Interview with Our Chair in Philanthropy
The MPNL program鈥檚 new Chair in Philanthropy, Dr. Jamie Levine Daniel, spoke to PANL Perspectives about her research specialties, how she started in the sector, and what attracted her to MPNL. Before this, was an Associate Professor, in the School of Public Service, at NYU, following eight years at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs, at Indiana University Bloomington.
What attracted you to the MPNL program?
Dr. Levine Daniel: 鈥奣he exciting thing about this position is how collaborative, integrated and responsive to the community it seems to be. What struck me is that the impetus and inspiration to create a Chair of Philanthropy came from the community. The position is collaboratively funded by a number of donors. The other thing that’s exciting is the focus on helping to inform the nonprofit sector, and there’s a lot of back and forth between academic work and practical work in the sector.
And I liked what I saw at the Summer Institute — how responsive key stakeholders seem to be to students and alumni. MPNL runs the Summer Institute really well, takes advantage of the two weeks to run courses, but also events for different stakeholders in the community. Being around the Celebration of Philanthropy event, the MPNL Alumni Association launch, Women in Philanthropy, the Advisory Council meetings and other events, I saw an excitement and understanding about the importance of the sector and the work that people do — and the importance of data, research and best practices to improve organizations.
How did you get started in the nonprofit sector?
Dr. Levine Daniel: I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. Cleveland has a strong Jewish community, with a lot of Jewish institutions. We regularly gave in our home, and made donations. And I grew up with unnamed, just sort of in the background, Jewish values of , which often gets translated as ‘charity’ but is more connected to ‘righteousness’ and ‘justice,’ and , which means ‘doing good deeds’ and technically, means ‘commandment.’ It probably comes as no surprise that first I worked in the nonprofit sector, then studied the nonprofit sector — and studied questions of justice and equity in a nonprofit context.
What are your academic interests and research?
Dr. Levine Daniel: 鈥奙y main focus is on . And I’ve started to look at questions of power and equity. I study community foundations — . As you may imagine, given current events, the contours of the project have changed shape and the questions that we’re able to ask and the access to information that we’re able to have, especially here in the United States, has been changing.
The second project is a cross-border philanthropy project. I study money flows, . It’s a longitudinal project that I’ve been doing with two scholars at Tel Aviv University for six or seven years. There’s a large Jewish diaspora, but Jewish communal organizations are not the only organizations sending money abroad. This type of study is generalizable or applicable to any sort of cross-border philanthropy, any diaspora philanthropy among different communities, and raises questions about transparency and accountability. That’s one thing I’m looking forward to replicating with Canadian data, both from a data availability question, but also from views of different contexts and cross-border trends.
Dr. Jamie Levine Daniel is on . Also, see for more details.