Susan Raymond

Susan Raymond, Ph.D. is Executive Vice President for Research and Analysis for Changing Our World. In February of 2011, Women United in Philanthropy honored Susan with the Women in Excellence and Achievement Award. In September 2014, she was honored in Washington, D.C. with the Patty and John Noel Humanitarian Award.

At Changing Our World, Dr. Raymond is responsible for designing and conducting business operating environment research for both nonprofits and foundations, as well as developing business plans and program evaluations for new and existing institutions. Some of Susan’s clients have included The National 4-H Council, The Salvation Army, The US Fund for UNICEF, and St. John’s University.

Susan has extensive experience in research, analysis and planning. At the New York Academy of Sciences, she created the first technology and public policy program, and then became Director of Strategic Planning and Special Projects. Prior to that, Susan was a project officer at the World Bank and a senior consultant to the U.S. Agency for International Development and to various private organizations including the Carnegie Corporation, specializing in healthcare and international economic research. She has led the formation of private foundations in Poland, Croatia, and Hungary and written business plans for foundations in India and Thailand. Under her leadership and during the political transition, Friends of Litewska Hospital became one of the first and most successful private philanthropies in Warsaw, Poland.

During 2005 through 2007, Susan was the Foreign Policy and Research Advisor to the bipartisan Congressional Commission studying the effectiveness of public and private foreign assistance, the Helping to Enhance the Livelihood of People Commission. Susan is a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Global Prosperity in Washington, D.C., a Faculty Lecturer at the Institute of Human Nutrition at Columbia University, and a member of the Advisory Boards of The Global Index of Philanthropic Freedom and America’s Unofficial Ambassadors. In 2012, the Director of the National Science Foundation appointed her to the Board of the U.S. Civilian Research and Development Foundation. In 2014, she was appointed by the National Academy of Sciences to an organizing committee for a national survey of research and development in the nonprofit sector.

Susan is an established author. Her fourth book, Recession Recovery and Renewal: Nonprofit Strategy During Rapid Economic Change, was published in April 2013. She has written scores of whitepapers on subjects ranging from public finance and the future of the nonprofit sector to Catholic philanthropy and private education fundraising. Her original research papers and a variety of other original studies are available at www.changingourworld.com/resource.

She is also the author of Nonprofit Finance For Hard Times: Leadership Strategies When Economies Falter, which was published in the fall of 2009 by Wiley and Sons, as well as Mapping the New World of American Philanthropy and The Future of Philanthropy: Economics, Ethics, and Management, published by Wiley and Sons in 2007 and 2004 respectively. She has published extensively in the areas of philanthropy, economics, health care and corporate responsibility in such journals as Foreign Affairs, Development Economic Reform Today, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Journal of Healthcare Administration Education, and Technological Forecasting and Social Change. Susan is also a Project Team member of the Macroeconomics of Cardiovascular Disease project of the Center for Macroeconomics and Health of the Earth Institute at Columbia University under Jeffrey Sachs. She is co-author of A Race Against Time: The Challenge of Cardiovascular Disease in Developing Economies. The report was covered in, among others, the Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine Asia, New England Journal of Medicine, and British Medical Journal.

She is a regular international conference speaker on the future role of philanthropy in economic growth and civil society. Susan earned her BA Phi Beta Kappa from Macalester College and her MA and Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in a joint program with the School of Hygiene and Public Health. She is an elected a member of Pi Sigma Alpha and the Cosmos Club. She has worked on philanthropy and economic development projects throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, as well as in Russia and Asia.