Interview with L. David Brown
L. David Brown is the Associate Director for International Programs of the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at the Kennedy School of Government. A former Peace Corps volunteer, he has been a professor of action research for organizational change at Case Western Reserve University and Boston University and is the founder of the Institute for Development Research in Boston.
What do you do?
I am currently the Associate Director for International Programs of the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations and a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government. These positions give me opportunities to indulge my lifelong interest in work as both an academic and a practitioner concerned with promoting social transformation and development. I get to teach a wide range of students, some academically inclined and others who are first rate activists. I get to develop and carry out action research projects with a wide range of interesting people and organizations, such as a current project to on the governance and architecture of transnational advocacy organizations—such as Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Oxfam International, and Slum/Shack Dwellers International—that works with their leadership to explore how they can become both more effective and more accountable to key constituencies. I also get to work with a worldwide network of colleagues in civil society organizations that are committed to social and political values that I share.
How did you get to where you are today?
How did I get here? It’s a long story. I grew up in Bangor, Maine – the eldest of five kids of a doctor and a teacher who came to Bangor from Boston. I attended Harvard College in the early sixties, and temporarily escaped graduate school by going to Ethiopia as a Peace Corps community organizer. Being in rural Ethiopia was a powerful experience: Working and playing and living there helped me recognize that I belong to a global family and that equity and development are causes worth pursuing.
In Ethiopia I was advised that a law degree was a good preparation for further work on development issues. I walked into Yale Law School off the plane from Ethiopia and found it difficult to get excited about torts. I took courses in other departments as therapy, discovered the emerging field of organizational behavior, and stayed to get a doctorate. In the summers I trained new Peace Corps Volunteers, and thought about applying organizational behavior to development problems. I wrote a dissertation and later a book about a four-year organization development project with a boarding school in which I was a co-consultant with my dissertation adviser.
My initial academic job was at Case Western Reserve University in a department known for action research on organizational change. During most of the seventies I taught there and consulted to a range of organizational change projects, from improving labor management relations at a chemical plant to improving strategy at a community development corporation to building city-wide leadership networks (including business, education, government, media, union and civil society leaders). After eight years my wife Jane and I and our two kids went on sabbatical to India for a year. Here, we worked with a center that worked with public enterprises and rural development initiatives.
In India we decided not to return to Case Western. We moved instead to Boston, which was midway between our families. Jane went to work for an organizational consulting firm. I started the Institute for Development Research (IDR), a nonprofit think-tank focused on organizational research and capacity building for development organizations. A year later I also began working at Boston University, where I taught courses on organizational change at the School of Management and on public enterprises in the Development Economics program. Two years later Jane joined IDR as its Executive Director. During the eighties and nineties I worked at both BU and IDR. In the mid-eighties IDR decided to focus on civil society organizations. Over the next fifteen years I had opportunities to work with civil society actors and partners in dozens of countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America as well as North America and Europe. IDR’s work also moved from a focus on organizations to focusing on national sectors, intersectoral relations, and transnational campaigns to influence agencies like the World Bank and USAID.
In 1999, the newly-created Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations invited me to build an international program to learn about and support civil society actors. IDR colleagues encouraged me to take the opportunity to continue IDR’s work with the resources available at the Center and the Kennedy School. During the last seven years I have worked with colleagues and students at Harvard and with partners around the world on the challenges of fostering civil society development, promoting cross-sector influence and cooperation for development, and learning about the evolution of transnational civil society organizations, networks and movements.
Anything you want to add?
I have had a lot of wonderful opportunities. I have also taken a lot of career “detours” – delaying graduate school to go to Ethiopia, switching from a legal to an academic career in graduate school, resigning tenure at Case to move to Boston. Many of those detours have become major paths for me, and I am very grateful for the people in my life (especially Jane and my development colleagues and co-conspirators) that have encouraged me to take them. I believe that the development and social transformation field, like many others in our turbulent world, is constantly in the process of re-inventing itself. I have had opportunities to work on projects and initiatives that were inconceivable when I was in school, so I would encourage those who hope to invent their own “careers” and fields. There are risks involved, but also rewards. For me the rewards have been well worth the risks.
