Founder & Faculty Director, Center for Social Sector Leadership | Adjunct Professor
Center for Social Sector Leadership | Sustainability
Expert in multisector leadership and social impact
About
Nora Silver is Founder, Faculty Director, and Adjunct Professor of the Center for Social Sector Leadership. She teaches Social Sector Solutions, Impact Investing Practicum, and Large Scale Social Change: Social Movements, for which she is an Aspen Pioneer Faculty Award winner. Read More
Silver 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 U.S. 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, she has worked with hundreds of organizations worldwide—including nonprofits, businesses, education, governments, foundations, and universities—on strategy and organizational development, cross-sector collaboration, community engagement, and board and executive development. She served as a senior trainer for the Peter F. Drucker Foundation.
Silver 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.
Expertise and Research Interests
- Alternative Leadership Models in Diverse Communities
- Multi-Sector Leadership
- Networks for Social Impact
- Next-Generation Social Sector Leadership
- Cross-sector Collaborations
- Nora Silver. Little Tokyo Service Center: “Welcome to Little Tokyo, Please Take Off Your Shoes.” Berkeley Haas Case Series.
2022 - Nora Silver. Community Coalition: How One Organization Achieves Successful Leadership Succession. Berkeley Haas Case Series.
2022 - Nora Silver. LA-Más: Can Co-Leadership Improve Outcomes for Organizations and the Communities they Serve? Berkeley Haas Case Series.
2021 - Nora Silver. Food Forward: How Volunteer Teams Move Surplus Produce from Tree to Table. Berkeley Haas Case Series.
2021 - Nora Silver and Paul Jansen. The Multisector Career Arc: the role of cross sector affiliations and sector hopping in career acceleration (opens in a new tab). Berkeley Haas.
2016 - Nora Silver, Laura Callanan, and Paul Jansen. Leveraging Social Sector Leadership (opens in a new tab). Special publication of GEO (Grantmakers for Effective Organizations) and Regents of the University of California.
2015 - Jane Wei-Skillern, Nora Silver. Four Network Principles for Collaboration Success (opens in a new tab). The Foundation Review.
2013 - Nora Silver, Jane Wei-Skillern. Cracking the Network Code: Four Principles for Grantmakers (opens in a new tab). Scaling That Works.
2013 - Nora Silver. Telling the Whole Story: Voices of Ethnic Volunteers in America (opens in a new tab). lulu.com.
2011 - Nora Silver. Cultural Competency: Not a Lump Sum of Stereotypes. The Journal of Volunteer Administration.
2002 - Nora Silver. The Promise and Pitfalls of Technology in Creating an Engaged Citizenry. The Grantmaker Forum on Community & National Service Session Highlights.
2000 - Nora Silver. At the Heart: The New Volunteer Challenge to Community Agencies. The San Francisco Foundation.
1989
At Haas since 2003
2014 – present, Faculty Director, Center for Social Sector Leadership, Haas School of Business
2006 – present, Adjunct Professor, Haas School of Business
2003 – 2014, Founder and Executive Director, Center for Social Sector Leadership, Haas School of Business
2007, Visiting Professor, University of Klagenfurt, Vienna Dialogic
1990 – 2003, Founder and Director, The Volunteerism Project, San Francisco, CA
1998 – 2001, Senior Trainer, Peter F. Drucker Foundation
1985 – 1989, Founder and Director, PAVE Alameda County
1982 – 1985, Executive Director, Tri-Valley Haven for Women, Livermore, CA
1975 – 1982, Instructor, Chabot College, Hayward, CA
- Provide strategy and organizational consulting to nonprofits, foundations, businesses, governments, and universities, including: American Red Cross, Consumers Union, Corporation for National Service (AmeriCorps), Georgetown University, Government of Singapore, National Judicial College, Office of the Governor of Hawaii, United Way of America, UPS Foundation, Walter and Elise Haas Fund, YMCA of the USA and others
Aspen Institute Faculty Pioneer Award
2016
- California will reward volunteering college students with aid — but spend half the money on overhead (opens in a new tab), CalMatters, 02/07/2022
- Haas pilots impact investing practicum (opens in a new tab), Poets & Quants, 06/16/2018
- Sal Khan creates online academy to educate anyone in world for free (opens in a new tab), San Francisco Chronicle, 01/19/2018
- #morekidsonbikes: New youth cycling group works with university to ‘map’ existing youth programs (opens in a new tab), Bicycle Retailer, 04/04/2017
- Berkeley-Haas Research on the Rewards, and Costs, of a Cross-Sector Career (opens in a new tab), Metro MBA, 07/29/2016
- Large Scale Social Change: Social Movements, MBA 292N
- Social Sector Solutions – Nonprofit Consulting Projects, MBA 292S