About Me    

 

Hello and welcome to my place on the Internet.  I teach, do research and work with various communities.   My organizational home is in the  University of Delaware.  I study technology and nonprofit organizations, particularly those using the Internet for social change. This was an opportunity to combine my passion for technology with my commitment to social justice.  When I first began my research in the mid 1990s, it was a rarely explored territory. Everyone was a pioneer and everything was new.  I spent a lot of time defending myself from people who felt that this wasn't a serious topic for research.

 Then came Jessie Ventura, Howard Dean and Move On.  This is now the mainstream and advocates who don't use these techniques are rapidly being considered dinosaurs. Other areas I write and do research in are communitarian thought, criminal justice, international development, Appalachia and environmental matters. 

I was involved in social causes and politics in college, but shortly after graduating I served as a VISTA Volunteer in Birmingham, Alabama. I worked with indigent defendants in a county jail as part of a pre-trial release program. They were poor, many used drugs and many came from neighborhoods that lacked hope. I was horrified by what I saw and I knew then that I wanted to change some of those situations.

 While in graduate school, I worked for a National Center for Volunteers in Criminal Justice. I've been a practitioner, mostly in child welfare and criminal justice. I started teaching at one of The University of Virginia branch campuses in 1980 and over the last quarter of a century have had the privilege of working with a number of America's future leaders.

I went to Mars Hill College  for my undergraduate degree, did my masters at the University of Alabama and my Ph.D at the University of Tennessee.  

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