Staff
The Nonprofit Risk Management Center is located in historic Leesburg, Virginia. Our offices are 13 miles from Washington’s Dulles Airport and 32 miles from downtown Washington, DC. Our address is: Nonprofit Risk Management Center, 15 N. King Street, Suite 203, Leesburg, VA 20176. Our telephone is: (202) 785-3891. Our fax number is: (703) 443-1990.
Melanie Lockwood Herman, Executive Director
In a world that is fraught with danger, it is comforting to know that Melanie Lockwood Herman is holding on tight to the handlebars of the Nonprofit Risk Management Center. The Center provides training, technical assistance and informational resources to help nonprofits take a practical approach to managing risk so that they can fulfill their missions and stay out of trouble.
A prolific author of a more than a dozen comprehensive (and comprehensible!) guides on various risk management topics, Melanie has delivered countless workshops, seminars, and keynote presentations for organizations simply unwilling to leave success to chance. Melanie earned a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Urban Affairs from American University (Washington, DC) and a Juris Doctor from George Mason University (Arlington, VA). She is a member of the District of Columbia Bar Association.
In August 2011 Melanie was named to the 14th annual NonProfit Times Power & Influence Top 50, a list of “the 50 most influential executives in the sector for the previous 12 months… selected for the impact they have now and for the innovative plans they are putting in place to evolve the charitable sector.” This is Melanie’s third appearance on the NPT Power & Influence Top 50: she was first recognized in 2007 and then again in 2008.
In May 2010, Melanie was appointed to serve on the Not-for-Profit Advisory Committee (NAC) of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (www.fasb.org). Information about the Committee and FASB can be found by clicking here.
A calculated risk taker, Melanie loves raw fish, scalding coffee, and riding her 2009 Buell Blast, 1964 Norton Electra or 1970 BSA Bantam motorcycles (she always wears her helmet). She also embraces risk by serving on four nonprofit boards. To be on the safe side, she recently became a certified lay speaker for the United Methodist Church.
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
- May 8, 2012—“Leading in Times of Crisis: Taking Action in the Face of Uncertainty (keynote),” American Network of Community Options and Resources (ANCOR), 2012 Conference, Washington, DC
- May 18, 2012—“Top 10 Financial Risks Facing Nonprofits Today (keynote),” NJ YMCA Finance Directors Conference, Perth Amboy, NJ
- May 22, 2012—“Nonprofit Risk Management,” Chief Financial Officers Affinity Group Meeting, National Assembly and National Health Council, Alexandria, VA
- July 9, 2012—“Fiscal Oversight and Financial Risk: A Practical Approach,” Maine Association of Non-Profits, Portland, ME
- August 9, 2012—“,” TN Valley Institute for NP Excellence, United Way's Center for Nonprofits, Chattanooga, TN
- September 12, 2012—“Practical Risk Management for Community Foundations: What You Need to Know,” 2012 Fall Conference for Community Foundations, Council on Foundations, New Orleans, LA
- October 5, 2012—“Ask the Experts-Closing General Session," Annual Association Law Symposium,” ASAE: The Center for Association Leadership, Washington, DC
- October 8, 2012—“Top 10 Risks to Nonprofits," and "Volunteer Risk Management,” Michigan Nonprofit Assiciation, Dearborn, MI
- October 23, 2012—“Enterprise Risk Management,” AICPA Not-for-Profit Executive Forum, San Francisco
SUE WEIR JONES, Office Manager
Sue joined the Center’s staff in September 2008 as our Office Manager. As our “front line” Sue is the person who greets office visitors and the nonprofit leaders who call the Center for risk management advice. With a diverse background as a business founder, owner, and sole proprietor, Sue has terrific experience in all aspects of business management, including planning, customer service, working with clients and their customers, invoicing, payroll and purchasing. We think Sue’s background is an ideal fit for an organization that seeks to inspire and support responsible risk-taking in the nonprofit sector.
As a “life-long” volunteer, Sue currently volunteers as a Board Member of Loudoun Therapeutic Riding. She also spends time volunteering with children who participate in the organization’s therapeutic riding program. Sue is a former Preschool Sunday School Director and Team Coordinator for a local church. Her volunteer service has taken her as far as Guatemala, where she volunteered at a children’s home there.
When she’s taking a break from her duties at the Center and her diverse volunteer roles, you’ll find her in rural Loudoun County hanging out at the farm with her daughter’s horse, Smart Sailena, fondly known as Grizz.
