BOARD MEMBERS

Emil Angelica

Emil Angelica holds an MBA in finance and management and is Principle Consultant and President with the Community Consulting Group, LLC.  He has over 35 years of experience providing consulting and training services to nonprofits, specializing in governance, strategic planning, community engagement and mergers and collaborations.  He has also worked extensively with the refugee and immigrant communities in Minnesota.  He was a CASP Fulbright Scholar in Cyprus working with the United Nations and the NGO sectors throughout the island.  He has authored a number of books and articles on nonprofit management and is known as a national speaker and trainer. He has been the project director for a several research studies.

 Marion Angelica

Dr. Angelica holds a doctorate in Human Relations with a focus on the nexus between creativity and conflict resolution.  She worked as a Fulbright Scholar in the nation of Cyprus, studying the impact of repeated grassroots peacemaking efforts on the divided island.  Marion has worked as an arts consultant both for foundations and at her own consulting firm, Convergences Inc.  She has taught nonprofit management, public policy and volunteer management at several universities and worked in university administration as a dean.   Marion currently works as a ceramic artist and teacher at the Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis, MN and offers workshops nationally and locally.

 Lawrence Sommer

During his professional career Lawrence Sommer has served as State Historic Preservation Officer for Nebraska, Director and CEO of the Nebraska and Montana State Historical Societies, Director of the St. Louis County Historical Society and Lake Superior Railroad Museum in Duluth and as a city planning official and consultant in several states. A native of northeastern Minnesota, Sommer is a graduate of Carleton College and holds a M.A. Degree from the University of Minnesota. He is author/editor of several books and numerous articles and technical reports related to historic preservation planning, architectural history, state and local history. His special fields of research interest include Lake Superior mining regions and Duluth architecture.

ADVISORY COUNCIL MEMBERS

Barry K Baines, MD

Dr. Baines received his MD degree from Georgetown University School of Medicine in 1975. He is Board Certified in both Family Medicine and Hospice and Palliative Medicine. He serves as a hospice medical director for two hospice programs in the Twin Cities, in addition to his role as Vice President with Celebrations of Life and LivingWisely. He is a leading authority on Ethical Wills/Legacy Letters, and pioneered their use in hospice, palliative care and other communities beginning in 1997. He is the author of "Ethical Wills: Putting Your Values on Paper and has created additional programming and resources on this topic that have been featured nationally.

Jonathan Hanft

Dr. Hanft grew up in the Washington, D.C. area. He graduated from Cornell University with a degree in Plant Sciences and received a M.S. and PhD in Agronomy from the University of Minnesota. Experiencing the devastating impact of AIDS on friends and the gay community, he became involved in HIV prevention and care in 1987. He has been an HIV educator, case manager for HIV positive youth, HIV insurance specialist and a program and funding administrator. As supervisor of Hennepin County Human Services and Public Health Department’s Ryan White Program since 2002, Jonathan leads the Minneapolis-St. Paul Part A Transitional Grant Area’s administrative team. He also served as technical advisor for the National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors global program in Ethiopia, Mozambique and Uganda.

Walter Harrison

Dr. Walter Harrison is president emeritus of the University of Hartford, having served as president from 1998 to 2017. During his tenure as president, the longest in the University’s history, he led the University is strengthening its finances, rebuilding a significant portion of its campus, dramatically increasing its fundraising, and improving its academic and admissions profile. In retirement, he remains involved as a director or trustee of a number of educational, health care, and theatre organizations, chairing a number of boards and serving on the executive committee of many others. He is also involved nationally in the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, and is committed to improving the academic opportunities available to all college athletes. A trustee of two independent schools and his undergraduate alma mater, Trinity College, and chair of the boards of two organizations devoted to providing increased educational opportunities to inner city Hartford youth, he is committed to improving educational opportunities to all students. And as chair of the board of St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center and a member of the board of directors of Trinity Health of New England, he is devoted to providing world class health care to all people regardless of background in Connecticut and Western Massachusetts.

Michael J. Lansing

Dr. Lansing is associate professor of history at Augsburg University. He is the author of Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North America Politics (2015) and co-author of The American West: A Concise History (2008). An active public historian, his experiences include an oral history project with the Minnesota chapter of the Sierra Club, a congregational history, the Historyapolis Project, two years on the Legacy Strategic Agenda Collaborative (co-sponsored by the Minnesota Historical Society and the Minnesota Association of Local History Museums), and Purple Places: A Digital History Tour of Prince’s Minneapolis. His current project is Enriched: Industrial Carbohydrates and the Rise of Nutrition Capitalism, a history of factory-processed grains and the propagation of a political economy that demarcates the way we understand, make, and eat food.

Nancy MacKay
Nancy MacKay, MLIS, is an oral historian, librarian, writer, and educator. She worked twenty-two years at Mills College in Oakland, California, as librarian and oral historian, retiring in 2011. She taught oral history and library science at the San Jose State University School of Information from 2008-2016. Nancy has consulted on a variety of community oral history and archiving projects, including the Oakland Chinatown Oral History Project, In our Own Words: Negro Spirituals Heritage Keepers (oral history project), Radcliffe College Oral History Project, City of Fremont Anniversary oral history project, the 420 Archive (oral history of the California cannabis industry), and currently, an archiving protocol for the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival. Nancy’s publications include the Community Oral History Toolkit (Routledge, 2013) (with Barbara Sommer and Mary Kay Quinlan), and Curating Oral Histories, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2016). She is editor of the Routledge Practicing Oral History series which now has nine titles in print. Since formal retirement Nancy has time to pursue her interest in helping community groups do oral history and archiving at a scale and budget appropriate to their goals.

Steven E Mayer

Dr. Mayer has over 30 years of experience conducting studies of organizational and grantmaking effectiveness throughout the nonprofit arena. As the founding director at Rainbow Research, Inc. (24 years), his evaluation work and consultation have been consistently acknowledged for their contribution to improved understanding and performance by his clients: foundations, nonprofit organizations, and community groups. Now at Effective Communities, LLC, the intent of his work is the same: to help socially concerned organizations respond more effectively to social problems and opportunities.  Steven Mayer’s formal training is in industrial and organizational psychology His work has been local in nature but in a variety of settings throughout the United States, in Minnesota, and in Western, Central, and Eastern Europe. Most of his projects and publications focus on the effectiveness of work done by foundations and nonprofit community organizations. He continues to update and add articles to the Effective Communities Project website (https://effectivecommunities.com), which serves as a free resource for nonprofits, grantmakers, activists, and evaluators.  Dr. Mayer is continuing work on a book with the tentative title, Design, Evaluation and Strengthening of Nonprofit Organizations.

Mary Kay Quinlan

Dr Quinlan holds a Ph.D. in American Studies. She retired as associate dean of the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). In addition to teaching journalism classes, she also taught and team-taught oral history classes at the UNL and at Nebraska Wesleyan University. She had a 15-year career as a newspaper reporter, primarily as a Washington correspondent for the Omaha World-Herald and Gannett News Service, during which time she served as president of the National Press Club.Mary Kay has an extensive background in oral history as a workshop presenter, teacher, and co-author (with Barbara W. Sommer and others) of several oral history manuals. She also is editor of the Oral History Association’s Newsletter, a position she has held since 1993.