage of students who receive financial aid: 79

Percentage who attend full time: 31

Average age of students: 36 for part-time students, 30 for full-time students

Average class size: 30

Web site: http://www.cwru.edu/mandelcenter/