New Executive Director at Bernard van Leer Foundation

The Hague, The Netherlands – 29 April 2009. The Bernard van Leer Foundation is pleased to announce Ms. Lisa Jordan as the new Executive Director as of 1 July 2009. Ms. Jordan is currently with the Ford Foundation, where she has worked since 2000. Ms. Jordan replaces Monique van ‘t Hek, who has served the Foundation since July 2008 as the interim Executive Director.

Ms. Jordan has a long and distinguished career working within civil society, foundations and governments on cross-cutting social and economic issues. She has worked for the U.S. Congress, with Members of the European Parliament and with the Japanese Diet on global environmental issues. She has previously studied and worked in the Netherlands. In her most recent role as Acting Director of the Governance and Civil Society Unit at the Ford Foundation, she was responsible for programming a budget of US$75m across ten field offices. She has degrees from the University of Michigan and the Institute for Social Studies, and has published books and articles on the topics of globalization, global civil society and NGO accountability.

The Foundation’s Board of Trustees was impressed by Ms. Jordan’s experience of working internationally and across sectors with governments and non-governmental organisations in order to improve broad social welfare. As her career has regularly involved creating the conditions for multiple parties to be engaged in public policy negotiations, she brings a wealth of experience to policy debates impacting children.

As the Foundation’s Chair Trude Maas-de Brouwer states: “We are confident that Lisa will reinforce the Foundation’s reputation as an innovative and effective agent in Early Childhood Development in both developing and industrialised countries’.

An American national, Ms Jordan is married to a Dutch national and has two children of primary school age.

For further information you can contact Jane Hartman at: jane.hartman@bvleerf.nl

See also Euforic's Bernard Van Leer Foundation newsfeed.

Euforic review of information management at Van Leer Foundation

In July 2007, Euforic submitted the reports of its review of information at the Bernard van Leer Foundation.

The report contained the finding of two studies commissioned in late 2006 and 2007. The first looked at the InfoHub, the second at the wider information management (IM) situation of the Foundation.

The review sought to understand some of the information ‘demands’ that frame why people in the Foundation seek information in the ways they do, when, how, and who from. The demand assessment revealed a complicated situation with many competing pressures on staff that directly influence their information seeking behaviours and usage.

The review also examined examples of different information uses in the Foundation, as a guide to better understanding the information sources and mechanisms that staff might have access to and actually use. These ‘cases’ showed quite different patterns of information needs according to the task at hand – grant-making, advocacy, and knowledge.

Discussions with staff also generated many general and specific insights into the information management challenges in the Foundation. These include: to find back information that should already be available; to select and filter what’s already stored; to synthesize ‘learning points’ out of various reports and reporting systems; how staff document their own ‘learning points’; learning and sharing across teams and projects in a changing organizational framework; interfacing different information management systems and services; identifying and adopting common terminology standards; and tracking external developments and events related to early childhood development.

The Bernard van Leer Foundation aims to enhance opportunities for young children (aged 0-8 years) growing up in circumstances of social and economic disadvantage, with the objective of developing their potential to the greatest extent possible. It currently supports around 280 projects in approximately 40 developing and industrialised countries. The Foundation joined Euforic in late 2006.

See also Euforic’s dossier on information, knowledge and communication

Infohub role and services the focus of Van Leer Foundation study

As part of its efforts to disseminate the rich variety of knowledge, know-how and lessons learned in its projects, the Bernard van Leer Foundation runs an ‘infohub’ as part of a wider set of information management, knowledge sharing, and learning tools.

Between November 2006 and February 2007, Euforic staff worked with the Foundation to clarify the niche and services offered by the infohub, with a view to extending its impact and more effectively engaging with staff and projects. Extensive discussions with staff reveal rather complex information and communication demands and needs and the need for a holistic view on the various tools and services available to staff.

As part of the project, Foundation staff were introduced to a range of emerging ‘social’ applications on the web – wikis, blogs, rss and so on – that could be part of a renewed infohub strategy to document and share lessons and information across the Foundation.

The Bernard van Leer Foundation aims to enhance opportunities for young children (aged 0-8 years) growing up in circumstances of social and economic disadvantage, with the objective of developing their potential to the greatest extent possible. It currently supports around 280 projects in approximately 40 developing and industrialised countries. The Foundation joined Euforic in late 2006.