Varied Life Experience Helps One Nonprofit Director ‘Build Bridges’
July 22, 2004 | Read Time: 6 minutes
When I was born in 1962, my parents, like many of their generation, were enchanted with the Kennedys. In addition to giving me the middle name Jacqueline, both parents responded to JFK’s call to public service and spent the better part of their careers in
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government, the “helping professions,” or academic administration. So you could say I ended up in the family business in my present role at Harvard, but however familiar the current terrain, the road I took to get here was not exactly linear.
In high school I was actively involved in music, theater, and student government. Because I liked to entertain and cook — and was not particularly academically inclined — I started college in a hotel-restaurant management program at the University of Denver. Eventually I migrated to the humanities, and I ended up getting a double major in English and theater arts from the University of Minnesota, graduating in 1986.
For about a year after college, I worked as an actress in community theaters in Minneapolis, while also working as a waitress. My shift into full-time nonprofit work came in 1987, when I came east to visit a younger sister who was working for the Public Interest Research Groups in Boston at the time.
When I arrived, my sister was taking part in training for organizers. I went and sat in on one of the sessions in which they were doing role-playing exercises — essentially, theater. I got drafted into participating, and by the end of the day had a job offer to set up a new PIRG office in Fairfield County, Conn., recruiting and training high-school and college students to canvass door-to-door around the state on environmental issues for the summer.
To be good at that job, you have to be able to make something out of nothing — overnight. Rent an office. Hire a staff. Learn the issues. Launch a campaign. It turned out that the work came pretty easily to me and I enjoyed it. After that summer, I came to Boston to run MassPIRG’s Cambridge office, and then managed a national PIRG recruitment campaign, hiring 3,500 college students to run campaign offices in 17 states in the summer of 1988.
After several years with the PIRG’s, I wanted to formalize my knowledge of management and leadership and decided to go to business school. This choice was not an effort to switch to the private sector, but rather a desire to learn the language and tools of business leaders. Due to my curiosity about globalization and its impact, I chose a small, international business program at Babson College in which I was in the minority — as a woman, as an American, and as someone interested in the public sphere. At Babson, I learned not only the basics of economics, accounting, finance, and marketing, but also how important it is to listen to and honor the input and expertise of people very different from me.
Shortly after finishing business school, I met a young Harvard academic at a dinner party. At the time, he’d just been asked to set up a new division on addiction and substance abuse at Harvard Medical School. Over dinner, he laid out the challenges he was facing and I responded. At the end of the evening, he said, “Do you want a job?” Three weeks later, I was working at Harvard, where I have remained for the last 12 years in a variety of roles.
A year into my job as administrator of the Division on Addictions at the medical school, my boss and I were asked to create a universitywide, cross-disciplinary program related to the brain, which became the Mind/Brain/Behavior Interfaculty Initiative. At the tail end of my time with MBB, I spent a year working as an internal consultant to the university’s central administration on a strategic planning effort and on a restructuring initiative, adding to my growing understanding of the challenges and opportunities inherent in promoting institutional change.
In 1997, I was hired as executive director of Harvard’s Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, another university “start-up” based at the Kennedy School of Government. During my six years at Hauser, my husband and I had two children, both of whom have altered and enriched my life immeasurably. Becoming a parent also shifted my relationship with work; I have turned down some interesting job opportunities in favor of jobs in which I have more flexibility and control over my time. I work fewer hours and grapple endlessly with the work-family balance — an often elusive but important goal for me.
This past October, I became executive director of Harvard’s new Initiative for Global Health, which seeks to enable a meaningful response to the major challenges in global health, by creating new knowledge and training leaders who can bridge the current boundaries within and across disciplines, sectors, institutions, and geographic locations.
Over time in each of these managerial roles, I have come to realize that what motivates me professionally is the opportunity to build bridges both within the institution and between academia and the “real world.” I enjoy thinking through the steps to get from a new idea, strategy, or vision to a bricks-and-mortar reality that can have some impact in the world and in people’s lives. Ironically, I think some of the most challenging and interesting questions our society faces seem to fall between the cracks of our existing institutional structures — including, or maybe especially, our academic disciplines.
For example, in the realm of health, how can the right incentives be created to ensure that the developed world uses our scientific and clinical knowledge to create low-cost, low-tech health interventions that are actually implementable in the developing world? This is no small task, given differences in cultures, belief systems, geographies, languages, and economic realities.
In my view, people — and relationships among people — are at the center of any answers we may find to these “bridging” questions. Over the years I have learned how important it is to engage all the people who will be affected in the process of redefining the future.
It is hard sometimes to listen to what people are saying, to stay present and not assume that you know how they think and feel, but it is crucial to the ultimate success of any transformational effort. My idea of effective engagement is quite distinct from giving away the right to make the decision. You can involve many people in a change-management process, but the final decisions must still be made by a small leadership team or a single leader.
Though untraditional, my varied career and life experiences have given me valuable perspective.
From my theater background, I try to make space for the people I work with to be challenged and creative in their jobs. At times I can think of myself as a director rather than an actor, though at other times I feel like I am in a bit of improvisational theater — jumping into situations in which I don’t know a lot and paying attention and responding. From my political organizing days, I bring what I learned about advocacy — surmounting hurdles and having multipronged strategies to draw supporters into a campaign.
Finally, from my children and family, I try to remember to celebrate and be joyful in my work — and to be present with the possibilities that exist in the moment, every day.
