The TFC was created as a hub for graduate student resources, fellowship, collaboration, and partnership—across multiple graduate schools—further promoting responsible business practices and shaping future leaders of our domestic and international communities.
Director
Owen
Mario serves as the founding Director of the Turner Family Center for Social Ventures at Vanderbilt University, a new hub that serves as a resource and thought leader for people across the university interested in combining revenue-generating businesses with social impact objectives. Most recently, he was the CEO of Emerge and founder of Contigo Financial, a socially-responsible consumer lender headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. His management experience includes finance, education and consulting in three different countries. He was a Fellow of Vanderbilt University’s Cal Turner program for Moral Leadership in the Professions and helped develop a hybrid housing-microfinance model to finance mortgage needs of people at the base of the pyramid in Central America. Mario serves on various boards including the Vanderbilt University Credit Union, ConexioÌn Americas, the Nashville Food Project, and formerly the Nashville Social Enterprise Alliance. He earned an AB from Dartmouth College and an MBA from Vanderbilt University.
Owen
Mark Cohen is a leading expert on environmental regulation and disclosure policies, as well as corporate crime and punishment. His extensive career in academia and the private and public sectors has seen him publish over 100 articles and books on a wide variety of topics, serve in several capacities within the Federal Government, and consult with major corporations. Professor Cohen’s 2001 paper with Shameek Konar – Does the Market Value Environmental Performance? – was cited as one of the 75 seminal and most influential articles in the field of Business and the Natural Environment. At Vanderbilt, Cohen teaches Corporate Strategies for Environmental, Social & Governance (ESG) Issues; Financial Analysis of ESG Data; The Future of Energy Markets in a Low Carbon Economy; Law and Business of Climate Change; and an international project course, Doing Business in Israel.
Owen
Mumin Kurtulus is associate professor of operations management at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University. He joined Vanderbilt in 2005 after getting his PhD in Operations Management from INSEAD in France.
Mumin’s research focuses on retail supply chains and explores the effectiveness of various manufacturer-retailer collaboration practices such as category management, collaborative forecasting, and direct-store delivery. His more recent research examines the implications of private labels on the retailers’ category management strategy.
Mumin currently teaches operations management classes in the MBA and Executive MBA programs at Owen. His operations management courses focus on questions related to design, management, and execution of processes in service and manufacturing organizations. Mumin has also taught the operations management class in the full time MBA program at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management.
Faculty Director
Owen
A long-time supporter and partner in the work of the TFC, Professor McCann is a celebrated teacher, mentor, and faculty member in the Owen Graduate School of Management. As faculty director, he will collaborate with center staff and student leadership to continue building the Center’s strategy for programming and learning at the intersection of social impact and business.
Professor Brian McCann is an authority in the field of strategic management. McCann has more than ten years of industry experience, including running JMD Development, Inc., a residential land development company; serving as the CFO for the Internet start-up Solve Interactive; and developing new strategic initiatives for the Dayton Development Coalition, a non-profit economic development group.
Professor McCann’s work has appeared in such leading journals as the Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Journal of Business Venturing, Journal of Management Studies, and the Journal of Management. He is also the co-author (with fellow Owen professor Luke Froeb) of the leading textbook Managerial Economics: A Problem-Solving Approach, which was originally published in 2007 by South-Western and is currently under revision for a fourth edition.
Owen
Professor Owens serves on the faculty at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management as a Professor for the Practice of Management and Innovation, and as the Evans Family Executive Director of The Wond’ry, Vanderbilt University’s center for creativity, innovation, design, and making. Specializing in strategic innovation, new product design and development, and organizational design, he is known as a dynamic speaker and is the recipient of numerous teaching awards. He provides consulting services for a wide range of clients around the world, and his work has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, London Guardian and San Jose Mercury News, as well as on NPR’s Marketplace. He has done product design work for well-known firms including Daimler Benz, Apple Computer, Dell Computer, Coleman Camping, Corning World Kitchen, Steelcase, and IDEO Product Development. He has also served as CEO of a large consumer electronics firm, Griffin Technology.
