Meet Our Board of Directors

Nicole M. McLaughlin (President)

Since 1986, Nicole McLaughlin has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to philanthropic organizations and the people they serve. While working for the City of Boston's Emergency Shelter Commission in the late 1980s, she served on the Board of Directors of Rosie's Place, a shelter for homeless women in Boston. At that time Ms. McLaughlin also provided relief staffing in a home for previously homeless women suffering from mental illness. Today she serves on the Board of the Plummer Home for Boys, a Massachusetts-based group home for adolescent boys offering a range of mental health clinical programs and services.

Ms. McLaughlin earned her law degree from Northeastern University and soon joined the in-house legal team of a nationally recognized women's health organization, providing both legal counsel and public policy analysis. Among her many responsibilities were the review and editing of fundraising materials, including direct mail, telephone fundraising scripts, Internet fundraising pitches and foundation proposals.

Ms. McLaughlin currently works with the law firm of Harmon, Curran, Spielberg & Eisenberg, where she provides legal and strategic advice to a wide range of progressive foundations, charitable and lobbying organizations, associations, and political action committees on federal tax law, federal election law and general legal issues. Among the clients Ms. McLaughlin has recently served are a national association of substance abuse organizations and a group advocating for publicly funded preschools.

Gail Harmon (Secretary)

Gail Harmon is a nationally recognized authority on exempt organization law, having advised in this field for over thirty years.

She is a partner with the law firm of Harmon, Curran, Spielberg & Eisenberg, LLP. As such, she provides strategic advice to a wide range of progressive foundations, charitable and lobbying organizations, associations, and political action committees on federal tax law, federal election law, and other legal issues. Ms. Harmon is a frequent speaker, writer and commentator on issues affecting the nonprofit sector and an active participant with the legal and nonprofit community in developing the law in this area. Among her publications: Being a Player, a guide to tax regulations governing lobbying by charities, co-author; Maximize Your Grassroots Power: Legal Guide to List Enhancement and Citizen Contact, co-author; E-Advocacy for Nonprofits: the Law of Lobbying and Election-related Activity on the Net; and Nonprofit Navigator, a newsletter (formerly called Tax Monthly for Exempt Organizations and Tax Monthly for Associations).

Ms. Harmon is member of the executive committee and board of directors of Population Services international. She is also a member of the board of directors of St. Mary's College of Maryland; Our Place in Washington, DC; and the DC Library Foundation. Ms. Harmon is a former president of the board of directors of the National Partnership for Women & Families.

Howard Hoople (Treasurer)

Howard Hoople has been active in non-profit management for over 30 years. Since 1998 he has been the president of Balanced Solutions, Inc., providing creative business planning, financial and operations support to non-profit organizations throughout New England. He works with clients to discover practical solutions to their planning, financial and operational problems. In this way, he helps clients improve the way they use their resources to meet their objectives.

After graduating from Dartmouth College, Mr. Hoople began his career developing program planning, evaluation, and financial control systems for Project Place, a collectively managed social service agency that operated several innovative programs in Boston’s South End. He subsequently earned an MBA at Harvard Business School, and then worked at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston as Administrative Director of the Psychiatry Department. In that role he supervised financial and administrative operations for the multiple constituencies of a teaching hospital system, including clinical care, research and teaching. He collaborated effectively with all of these constituencies to create and redesign programs and systems, while increasing revenues and cutting costs.

Mr. Hoople continues his strong commitment to non-profit organizations, bringing all of this experience to bear in his consulting practice: insight into the application of traditional for-profit techniques in a non-profit environment, a sensitivity to the complex goals non-profits often present, and a track record of having successfully managed a large, complex non-profit system. The key contribution he makes is to help clients improve their use of limited resources to achieve their long-range goals.

Rebecca Riccio (Director)

Rebecca Riccio is the founder and principal of writeCHANGE, a consulting practice dedicated to increasing the impact of mission-driven organizations. She builds her clients’ capacity to effect meaningful change by integrating their approaches to strategic planning, program design, fund development, and communications. Her clients work locally, nationally, and internationally in the areas of health and human services, humanitarian assistance, civil society, education, and culture and the arts.

Ms. Riccio shares her wide-ranging expertise in the non-profit sector with students at Northeastern University, where she was invited to design and teach a course on non-profit program design and fundraising. Under Ms. Riccio’s supervision, students work with Boston-area non-profit organizations as part of a service-learning experience that blends real-world experience with classroom theory.

With a B.A. in Soviet Studies from Wesleyan University and an M.A. from the University of Michigan in Russian and East European Studies, Ms. Riccio began her career in the non-profit sector managing a teacher training and civics education program in former Soviet bloc countries for the Council on International Educational Exchange in New York. During a nine-year tenure at SATELLIFE, a non-profit organization based in Watertown, Massachusetts, she developed, managed, and raised funds for a variety of projects promoting knowledge building and sharing among health professionals in the developing world.

Ms. Riccio serves on the Arlington (Massachusetts) Chamber of Commerce and is actively engaged in her community and children’s school. As a result of a family member’s experience with bipolar disorder, she has a deep commitment to helping other families understand and cope with mental illness.

Joseph A. Shrand, MD (Director)

Dr. Shrand is a practicing psychiatrist in the field of child and adolescent medicine. He was for many years associated with McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts (affiliated with Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital). Currently he serves as Medical Director of Pembroke Hospital in Massachusetts. There, Dr. Shrand has designed a program that focuses on Attachment and Theory of Mind, two powerful developmental constructs that intimately drive social interaction.

After receiving a BA in liberal arts from Sarah Lawrence College, Dr. Shrand studied at Harvard and Columbia to prepare for medical school, and he received his MD from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine in 1990. In 1993, he completed his residency at the Institute of Living, a mental health center connected to Hartford Hospital and affiliated with the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. Following his residency, he completed a two-year fellowship in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Training at McLean Hospital.

In the late 1990s, Dr. Shrand filled a variety of positions at McLean Hospital, including Director of Child and Adolescent Ambulatory Services, Director of Child and Family Therapy in the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Division, Assistant Child Psychiatrist, and Psychiatric Attending in the McLean Adolescent Partial Hospital.

He also served as Staff Psychiatrist in Child Psychiatry and as Child and Adolescent Psychiatry field back-up on the Emergency Service Team at Mass General and as Instructor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Before entering the field of medicine, Dr. Shrand worked as a grant-writer for CARE, Inc., winning a grant of over $340,000 to help educate children in Belize. As the father of four children, Dr. Shrand takes time to be involved with educational reform in his home town and also serves on the board of the Mohonk Charter School in Boston.

Meet our Staff and Advisory Committee.