August 6, 2009

US Board of Trustees

The following people make up our US board of trustees:

Alice Brown

Alice is independent consultant and researcher and an international human rights advocate and expert on the use of the law for the public good. She has extensive experience in civil rights litigation and social justice philanthropy and currently advises, speaks and conducts research on a broad range of topics including philanthropic giving, good governance, leadership development, organizational effectiveness, public interest law and transformation within the South African legal profession. Ms Brown convenes the annual Public Interest Law Gathering (PILG) and serves on the boards of Corruption Watch and Section27, one of South Africa’s most respected public interest law centres. She is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the advisory committees of the Wits Justice Project and of Lawyers Against Abuse.

Alice served nearly two decades of leadership at the Ford Foundation, as a human rights program officer in its New York headquarters and as a program officer, Deputy Representative and then as the Foundation’s Representative for the Office for Southern Africa based in Johannesburg. During this time, she engaged in innovative grant making to support visionaries working on crucial global, regional and national issues in areas including human rights, social justice, constitutionalism and reconciliation, amongst other matters.

Earlier in her career, Alice spent five years as a litigator and advocate at the renowned NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), where she addressed some of the most intractable civil rights problems in the U.S. Her work and publications addressed legal aspects of housing conditions and environmental degradation in African American communities. Prior to her assignment with LDF, Ms Brown had the privilege to serve as a research assistant and law clerk of the late Honorable A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., a prominent and distinguished U.S. federal court judge, historian and civil rights advocate.

Alice is a graduate of the New York University School of Law, where she was named an Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Fellow based upon academic performance and a commitment to civil rights and liberties. She holds a BA in History with honors from Dartmouth College and pursued graduate study in African History at Northwestern University. She has been a Visiting Adjunct Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand School of Law, a fellow of the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program, and a Visiting Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University.

Linda Nguyen

Linda is director of talent acquisition and development for the Center for Community Change (CCC). In this role, Linda leads CCC’s efforts to recruit, train and retain top talent and is responsible for developing and executing a full cycle talent strategy. Prior to CCC, Linda built and managed a national initiative at the Alliance for Children and Families that enabled thousands of community residents across the U.S. to become advocates, leaders and activists. She encouraged nonprofit staff and board members to embrace civic engagement strategies in their organisations and neighbourhoods and to work in concert with community to address key issues in health, education and economic security. Her professional background also includes research in civic engagement and advocacy practices of human service organisations in the U.S., content development for a website covering human rights in Chile and management of the volunteer program at the YWCA in Berkeley.

Originally from Oakland, Linda earned a bachelor’s in social welfare from UC – Berkeley and a master’s in public policy from the University of Michigan. She currently resides in the Washington, D.C. metro area.

Michael Thatcher

Michael has been the CEO of Charity Navigator since 2015. Prior to joining Charity Navigator he spent more than 15 years with Microsoft, the last 10 of which as their Public Sector Chief Technology Officer (CTO) responsible for technology policy initiatives and engagements with government and academic leaders in the Asia, Middle-East and Africa.  Based in Singapore from 2010-15, he led a team of nationally focused CTOs and technical development strategists across greater Asia.

Over the years Michael has held various board seats within the nonprofit sector focused on humanitarian issues, the arts, the environment and information technology standards development.  His experiences also include technically supporting oceanographic research for Wood Hole Oceanographic Institution and co-founding and directing the international performing arts organisation, Dance Music Light.  He holds several patents in enterprise systems management and has a degree in Music from Columbia University in New York.

Nancy MacPherson

Nancy most recently served in the role of Managing Director for Evaluation at the Rockefeller Foundation (2008-2017), managing Foundation-wide evaluation. Prior to 2008, she worked in Asia and Africa with international development organizations, the United Nations, multilateral and bilateral agencies. She set up and managed IUCN’s Program Evaluation System and Performance Assessment System and served as Special Advisor to the IUCN Director General. She has also played a key role in the establishment and nurturing of a number of global and regional development evaluation professional associations, and networks, notably, the International Development Evaluation Association (IDEAS) and the African Evaluation Association (AfrEA). Nancy was a member of the teaching faculty at the World Bank’s summer International Program for Development Evaluation Training (IPDET) from 2001-2011.

She holds a master’s degree from Carleton University, Ontario, and has lived and worked in Canada, Africa, Asia, Switzerland and the United States. She is the recipient of the 2015 American Evaluation Association’s (AEA) Enhancing the Public Good Award, presented to an individual whose evaluation work has substantially contributed to the public good.