Georgetown appointed James Allen Smith as the first Nielsen Chair in Philanthropy, the Georgetown Public Policy Institute announced. Smith will serve as the chair for one year beginning Aug. 1, 2003.

The Nielsen Chair is part of the Center for the Study of Voluntary Organizations and Service, which is one of the four research centers of GPPI.

The Ewing Marion Kauffman Faundation of Kansas City, Mo., granted $3 million to GPPI to establish the chair in 2000. The same foundation has also sponsored the seminar series over the past two years. Smith said the seminar series would not continue.

Smith said he spent most of his career in one sector of the “Philanthropic universe,” foundations. The Twentieth Century Fund, which he worked early in his career led [him] to write three books about public policy think-tanks.

Later in his career, Smith worked in the Howard Gilman Foundation in New York. According to the press release, “he helped found the Center for Arts and Culture, a Washington based cultural policy center, and the Creative Capital Foundation, a fund established to support individual artists.” The foundation was not only interested in arts and culture, but it was also interested in environmental conservation and public health programs. “We did very early founding in the HIV/AIDS epidemic,” Smith said.

Smith is currently serving as the advisor to the President of the J. Paul Getty Trust based in Los Angeles, Calif. “Getty is primarily known for the large museum that it has in Los Angeles. But we also run conservation and preservation programs for cultural artifacts, buildings [and] historic sites,” he said.

Smith said he saw his appointment as the Nielsen Chair in Philanthropy as “an opportunity to step back from the day-to-day work in a foundation to teach, to reflect with students about the role of these important institutions in American society.”

Smith said he will be teaching in GPPI, and working on a book about the “the relationship between foundations and public policy making processes.” According to Smith, the purpose of the chair is to provide more consistent teaching on philanthropy.

“[The foundations] have demonstrated that they have an impact on our public policy making processes,” Smith said. According to Smith, foundations have different tools for influencing policy. They fund basic social sciences research, applied research or mass advocacy, he said. He also added that there are debates within the foundations about “the best tools for influencing the policy” and outside the foundations about “what the proper role of these endowed institutions in a democratic society might be.”

Smith met Waldemar A. Nielsen while he was a college student. At the time, Nielsen had already served as the vice president at the Ford Foundation, and he was the President of the African-American Institute. “I thought he had just had the most interesting and exciting career possible,” Smith said.

Nielsen was working on his book called “The Big Foundations” when Smith met him. Smith described the book as “one of the first attempts to study the role of foundations in American society.” Smith said he thought it was “quite fitting that [he] could come here to continue the kind of research that [Nielsen] inspired him to think about doing.”

Smith is quite excited about the coming year. “[It is a] wonderful coincidence. three decades later to occupy a chair that honors [Nielsen]. .[I] hope that I can contribute to the students who may be interested in philanthropic sector in the same way that Waldemar Nielsen contributed to my career,” he said.