Principal Contributors

This is a group blog that is open to contributions from any of the Monitor Institute staff. The principle contributors are:

Noah Flower
Noah is a researcher and analyst at Monitor Group where he has worked since 2004 specializing in scenario planning, systems thinking, and other modes of foresight analysis. Other online shards of him can be found on his personal blog Deep Currents, Facebook, del.icio.us, LinkedIn, and Flickr. As a researcher for the national security & intelligence consulting team Monitor 360, his primary areas of research focus have been on global security and international affairs, one example of which was a the set of 25-year scenarios on the future of China that were summarized in Business 2.0. With the Monitor Institute he has focused so far on understanding the network that is lobbying to reform the U.S. Farm Bill, case studies of innovation and transformation for use in educational reform, and on the “Monitoring and Scanning” reports that preceded this blog. He received his A.B. in philosophy at Dartmouth College, where he graduated cum laude and received high honors for his undergraduate thesis on the nature of moral character.

Heather McLeod Grant
Heather is a published author, speaker, and advisor to high-impact organizations; she recently joined the Monitor Institute as a senior consultant. She is the co-author of Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits, which was named a Top Ten Book of 2007 by the Economist. Additionally, she serves as an advisor to the Center for Social Innovation at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and a fellow with the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. She is a former McKinsey & Company consultant and a co-founder of Who Cares, a national magazine for young social entrepreneurs published from 1993-1999. She has been published in the New York Times, Inc., the American Prospect, and Alliance, and has appeared on CNN and NPR. Heather serves on the Advisory Boards of the Stanford Social Innovation Review and the National Civic League. She holds an MBA from Stanford University and an AB from Harvard University, and resides in the Bay Area with her husband and daughter.

Gabriel Kasper
Gabriel works out of the Monitor Institute’s San Francisco office and has deep experience as a strategist working with foundations, corporations, and social change organizations. For the last fifteen years, he has focused primarily on the practice of philanthropy itself, helping funders understand emerging patterns of innovation and adapt to the changing context for their work. Before joining Monitor in 2004, he was the program officer for philanthropy at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, where he was responsible for developing the foundation’s strategy for increasing the effectiveness of philanthropy as a field and managing its grantmaking in that area. Gabriel is co-author of the 2005 report On the Brink of New Promise: The Future of U.S. Community Foundations and has published numerous articles on such topics as the future of philanthropy, social innovation, networks and social media, diversity, technology in the nonprofit sector, community development, and the growth of philanthropy in communities of color.

Angus Parker
Angus is an independent consultant affiliated with the Monitor Institute and the Program Director of WiserEarth, a community directory and social network for environmental and social justice organizations. His practice focuses on helping build effective non-profit partnerships and networks. He has extensive non-profit management experience working for biodiversity conservation organizations and is also a former Monitor Group Senior Consultant. He holds an MBA from the Wharton School of Management, an MA with Honors from the Lauder Institute of International Management and a MSc from Johns Hopkins University in Environmental Science.

Katherine Fulton
Katherine is president of the Monitor Institute and a partner at Monitor. She has spent three decades chronicling and catalyzing social change as a leader, strategist, teacher, editor, writer, speaker, and advisor. Katherine is passionately interested in how private resources can be used more effectively to create public good, and in recent years her work has increasingly focused on how philanthropy and social investing can adapt to a rapidly evolving global context. She has advised many of this generation’s leading philanthropists and foundations, given dozens of major speeches about the future of philanthropy, and co-authored three noted publications: Looking Out for the Future: An Orientation for Twenty-First Century Philanthropists, On the Brink of New Promise: The Future of U.S. Community Foundations, and What If? The Art of Scenario Thinking for Nonprofits.

Diana Scearce
Diana works out of the Institute’s San Francisco office and has over a decade of consulting experience as a strategist and process facilitator across sectors. Diana’s practice focuses on helping social change organizations, networks, and multi-stakeholder groups increase their impact through collective action. Her work draws on experience with strategy development, scenario thinking, experiential learning design, and training across a variety of established and emerging industries, with a focus on the social sector. Since early 2007, Diana has led a partnership with the Packard Foundation to explore how networks can facilitate greater philanthropic effectiveness.

Aron Kirschner
Aron has been an associate with Monitor Group since 2006. At Monitor, Aron has worked across a number of fields and project domains, including several projects in the social sector. With the Monitor Institute, Aron has worked on the “Monitoring and Scanning” reports featured on Working Wikily as well as work for social sector clients focused on applications of network theory, social network analysis, market mapping, and general strategy development. At Monitor, Aron is also the office head for Inspire, a national volunteer non-profit consulting practice for younger consultants. Aron holds an undergraduate degree from Stanford University in Economics, with honors. You can follow Aron online on Twitter and Facebook.

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