Sue enjoys practicing her horsemanship skills, working with children, cooking
and traveling. An accomplished cook, she isn’t afraid to fire up the oven to 500
degrees and prepare homemade pizza from scratch. She keeps the number of the
nearest pizza delivery outfit close at hand “just in case.”
CHRISTINA (CHRIS) CROLL, Marketing & Communications Director
As the Center’s Marketing & Communications Director, Chris is responsible for making risk management approachable and fun—a seemingly impossible task for which she is uniquely qualified! Chris has spent the past 20 years helping companies launch interactive programs and marketing campaigns. Chris started her career on Madison Avenue producing multimedia on floppy disks. It took nine separate disks to load "The Absolut Museum," the first program Chris worked on, which was an interactive virtual walk through of Absolut Vodka's artist print ads.
Then after Al Gore invented The Internet in the early 1990's, Chris was hired by large telco and cable companies to help them launch broadband programming for their high speed networks. Chris was then recruited to help IT research and advisory firm GartnerGroup (now Gartner) play in the dotcom space. Next Chris relocated to Virginia to spearhead the launch of AOL's first brand extension - AOL for Small Business, which signed up 400,000 small business subscribers in its first year. While at AOL, Chris led teams responsible for AOL's classifieds content channels (Autos, Real Estate, Jobs, Computing and Yellow Pages), which generated in excess of $100M in revenue for the company. Chris has been an invited speaker at Comdex, Symposia in Australia and for Paul Kagan conferences and she has been interviewed by CNN, "USA Today" and other national media. For the past several years, Chris has been serving as President of Croll Ventures, LLC which provides management consulting and writing services to help companies achieve greater return on investment from their marketing and social media initiatives. In her off hours, Chris writes articles and pens an advice column called "Ask Chris: What to Say When..." for a lifestyle magazine that reaches 250,000 women in the metropolitan Washington D.C. area.
Chris earned a Master's in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University and a Bachelor of Science in Television & Radio from Ithaca College. Chris has also been known to brag about earning a PhD in GSD (getting stuff done!) Chris speaks French which came in handy when she moved to Paris in early 1992 to serve as an Assistant Manager at Disneyland Paris. Chris is now learning Mandarin which will come in handy when she orders takeout. Chris lives in Leesburg with her patient husband, her even more patient Yellow Lab Maggie and her two extraordinarily impatient children, ages 5 and 7. Follow Chris on Twitter at @chriscroll or become a fan of Croll Ventures, LLC on Facebook.
Associates
The following professionals provide invaluable support that brings the Center’s mission to life. Throughout the year these dedicated team members support our publishing, software development, training and consulting programs. When you engage the services of the Center (or purchase one of our products or tools), your nonprofit benefits from the expertise and dedication of a diverse array of talented professionals.
Don Withrow
If you ask Don what he does for a living he’ll tell you he’s a Geek. Actually, he is the principal of Don Withrow Consulting, a Fairfax, VA-based firm specializing in mission critical application development. These days much of his development work is for web applications and the backend services that support those applications. Don’s expertise is an ideal fit with the mission of the Nonprofit Risk Management Center, where he serves as a key team member in all of the Center’s web application projects. Don says that the real fun in his work comes from the variety of people and challenges he finds working with his clients from the nonprofit, financial, publishing, training and legal communities.
When Don isn’t working, which is seldom, you might him find riding his Harley on the beautiful back roads of Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland. Or, you might find him at the Alexandria campus of Northern Virginia Community College teaching students how to learn to ride a motorcycle and manage the risks along the way. Don is something of an expert in motorcycle-related risks. He began riding at age 12, and although you wouldn’t know it otherwise, he claims this was “a very long time ago.”
Edward M. Mulherin, CPA, Esq.
Ed has over 30 years of experience providing audit, CFO and consulting services to a diverse group of nonprofit clients nationwide. In 1990 Ed was one of the founding members of Leonard, Mulherin & Greene, P.C., a CPA and consulting firm specializing in nonprofit clients and has been instrumental in the firm’s direction and dramatic growth over the past twenty years. In 2000, Ed conceived and founded eCratchit, a revolutionary concept for bookkeeping and accounting services. eCratchit has developed and supports a proprietary Web-portal software that allows the company the ability to perform daily bookkeeping functions for client organizations, while ensuring clients complete access to accounting records and software online. In addition, the company provides setup and cleanup services as well as CFO and Controller consulting. The company currently has over 150 (including 50 nonprofits) clients located all over the country for which they provide bookkeeping and accounting services and has 20 employees. Ed has lectured and written extensively on nonprofit finance topics and prides himself on his ability to take a practical, realistic approach to finance issues. Ed works with dozens of nonprofit Boards, helping them understand and support their missions with strong financial management. Ed has served as the Nonprofit Risk Management Center’s “Virtual CFO” for the past nine years and has also partnered with the Center on several client engagements.
