Char Mollison's Biography

Char Mollison has over 30 years of experience leading, managing and advising nonprofit organizations. For nine years she was vice president for member services at the Council on Foundations, a national membership association promoting responsible and effective philanthropy. For eight years before that she was vice president for membership at Independent Sector, a national coalition to advance giving, volunteering and not-for-profit initiative.

Her career began in the late 1960's when, as a college student, she co-founded one of the many nonprofit community newspapers springing up around the country to express a new generation's ideals of global peace and cooperation. She earned a Masters Degree in comparative literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center and taught at Queens College. The limited opportunities available at that time to women in higher education spurred her interest in the growing movement to advance the status of women, and that led to her next role in Washington, DC with a national organization called WEAL.

She spent 12 years at WEAL, serving for nine as the Executive Director in the 1980’s. During that time, she developed the team of volunteers and staff and garnered the financial support that resulted in several new laws relating to women’s legal and economic advancement in education and employment, including blue collar jobs and the military. WEAL’s volunteers and staff, through partnerships and coalitions, secured other gains for women in laws governing Social Security, taxes, insurance and pensions.

For 11 years, she has been teaching graduate courses in nonprofit management, governance, ethics and executive leadership at Johns Hopkins University, Georgetown University and George Mason University. As a consultant (a side business she started in 1994), she has advised staff executives and boards of many nonprofit organizations in the U.S. and abroad, including Eastern and Central Europe and Asia. She is a Fellow of the Salzburg Seminar and has worked with nonprofit leaders from around the world to strengthen and develop civil societies.

She serves on the board of the House of Ruth, a nonprofit in Washington, DC, that provides services to homeless or abused women and children, including emergency shelter, transitional and permanent housing, developmental day care and medical and psychiatric care. She also serves on several advisory boards concerned with philanthropy.

She lives in a 1926 Sears catalog house in the Palisades neighborhood of Washington, DC. Her husband Andy, a retired journalist and former President of the National Press Club, is President of Palisades Village, an association to help people stay in their homes as they age. They have one niece and nine nephews. She uses most of her leisure hours to listen to opera and read the original literary works from which opera libretti were adapted.

June 2008