Howard Husock

Howard Husock is vice president for policy research at the Manhattan Institute, where he is also director of its Social Entrepreneurship Initiative and a contributing editor to the Institute's quarterly magazine, City Journal. He is the author of the blog Philanthropy and Society on Forbes.com and author of the book Philanthropy Under Fire.

Husock was nominated for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Board of Directors by President Barack Obama in June 2013 and confirmed by the Senate in August 2013. From 1987 through 2006, Husock served as director of case studies in public policy and management at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, where he was also a fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations. His publications on the nonprofit sector have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, National Affairs, Society Magazine, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, The Public Interest, The New York Times, and the Washington Post. In addition, Husock has written widely on housing and urban policy, including in his book, The Trillion-Dollar Housing Mistake: The Failure of American Housing Policy (Ivan R. Dee, 2003) and his monograph Repairing the Ladder: Toward a New Housing Policy Paradigm (Reason Foundation, 1996). His work has also appeared in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Philanthropy, and The Wilson Quarterly. Husock is a former broadcast journalist and documentary filmmaker whose work at WGBH-TV in Boston won three Emmy awards.

His WGBH series Community Disorder: Racial Violence in Boston (1979) won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism award for television. His WGBH credits include The Paterson Project: One City in the Reagan Era (1982); Pat Ewing and an American Dream (1981); Meet Tom Menino (1983); The World Halfball Tournament (1983) and America’s First School: 350 Years at Boston Latin (1984).

Husock is a graduate of the Boston University School of Public Communication and was a 1981-82 mid-career fellow at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is married to ceramic sculptor Robin Henschel and the father of three adult sons. He currently resides with his wife in New York.

In Philanthropy Under Fire (ISBN 978-1594037382) Husock defends the American tradition of independent philanthropy from significant political and intellectual challenges which threaten it today. Although the U.S. continues to be the most charitable nation in the world, serious efforts seek to discourage traditional, personal charitable giving by changing the tax code, and directing philanthropy toward causes chosen by government. Some voices seek to narrow the very definition of philanthropy to include only direct redistribution of income from rich to poor. In contrast, Husock broadly defends philanthropy’s causes—from the food pantry to the art museum to the university science lab—as both a source of effective new ideas and as a core aspect of democracy and liberty. In a new and original argument, he asserts that having broad impact does not require a marriage of philanthropy and government. Instead, he says, private programs growing out of the values held by their leaders—and imbued with those values—can have a wide impact through their influence on society’s norms. In this sense, the good that private philanthropy does for American society can far transcend the good that it does for its immediate recipients.