Owen
Kendall Park is an Assistant Professor at Owen Graduate School of Management and a Scholar in Residence at the Tuner Family Center. Her current scholarship focuses on for-profit social enterprises, impact measurement systems, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and strategic sustainability. She has published research on cause marketing, the determinants of ethical consumption, and the characteristics of ethical consumers. Her most recent work explores social entrepreneurship and the ways for-profit social enterprises balance their social and financial goals.
Park received her Ph.D. in Sociology at Princeton University, where she received the Dean’s Fellowship. She holds a B.A. summa cum laude in Neuroscience, Psychology, and Sociology from Vanderbilt University. She has served as a writer for Social Enterprise Alliance and an editor for the American Sociological Association’s Economic Sociology Journal.
Divinity
Joerg Rieger is the Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair of Wesleyan Studies, Distinguished Professor of Theology at Vanderbilt’s Divinity School, and the Founding Director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice. Previously, he was the Wendland-Cook Endowed Professor of Constructive Theology at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University. He received an M.Div. from the Theologische Hochschule Reutlingen, Germany, a Th.M. from Duke Divinity School, and a Ph.D. in religion and ethics from Duke University.
For more than two decades he has worked to bring together theology and the movements for justice and liberation that mark our age. His work addresses the relation of theology and public life, reflecting on the misuse of power in religion, politics, and economics. His main interest is in developments and movements that bring about change and in the positive contributions of religion and theology. His constructive work in theology draws on a wide range of historical and contemporary traditions, with a concern for manifestations of the divine in the pressures of everyday life.
Law
Lauren Rogal developed and teaches at Vanderbilt’s Turner Family Community Enterprise Clinic, in which students support nonprofit organizations and start-up entrepreneurs. Rogal began her legal career as an associate with Klamp & Associates, a D.C.-based law firm that represents nonprofits and social enterprises, where she focused on developing sustainable financing structures for community development and facilitated complex international transactions. She continued to practice of counsel with the firm from 2015 to 2017 while pursuing an LL.M. in advocacy and teaching the Social Enterprise and Nonprofit Law Clinic at Georgetown.
Her current scholarship focuses on reforming executive compensation in the nonprofit sector. Rogal is affiliated with the law school’s Social Justice, Law and Business and Law and Innovation programs. She earned her J.D. cum laude at the University of Michigan Law School, where she was a Clarence Darrow Scholar, and also holds a B.A. magna cum laude in international relations from the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a Benjamin Franklin Scholar, and an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, where she was associate editor of Perspectives Journal of International Development.
Peabody
Professor Suiter employs social and political theory as a lens through which to explore health and mental health challenges for persons returning to their communities from institutional settings, such as prison or inpatient drug rehabilitation programs. Additionally, Professor Suiter studies the way engaged learning experiences influence student learning and development, as well as the communities with which they are engaged.
Professor Suiter’s primary teaching responsibilities lie with the Community Development & Action M.Ed. program, and include Proseminar, Program Evaluation, and Community Health. Professor Suiter has worked with a number of community organizations in Nashville, the United States, and abroad, including Magdalene House, Renewal House, Project Return, and Centerstone Research Institute.
Faculty Emeritus
Owen
Cal Turner Professor of Moral Leadership Across the Professions for Vanderbilt University, Emeritus
Ph.D. Business Administration, University of North Carolina
Dr. Victor joined the Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management faculty from the Institute for Management Development International (IMD), in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he was Professor of Management and Director of the Program for Management Development. Prior to IMD, Dr. Victor was on the faculties of the University of North Carolina and the University of Nebraska. In addition to serving on the Advisory Board for the Turner Family Center for Social Ventures, Dr. Victor led the Project Pyramid program. Read more about Bart’s legacy with the Center and students in his retirement announcement here.
TFC intentionally builds relationships with businesses who are motivated to use their resources as a catalyst for the alleviation of poverty. Our partners in the local community, throughout the nation, and around the world help us increase our reach and change the status quo.