The World Has Changed and So Must We (with Clara Miller, The F.B. Heron Foundation)

Location: Harvard Kennedy School | Taubman Building, Nye A

The World Has Changed and So Must We

A ground-breaking new vision for philanthropic intervention

Spring 2013 Frontline with Faculty Series
with CLARA MILLER, President, The F.B. Heron Foundation

Like other foundations, The F. B. Heron Foundation has for years focused on helping families at the bottom of the economic and social scale — inheritors of persistent poverty, racial and ethnic discrimination, social and geographic isolation. Unfortunately, for the great bulk of the U.S. population, social and economic mobility have been stagnant for decades. Industrial and technological advances now lead as often to reductions in employment as to increases.  Employment at a living wage is neither reliable nor commonplace.  Heron Foundation president Clara Miller comes to the Frontline with Faculty Serieson Tuesday, February 26 to discuss the organization’s ground-breaking new strategy, which aims to alleviate structural poverty while supporting an American economy that successfully competes in the global market.  Specifically, the Heron Foundation believes that philanthropy’s financial toolkit should include every investment instrument, all asset classes, and all enterprise types, and the organization is shifting its focus from creating homeownership opportunities for low and moderate income people to more balanced and holistic investment opportunities in assets that improve access to reliable income and opportunity to disadvantaged populations.

Clara Miller  is President of The F. B. Heron Foundation, which helps people and communities help themselves out of poverty. Prior to assuming the Foundation’s presidency, Miller was President and CEO of Nonprofit Finance Fund which she founded and ran from 1984 through 2010. Miller was named to The NonProfit Times “Power and Influence Top 50” for the five years from 2006 through 2010.  She was awarded a Bellagio Residency in 2010 by The Rockefeller Foundation. In addition to serving on The F. B. Heron Foundation’s board, Miller is on the boards of GuideStar, PopTech, and The Robert Sterling Clark Foundation. She is a member of The Bank of America’s National Community Advisory Council, the Aspen Philanthropy Group and the Social Investment Committee of the Kresge Foundation. In 2010 Miller became a member of the first Nonprofit Advisory Committee of the Financial Accounting Standards Board. In 1996, Miller was appointed by President Clinton to the U.S. Treasury’s first Community Development Advisory Board for the then-newly-created Community Development Financial Institutions Fund. She later served as its Chair. She chaired the Opportunity Finance Network board for six years and was a member of the Community Advisory Committee of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for eight years. Other prior board affiliations include Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, Enterprise Community Loan Fund, Community Wealth Ventures and Working Today. Miller speaks and writes extensively about nonprofit capitalization and finance and has been published in The Financial Times, Stanford Social Innovation Review, The Nonprofit Quarterly and the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

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