Jeffrey L. Brudney

“A consummate mentor and a prolific researcher and publisher” – that’s how Jeffrey L. Brudney is remembered by colleagues and students around the world. Brudney started his career as a professor of Public Administration in 1979 at the University of Oklahoma. In 1984 he moved to a position at the University of Georgia – Athens where he studied volunteerism and nonprofits. There, he co-founded the Institute for Nonprofit Organizations and a new Master of Arts in Nonprofit Organizations program.

Brudney’s trademark passion and intensity soon made him a highly sought after lecturer and international colleague. In 1984 he was selected as a Fulbright Fellow to York University in Toronto, Canada. He lectured on volunteerism in France and Northern Ireland, and became a lifelong collaborator with academician Lucas Meijs of the Netherlands. 

In 1990 Brudney authored Fostering Volunteer Programs in the Public Sector: Planning, Initiating, and Managing Voluntary Activities for which he received the John Grenzebach Award for Outstanding Research in Philanthropy for Education. It describes how governments can involve citizen volunteers in providing a diverse range of public services – from neighborhood crime watch to mental health assistance. It also provides practical methods for increasing the quality and impact of government services with volunteers, and includes procedures for evaluating and improving the cost-effectiveness of these activities. This first-of-its-kind-book immediately caught the attention of Leaders of Volunteers in local, state and federal agencies who were struggling to be recognized and supported for their work. Brudney was quickly hailed as a rare “pracademic” – with one foot in the world of scholarly research and the other in practical real-world application. As such, he became a popular presenter at many Volunteer Management conferences, and partnered with the national Association of Volunteer Administration as well as the Points of Light Foundation on several studies to benefit the growth of the profession.

As an active volunteer himself, Brudney was a delegate to the Presidents’ Summit for America’s Future, a national gathering in 1997 focused on promoting volunteerism to address critical community issues. After the Summit, he continued to work on local volunteer initiatives which ultimately resulted in the creation of a Voluntary Action Center in Athens, Georgia.

Over the span of his long career, Brudney’s work includes over 300 publications and thousands of citations of that work on topics of nonprofits, public service, research methods – and the intersection of volunteering, nonprofit management and public administration. His work in mentoring students on the subject of volunteering has helped to create a new world of academics carrying on his work across the country. Those who benefited from his classes and workshops  remember him as a caring, gentle, ever-smiling thought-leader who significantly reshaped how we think about the nonprofit sector and volunteer engagement.

Brudney died in 2021.