Director, Postsecondary Initiative

Nevin Brown joined Achieve as director, postsecondary initiative in September 2008. In this capacity, Mr. Brown is responsible for advancing Achieve’s mission through engagement with the postsecondary community.

Before joining Achieve, Mr. Brown was president of the International Partnership for Service-Learning and Leadership (IPSL), a New York-based organization that provided academic and community service study-abroad opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students in ten nations worldwide.   Prior to moving to New York in 2003, Mr. Brown was for eleven years a principal partner with the Education Trust; he worked particularly closely with community-based school-university collaborative initiatives in a number of cities throughout the United States (through the Trust’s K-16 and Community Compacts for Student Success initiatives), directed for six years the Trust’s annual national conferences, and was the communications officer for the Quality in Undergraduate Education initiative, through which two- and four-year postsecondary institutions have developed standards for academic achievement in five core disciplines. From 1980-1991, Mr. Brown headed the Division of Urban Affairs of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC), where he worked with nearly 100 public urban universities located in most of the nation’s major metropolitan areas. While at NASULGC, Mr. Brown also directed a program of urban university-urban school collaborative initiatives in sixteen U.S. cities, with funding from the Ford and Exxon Education Foundations.

Mr. Brown also has held previous appointments with the District of Columbia Public Schools, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), the University of Houston, and the Southern Regional Council’s Southern Governmental Monitoring Project.

An historian by academic training, Brown has spent most of his professional career working in the areas of urban policy and education. Among his professional affiliations, Brown has been a member of the governing boards of the Urban Affairs Association (UAA), the National History Education Network, and the Colleges and Universities of the Anglican Communion (CUAC). He has also served as a review panelist for the National Science Foundation, Innovations in American Government Awards, and National History Day, and as a member of the editorial boards of several professional journals. He also co-chaired the European Links Committee for UAA from 1995-2003, through which he was involved in the creation of the European Urban Research Association (EURA).

Brown received a B.A. with highest honors in history from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1972 and an M.A. in history from the University of Virginia the following year. In 2001 he received the Urban Hero Award of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges.