The William T. Grant Foundation is pleased to announce four new appointments to our Board of Trustees. Olivia Golden and Melvin Oliver will join the Board during the upcoming October meetings, and Nancy Gonzales and Ken Prewitt will begin their terms in 2010.

“We are very pleased that these outstanding colleagues are joining our Board. Their wisdom, skills, and diversity bring us great strength,” said Robert C. Granger, the Foundation’s president.

Olivia Golden is currently an institute fellow at the Urban Institute, where she focuses on child and family programs, specifically service providers. In 2007, she worked with then-Governor Spitzer as director of state operations for New York. Previously, she served as director of the Child and Family Services Agency of the District of Columbia. Dr. Golden also spent eight years with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as commissioner for children, youth, and families and as assistant secretary for children and families. In these positions she oversaw scores of programs, including Head Start. Her recent book, Reforming Child Welfare (Urban Institute Press), examines the processes that lead to successful reform and is based on her experiences as an administrator and an academic. Dr. Golden earned her Ph.D. in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Melvin Oliver is the SAGE Sara Miller McCune Dean of Social Sciences and a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is an expert on racial and urban inequality and poverty. Prior to his tenure at UCSB, Dr. Oliver was vice president of the Asset Building and Community Development Program at the Ford Foundation, which is focused on reducing poverty and injustice around the world. He also spent 18 years as a faculty member at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he served as director of the Center for the Study of Urban Poverty. Dr. Oliver is co-author of Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality. He earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Washington University in St. Louis.

Nancy Gonzales is an ASU Foundation Professor of Psychology (Clinical) and co-director of the Principal Research Core at the Prevention Research Center of Arizona State University, where she has been a faculty member since 1992. Dr. Gonzales’s research focuses on the influence of culture, neighborhood, and other contextual factors on adolescent mental health, and the development of culturally sensitive prevention and promotion strategies for high risk youth. She has been involved as a mentor and committee member with the Foundation’s Scholars Selection Committee for several years, working to foster the careers of promising early-career researchers. Dr. Gonzales earned her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Washington.

Kenneth Prewitt is the Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Dr. Prewitt was previously director of the U.S. Census Bureau from 1998 until 2001. He has also served as director of the National Opinion Research Center, president of the Social Science Research Council, and senior vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation. Dr. Prewitt spent 17 years as a member of the faculty at the University of Chicago, in addition to numerous other academic positions. His work includes research on ethnoracial classification in national statistics and his published work includes Politics and Science in Census Taking (2003) and The Legitimacy of Philanthropic Foundations (2006). He earned his Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University.