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.

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