THE AUTHORS

Robert D. Putnam is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard, where he teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses. In addition to teaching, Professor Putnam is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the British Academy, and past president of the American Political Science Association. In 2006, Putnam received the Skytte Prize, the world’s highest accolade for a political scientist, and in 2012, he received the National Humanities Medal, the nation’s highest honor for contributions to the humanities.  Raised in a small town in the Midwest and educated at Swarthmore, Oxford, and Yale, he has served as Dean of the Kennedy School of Government. The London Sunday Times has called him “the most influential academic in the world today.”

He has written fourteen books, translated into twenty languages, including the best-selling Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, and more recently Better Together: Restoring the American Community, a study of promising new forms of social connectedness. His previous book, Making Democracy Work, was praised by the Economist as “a great work of social science, worthy to rank alongside de Tocqueville, Pareto and Weber.” Both Making Democracy Work and Bowling Alone are among the most cited publications in the social sciences worldwide in the last half century.

Lewis M. Feldstein was the longtime President of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation. (NHCF) www.nhcf.org NHCF is New Hampshire’s statewide community foundation, a powerful force for change and the principal source of venture capital for the state’s nonprofit community. NHCF finished 2002 with $214 million in assets and received $25.4 million in gifts.Feldstein worked with the civil rights movement in Mississippi and served for seven years in senior staff positions to New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay. Prior to coming to NHCF, Feldstein served as Provost of the Antioch/New England Graduate School. He is a graduate of Brown University and holds a Master’s in Law and Diplomacy from Tufts University. Among his singular achievements were seven-year tenure as the MC of the International Zucchini Festival, and a stint as wine steward and personal assistant to John Wayne on his yacht in the Mediterranean. Feldstein serves on the Boards of Directors of the Independent Sector and the National Center for Family Philanthropy. He Co-Chaired the Harvard University three year Executive Seminar Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America. He has received six Honorary Doctorates. Feldstein was selected as one of the 100 people Who Shaped New Hampshire by the Concord Monitor, and one of the ten most influential people in New Hampshire by Business NH Magazine in 2001. He lives in Hancock, New Hampshire.