• Lester M. Salamon is a Professor at The Johns Hopkins University and director of the Center for Civil Society Studies at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies. He previously served as Director of the Center for Governance and Management Research at The Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. and as Deputy Associate Director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget in the Executive Office of the President. Before that, he taught at Duke University, Vanderbilt University, and, during the American civil rights struggle of the mid-1960s, at Tougaloo College in Tougaloo, Mississippi.
  
  Dr. Salamon was a pioneer in the empirical study of the nonprofit sector in the United States and, more recently, throughout the world. His 1982 book, The Federal Budget and the Nonprofit Sector, was the first to document the scale of the American nonprofit sector and the extent of government support to it. His book Partners in Public Service: Government-Nonprofit Relations in the Modern Welfare State (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), which examines government-nonprofit relations in the United States, won the 1996 ARNOVA Book Award. As director of the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project, Dr. Salamon has extended this analysis to the international sphere, producing the first comparative empirical assessment ever undertaken of the size, structure, financing, and role of the nonprofit sector at the global level. The results of this work have been published in Dr. Salamon’s 1994 book, The Emerging Sector(Manchester University Press), in his more recent volumes, Global Civil Society: Dimensions of the Nonprofit Sector –Vol. I (Johns Hopkins University 1999) and Vol. II (Kumarian Press, 2004), and in an entire series of books on the international nonprofit sector published by Manchester University Press.
  
  Dr. Salamon is also the author of America’s Nonprofit Sector: A Primer, which is used widely in college-level courses on the nonprofit sector in the United States and elsewhere, and The State of Nonprofit America recently published by the Brookings Institution Press. His book The Tools of Government – A Guide to the New Governance (OUP 2002) has been well received by policy planners and academics alike.

Heather Peeler

• Heather Peeler blends more than ten years of experience in the nonprofit sector with years in management consulting. She has worked in a variety of fields including the arts, publishing, health care, and philanthropy. Prior to joining CWV, she was a senior associate at Innovation Network, where she oversaw business development, public relations, marketing and new product development for a consulting firm serving nonprofits and foundations. Prior to joining Innovation Network, Heather served as the Managing Editor for Foundation News & Commentary, the flagship publication of the Council on Foundations, where she oversaw the magazine's circulation and advertising programs and wrote features and organizational profiles.
  
  After receiving an MBA from the Anderson School at UCLA, Heather was the Executive Director of Small Press Distribution, a nonprofit located in Berkeley, CA that provides distribution services for independent literary publishers. While living in the Bay Area, she co-founded GenArt/SF, a nonprofit arts organization dedicated to increasing young people's participation in the visual arts.

Mike Eichler

• Mike Eichler is a faculty member of the School of Social Work at San Diego State University and the Director of the Consensus Organizing Center. He has over twenty years experience in community organizing and is the creator of the method of consensus organizing. He has worked with unemployed steelworkers, casino owners, welfare recipients, bankers, corporate executives and the homeless bringing them together around common self interest.
  
  He began his organizing career in Pittsburgh where he helped a neighborhood battle the illegal practices of racial steering and blockbusting by joining forces with a for profit real estate firm. When hired by Pittsburgh executives to help address economic problems caused by the closing of the steel mills, he brought the unemployed and the business leaders together to begin revitalization of the region. He was asked by the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) to expand his work throughout the country and organized new grass roots efforts in such diverse cities as West Palm Beach Florida, New Orleans Louisiana, Las Vegas Nevada, and Houston Texas. He started his own national non profit, the Consensus Organizing Institute which trained organizers in the consensus organizing method.
  
  In 1999 he joined academia where he said he “would never be heard from again..” He has been recognized for his contributions by receiving the Mon Valley Initiative’s coveted John Heinz Award and has been selected by San Diego State students as Professor of the Year in 2001, 2004 and 2005.