Jane Harman is President of the Harman Family Foundation and a former member of the US Congress, to which she was elected in 1992 representing California‘s 36th Congressional district. Prior to her election, Harman worked as an attorney, served as deputy secretary to the Cabinet in the Carter White House, and was special counsel to the Department of Defense. She began her career on Capitol Hill as chief counsel and staff director for the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights. A senior member of the Homeland Security Committee, Harman was a frequent critic of the administration’s post-war Iraq policy and has advocated for a post 9/11 legal framework that would inform policy on detentions, interrogations, and the surveillance of American citizens. In early 2011 she left Congress to become President and CEO of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. A graduate of Los Angeles public schools, Harman received her BA from Smith College and JD from Harvard Law School.

Barbara Harman began her career as a college English professor, landing at Wellesley College in 1977 where she wrote three books and taught literature and writing for 25 years. She became Executive Director of the Harman Family Foundation in 2000 and founded the Catalogue for Philanthropy: Greater Washington in 2003. The Catalogue annually features the best community-based nonprofits in metropolitan Washington and has helped raise over $50 million to fuel their growth. Barbara is a member of the board of the Catalogue and a Trustee of the Shakespeare Theatre Company. She received the Mayor’s Arts Award for Visionary Leadership in the Arts (with Jane Harman) and was named one of Washington’s “most powerful women” by Washingtonian Magazine in 2013, 2015, and 2017 and a Washingtonian of the Year in 2016. She enjoys living half in a bucolic suburb west of Boston and half in the busy Penn Quarter/Chinatown neighborhood of Washington, DC. A graduate of Tufts University, she received her MA and Ph.D. degrees from Brandeis University.

Laurel Dumont is a consultant for Intentional Philanthropy and serves as Director of the New York grantmaking program.  She has taught in the Newark Public Schools, founded a nonprofit focused on helping a challenged city thrive, and as Senior Director at Leadership for Educational Equity created programs to inspire and develop social entrepreneurs around educational equity. Her diverse background as a teacher, social worker, nonprofit executive, and grantmaker, has given her broad knowledge of the issues and a thoughtful and comprehensive approach to her work. Laurel earned her BA at Wesleyan University and holds MSW and JD degrees from the University of Michigan.

Nancy Swartz is Grants and Operations Manager for the Harman Family Foundation (where she has worked for over a decade) and Editor of the Catalogue for Philanthropy: Greater Washington.  Swartz began her career as Associate Producer for Special Projects and Producer at The Good Day Show at the ABC affiliate, WCVB-TV, Channel 5 in Boston from 1980 – 1986.  As General Manager for Century III Teleproductions Digital Images Division (1986 – 1990), she managed a staff of full-time and freelance broadcast designers. A partner with Katz & Company from 1990 – 1995, she worked with CBS-Inc. to customize all CBS affiliate television stations’ graphics and music. At LoConte Goldman Design, a broadcast design firm in Boston, she was Business Manager from 1995 – 2001.  A graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Swartz has been a board member of the Needham Education Foundation; the Needham Friends of Music; and the Catalogue for Philanthropy, as well as a longstanding volunteer in her community.

*Founder and former President of the Harman Family Foundation, Sidney Harman, died on April 12, 2011, less than four months short of his 93rd year. He was Founder and Chairman of Harman International Industries, a leading manufacturer of high-quality audio products for the automotive, consumer, and professional markets. A pioneer in the high-fidelity industry, his innovative “quality of working life” programs have become the standard for such programs in the American workplace. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Harman was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Aspen Institute and the Shakespeare Theatre, and Trustee Emeritus of the Carter Center.  A graduate of Baruch College of the City University of New York, he founded the Harman Writer in Residence program there.  He also held the first Judge Robert Widney Professorship in Business at the University of Southern California where he founded the  USC Sidney Harman Academy of Polymathic Study. Dr. Harman became the owner of Newsweek in the summer of 2010 and merged it with the Daily Beast several months later. He was co-author, with Daniel Yankelovich, of Starting With the People (Houghton Mifflin) and the author of Mind Your Own Business (Currency/Doubleday). Washington DC’s  Sidney Harman Hall is named in his honor.