2016 Faculty Pioneer Award Recipient

Nora Silver

Adjunct Professor and Faculty Director, Center for Social Sector Leadership

Haas School of Business, University of California Berkeley

Winning Course: Large-Scale Social Change



“This course was built on students’ expressed interest in creating major social change. Most social change occurs outside of institutions, through social movements. Companies pay attention because movements have the power to help or hinder their business, and because society increasingly expects community engagement from its corporate leaders. Business students want to be prepared to strategically lead or engage in social change. This course teaches them the levers for change and has them practice utilizing those levers to analyze a current movement and design a new social movement.“

Biography

Nora Silver is Founder and Faculty Director of the Center for Social Sector Leadership and Adjunct Professor at University of California Berkeley-Haas School of Business. She led the Center to be ranked third in the country (US News & World Report, 2016). Berkeley-Haas was also ranked first among business schools in social impact (Business as Unusual, 2014).

Nora is a serial entrepreneur, having founded a number of nonprofit social enterprises. She was founder of a unique collaboration of corporate, community and family foundations united to strengthen and diversify volunteerism in the United States. She also founded a groundbreaking enterprise that examined traditional notions of community service and taught a broad range of organizations to better engage volunteers. Early in her career, she served as executive director of a domestic violence organization, taught Spanish in an inner city school, and worked as a psychotherapist in private practice.

As an organizational consultant, Nora has worked with hundreds of organizations worldwide – including nonprofits, businesses, governments, foundations, and universities – on strategy and organizational development, cross-sector collaboration, community engagement, and board and executive development. Nora served as a senior trainer for the Peter F. Drucker Foundation.

Nora holds a Ph.D. in organizational and clinical psychology. She is the author of Telling the Whole Story: Voices of Ethnic Volunteers in America, and At The Heart: The New Volunteer Challenge to Community Agencies. She has also authored papers on multi-sector leadership, nonprofit networks, and next generation social sector leadership.