THE BURD GROUP
Strategic Solutions for Change
ABOUT US
Nancy Burd, President
For over two decades, Nancy Burd has been a leader, practitioner and advisor in the nonprofit and philanthropic communities. Prior to founding The Burd Group, she was recruited to The Philadelphia Foundation to reinvent its philanthropic strategy. As Foundation Vice President, Burd developed and implemented that region's only general operating support and capacity building grantmaking program, establishing the Foundation as a leader and convener on critical sector issues. Previously, she was the founding Director of Philadelphia's Nonprofit Finance Fund, where she guided its explosive growth and geographic expansion and invested nearly $50 million in loans and grants to area nonprofits. She advised foundations on strategic and effective philanthropy, and guided nonprofits through growth and change in visual and performing arts, community development, capacity building, leadership development, social entrepreneurship, nonprofit finance and management, governance and operations.
Nancy Burd has presented at seminars on effective grantmaking for philanthropists and foundations, capital planning, business planning, endowment and governance issues. Burd has been a featured speaker at the Yale School of Management Philanthropy Conference, Harvard Business School's Social Enterprise Initiative, the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business and Fels Institute of Government. She is an Adjunct Professor at the Fels Institute, a graduate program in government and public policy of the University of Pennsylvania, teaching Nonprofit and Foundation Management. Burd has authored or co-authored several papers on general operating support, and capacity building, and led studies on arts policy and development. Her strategic planning accomplishments have been featured in publications of the Center for Effective Philanthropy and Grantmakers for Effective Organizations. Burd holds a Master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania.
Cathy M. Weiss, Senior Consultant
With more than twenty years of experience in the public and philanthropic sectors, Cathy Weiss's portfolio includes strategic planning, organizational and resouce development and program management, with a particular emphasis on family and private philanthropy.
Weiss served as the first non-family Director of the Claneil Foundation, a 40-year old family foundation, guiding efforts to expand its scope, professionalize its operations, revise its governance structure, create strategic and investment policy plans, introduce non-family board members and expand third generation participation. She previously served as the Program Officer of the Rockefeller Family Fund, and as a Senior Program Officer of the William Penn Foundation. Weiss came to the philanthropic sector after a distinguished career in government, serving in the administrations of Philadelphia Mayor W. Wilson Goode, and New York Mayor Ed Koch. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree with Honors from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, with additional course work completed at London University.
