Jane’s work life has been a continuous expression of her passion to assist those whose voices often go unheard. Jane has learned that such people are heavily affected by decisions made by those with power and resources, but they are rarely seated at the table where those decisions are made. Jane’s advocacy is dedicated to shifting that imbalance.
Jane began her career as a VISTA volunteer assisting young adults caught in the criminal justice system with establishing relationships with positive role models and mentors. Following other program management roles, she became the Director of Evaluation at the United Way of Southeastern New England in 1980, and founded one of the first management assistance programs in the U.S. in 1982 as a large number of small and struggling nonprofits emerged at once from the U.S. War on Poverty. This began what would become a lifelong passion to use the nonprofit corporate structure to connect marginalized communities with resources and simultaneously to assure funders that they would invest in these causes.
Via work with individual organizations to strengthen their functioning, a variety of studies of specific community needs, and support to cross-sector and collaborative efforts to build more sensible community systems of support, Jane was privileged to engage with leaders of many of the critical social issues of our times. Examples of these issues include the AIDS epidemic; Southeast Asian immigration post Vietnam; the influx of displaced homemakers to the workplace due to rising divorce rates; the shift of people with mental health and developmental disabilities from institutional to community-based care; the redefinition of substance abuse from moral lapse to treatable illness; the design and building of community-based systems of care components such as caregiver respite and therapeutic childcare to support parents with children with unique health needs; the recognition of trauma as a major contributing factor to poor health and mental health outcomes; and the emergence and subsequent redesign of supports for food insecurity, among others.
As a result of assisting health, mental health, and substance abuse providers to adjust to shared risk and managed care models of funding in the 1990s, Jane became more and more involved in the creation of strategic alliances in the sector, leading eventually to the publication of Forging Nonprofit Alliances, published as a volume of the Nonprofit Management Series of Jossey Bass in 1998. This was the first book to offer guidance to nonprofit leaders seeking to consolidate via partnership or merger.
In 2006, Jane, along with Anne Yurasek, founded Fio Partners, LLC, a consulting firm that provides management services to nonprofit organizations across the U.S. Jane codified the methodology and resources for strengthening nonprofits from her 30 years of practice, and this work continues to provide the knowledge and skills to support the practice. Jane retired from active consulting in 2019.
Jane has a B.A. in English and Philosophy from Hunter College and a Master’s Degree in business administration from the University of Rhode Island. She lives with her husband in Boothbay, Maine. They have three children and six grandchildren.
In 2013, Jane was diagnosed with Parkinsonism. She joined the Resolve Parkinson’s initiative based on her observations of the inadequate system of support for patients and the lack of forward progress in understanding the root causes of Parkinson’s symptoms. “If ever there was a system in need of redesign, it is this one. When a system is so inadequate that its supposed beneficiaries take it upon themselves to assess needs, identify potential treatments, and carry out experiments on their own bodies, it is a clear sign that the scientific and medical communities have lost touch. I look forward to working with my fellow board members to build the capacity of RP to be an influential voice in decisions focusing research on positive patient outcomes. Despite good intentions, there are 50 years of near stagnation to overcome.”
