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Fellow

Henry Cisneros

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Chairman and Co-Founder, American Triple I Partners

About

Henry Cisneros served as the secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in President Bill Clinton’s administration. Cisneros was credited with initiating the revitalization of many of the nation’s public housing developments and formulating policies which contributed to achieving the nation’s highest ever homeownership rate.

He is currently chairman of the CityView companies, which work with urban homebuilders to create homes priced within the range of average families, and chairman of Siebert Cisneros Shank & Co., L.L.C., a leading public finance firm.

Cisneros was elected mayor of San Antonio, Texas in 1981, becoming the first Hispanic-American mayor of a major U.S. city. During his four terms as mayor, he helped rebuild the city’s economic base and spurred the creation of jobs through massive infrastructure and downtown improvements. He was selected as the “Outstanding Mayor” in the nation by City and State Magazine in 1986.

After leaving HUD in 1997, Cisneros was president and chief operating officer of Univision Communications, the Spanish-language broadcasting company, and currently serves on its board of directors.

Cisneros holds degrees from Texas A&M University, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and The George Washington University. He also has been awarded more than 20 honorary doctorates from leading universities. He has authored and edited several books, and was presented the Common Purpose Award with former HUD Secretary Jack Kemp for demonstrating the potential of bipartisan cooperation.

Faculty Fellow

Ram Cnaan

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Professor; Program Director, Program for Religion and Social Policy Research

Faculty Director, Goldring Reentry Initiative

About

Ram Cnaan is Professor and Director of the Program for Religion and Social Policy Research, and Faculty Director of the Goldring Reentry Initiative in the School of Social Policy & Practice. He is a world-renowned expert in studying faith-based social services and volunteerism. He carried out the first national study on the role of local religious congregations in the provision of social services as well as the first one-city census of congregations in one city (Philadelphia). Cnaan is now working on fiscally valuing the contribution of urban congregations as well as working on an edited volume on innovative nonprofit organizations and leading the Goldring Reentry Initiative to reduce ex-prisoners’ recidivism in Philadelphia. In addition, he serves on the editorial board of eleven academic journals. 

Selected Publications

Luria, G., R.A. Cnaan, and A. Boehm. In Press. “Religious attendance and volunteering: Testing national culture as a boundary condition.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.

Cnaan, Ram A. And Toorjo Ghose. 2017. “Doctoral Social Work Education.” Research on Social Work Practice. 

Heist, D. H., and R.A. Cnaan. 2016. “Faith-based international development work: A review.” Religions 7(3): 1-17.

Cnaan, R. A., and S. An. 2016. “Harnessing faith for improved quality of life: Government and faithbased nonprofit organizations in partnership.” Human Service Organizations Management, Leadership and Governance 40(3): 208-219.

Cnaan, R. A., and D. Kaplan Vinokur. 2014. Cases in innovative nonprofits: Organizations that make a difference. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 

Faculty Fellow

Ira Harkavy

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Associate Vice President and Founding Director of the Barbara and Edward Netter Center for Community Partnerships 

Areas of Interest

    About

    Ira Harkavy is Associate Vice President and Founding Director of the Barbara and Edward Netter Center for Community Partnerships. Harkavy teaches in the departments of history, urban studies, and Africana studies, and in the Graduate School of Education. As Director of the Netter Center since 1992, Harkavy has helped to develop academically based community service courses, as well as participatory action research projects, that involve creating university-community partnerships and university-assisted community schools in Penn’s local community of West Philadelphia. Harkavy is Chair of the National Science Foundation’s Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineering (CEOSE); US Chair of the International Consortium on Higher Education, Civic Responsibility, and Democracy; and Chair of the Anchor Institutions Task Force. He has co-edited and co-authored seven books, and has written and lectured widely on the history and current practice of urban university-community-school partnerships and strategies for integrating the university missions of research, teaching, learning, and service. Among other honors, Harkavy is the recipient of the University of Pennsylvania’s Alumni Award of Merit, Campus Compact’s Thomas Ehrlich Faculty Award for Service Learning, a Fulbright Senior Specialist Grant, and two honorary degrees.

    Selected Publications

    Benson, Lee, Ira Harkavy, John Puckett, Matthew Hartley, Rita A. Hodges, Francis E. Johnston, and Joann Weeks. 2017. Knowledge for Social Change: Bacon, Dewey, and the Revolutionary Transformation of Research Universities in the Twenty-First Century. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

    Bergan, Sjur, Tony Gallagher, and Ira Harkavy, eds. 2016. Higher Education for Democratic Innovation. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing.

    Harkavy, Ira. 2016. “Engaging Urban Universities as Anchor Institutions for Health Equity” editorial in American Journal of Public Health. Washington, DC: American Public Health Association Publications. 106(12): 2155–2157.

    Harkavy, Ira, Nancy Cantor, and Myra Burnett, “Realizing STEM Equity and Diversity through Higher Education-Community Engagement,” white paper based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant no. 1219996, January 2015, available at http://www.nettercenter.upenn.edu.

    Harkavy, Ira, Matthew Hartley, Rita Hodges and Joann Weeks. 2013. “The Promise of University-Assisted Community Schools to Transform American Schooling: A Report from the Field, 1985-2012.” Peabody Journal of Education 88:5 (2013): 525-540. 

    Fellow

    Patricia L. Smith

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    President and CEO, The Funders Network

    About

    Patricia L. Smith is President and CEO of The Funders Network (TFN), where she drives TFN’s organizational and operational initiatives and systems and provides oversight and direction to its funder working groups and grant and fellowship programs. She also serves as program lead for TFN’s Inclusive Economies working group, which applies a three-part focus—race, place and prosperity—to economic growth and development.

    Pat is formerly a senior policy advisor for the Reinvestment Fund, a national leader working to revitalize low-income communities through the strategic and innovative use of capital, data and partnerships. She led the Reinvestment Fund’s efforts to improve access to healthier foods in underserved urban and rural communities, and was instrumental in expanding fresh food finance across the industry of community development finance institutions, helping secure over $243 million in federal funding for that work. Prior to joining the Reinvestment Fund, Pat directed the City of Philadelphia’s Neighborhood Transformation Initiative (NTI), a $295 million public-private partnership to stimulate investment in Philadelphia neighborhoods. NTI contributed to a paradigm shift in urban redevelopment policy and resource allocation by creating a data-driven framework for assessing opportunities in distressed urban markets.

    Pat is a current member of the Association of Black Foundation Executives (ABFE), and serves on the technical advisory committee for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s national initiative, Aligning Systems for Health, led by the Georgia Health Policy Center.

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