Al has been working with nonprofit organizations since 1982, as a staff member, executive, board leader, and consultant. Al “has been there” – raising funds, dealing with donors, balancing budgets, recruiting the right people, and making difficult strategic decisions.
Al brings a smart perspective. He is analytical, thoughtful, and engaging. He takes pride in his reputation as a good listener, and he uses humor to help clients get through difficult moments. Al is driven to help his clients be successful, and to have fun doing it.
Al meanwhile has built a national following on issues affecting the nonprofit sector. Al is a popular keynote speaker at nonprofit conferences and a frequent contributor to the opinion pages of the leading nonprofit journals. He has been cited on nonprofit issues in publications from the New York Times to Vanity Fair to The Atlantic, and he maintains a popular blog on this website.
Al is a 1980 graduate of Harvard University, where he met his wife Pat, now a professor emerita and retired associate provost at Plymouth State University. Al and Pat make their home in Concord, New Hampshire. They have a son in Brooklyn and a daughter in the Boston area, as well as two unbelievably adorable grandsons.
In his personal time Al is an avid reader, especially of history. In warm weather, he is an enthusiastic bicyclist, while in the winter he can be found doing pull-ups at the 6 a.m. boot camp at his local Y. In his 50s, he gained the distinction of joining the “4,000-Footer Club,” meaning that he successfully scaled all forty-eight 4,000-foot-high New Hampshire mountains — and he lived to tell about it, barely. And in 2024 he was named to the “NH 200” list of most influential business leaders in the state.
And many summer evenings will find him in Section 32 at Fenway Park, cheering on his Boston Red Sox. (Sometimes they win; sometimes they lose; sometimes it rains.)