When Ed is not advising clients on financial management issues, he spends as much time in Vermont as possible, trying to accomplish his personal 20/20/20 goals: challenging yourself to do something you love 60 times a year. Ed’s 20/20/20 interests are Snowboarding, Golf and Fly Fishing. Ed is a magna cum laude graduate of Boston College and is a cum laude graduate from Suffolk University Law School. He served on Intuit’s Advisory Council for QuickBooks users in 2004 & 2005
Diana Del Bel Belluz, M.A.Sc., P.Eng.
Diana Del Bel Belluz is a risk management evangelist. As a child, she wanted to become either a mathematician or a pastry chef. A true generalist, at university, she completed undergraduate and master’s degrees in systems design—the ‘artsy’ engineering program. In 1990 she landed in the risk management field and found it was the perfect opportunity to blend her analytical skills with her creative side. Ever since she’s been doing innovative risk work with clients in the corporate, government, and nonprofit sectors—helping them to make well thought-out, proactive, systematic, and bold decisions that balance risk and reward. Diana is enthusiastic about spreading the gospel of risk management because she regards it as an essential discipline for any organization with ambitions to deliver the most good it can with the resources entrusted to it.
In her spare time, Diana advances the field of risk management by organizing conferences, teaching courses and management training seminars, speaking to groups, and authoring publications on a wide range of risk management topics. Through her company Risk Wise, based in Toronto, Canada, she publishes the Risk Management Made Simple Advisory, a free online newsletter with tips on how to actually implement systematic risk management. And she’s developed into a fine cook and still bakes the occasional pastry!
Alan Strand
Alan is a nonprofit management professional who is oddly passionate about nonprofit accounting and financial management. He has provided financial training and consulting to nonprofit organizations in California and Washington State and has presented workshops and seminars across the U.S. Alan is pretty sure no one went into nonprofits because they like finance and risk management, but notes that those are the areas that can get charitable organizations into a lot of trouble. Alan has worked as a consultant and also as the Director of Finance and Quality Reporting with the California Association of Nonprofits. Alan enjoys working with organizations to get their systems in shape so they are able to focus on their missions. When not consulting with or blogging about nonprofit accounting he can be found in his wood shop, trying to keep all his fingers while making wooden toys. A more detailed bio can be found at "www.linkedin.com/in/alanstrand.
Michael Gurtler
Mike Gurtler is a risk management professional who enjoyed 25 years as a YMCA professional before forming Safe-Wise Consulting in 2007. Safe-Wise works with nonprofits all over the US helping to nurture sound safety and risk management practices. Mike subscribes to the Center’s broad but practical approach to risk management and tries to avoid being type-cast as an expert who tells people what they cannot do. Mike is a key team member in the Center’s youth-protection, aquatic safety and recreation consulting practice. According to Mike, “I think the challenge for insightful risk consulting is being able to say “Yes” in a responsible way that is acceptable to the organization and its mission.” Mike has produced a substantial body of topical resources on various risk management topics and is a capable and popular trainer and presenter.
Mike lives in Maine with his family: Michele (spouse of 17 years), Mason (son of 9 years going on 30), Bella (the dog) and Lucy (a very independent cat). The Gurtler family braves the New England winters in order to enjoy the mountains, lakes, ocean and small town community living. An avid basketball player, Mike can often be found at the local Y chasing after his errant shot attempts and setting up orange safety cones.
Joe Risser, CPCU, ARM-P
Joe Risser is a risk management consultant who presents and writes on risk management topics in the areas of special events, student interns, camps, contracts, insurance requirements and waivers. Joe's practice, Risk Management Design, is based on the California Central Coast. Recently retired from a career in higher education risk management, he consults part-time between outdoor adventures and travel. Prior to leaving the world of higher education, Joe served as Director of Risk Management at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. Joe’s expertise is invaluable in Center projects involving nonprofit and public entities with special events, facilities, workplace safety and camping exposures. Joe's professional metamorphosis from camp director to a public entity risk manager is fitting for a former Boy Scout who loves to keep people safe. Years of service in Search & Rescue operations taught him the value of preparation and the hard lesson that even with good planning, bad things can happen. Thankfully Joe took to risk management like a duck to water, and quickly learned that applying the basic tools and lessons of risk management can often keep the bad thing from happening—or at least lessen the negative impact.