Welcome

Welcome to my webpage. I serve as Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Public Policy at Nazarbayev University.  I received my PhD in Public Administration at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University. My research and teaching interests include collaborative policy formation, the nonprofit sector, and state politics.

My scholarship is influenced by prior experience as a coalition organizer and manager for networks of faith-based organizations, for get out the vote campaigns, for healthcare reform, and for public employees. Through the National Urban Fellowship, I researched interdisciplinary communication errors at The Bellevue Hospital Center, and during doctoral studies I trained research teams to investigate social innovation in distressed neighborhoods of New York City.

Our empirical knowledge of nonprofit advocacy lags behind other areas of nonprofit scholarship because researchers have paid little attention to distinguishing coalition advocacy from nonprofit advocacy in general. My research differentiates the two levels and evaluates nonprofit advocacy through the lens of state-level associations, illuminated by collective action theory. As nonprofit populations grow, their associations work to overcome collective action problems. One of my recent publications constructs measures for factors that predict engagement, and includes collective action variables such as the size of school populations.

Thanks very much for visiting.