The Nonprofit Quarterly’s board of directors is very pleased to announce it has selected its new editor in chief and co-president in Cynthia (“Cyndi”) Suarez, who assumed the role as of January 1st, joining co-president and publisher Joel Toner. Suarez was selected after a national search and comes with four years of strong, tested leadership in a senior editor role at NPQ.
Suarez’s work focuses on how social change occurs. She has decades of experience working in, and consulting to, nonprofit organizations, social movements, and philanthropy. She has a passion for liberatory practices and specializes in network and platform strategies. She is the author of the celebrated book The Power Manual: How to Master Complex Power Dynamics (2018), as well as numerous articles at NPQ looking at the state of racial and social justice in the sector and beyond. Before coming to NPQ, Suarez was, among other things, executive director at Northeast Action, the first regional political strategy center in the United States. Past consulting clients include the Movement for Black Lives and United We Dream.
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Board chair Chuck Bell notes that it’s in NPQ’s DNA to push dialogue beyond current restrictive analytical boundaries, and that, in Suarez, the board selected a leader who has an appetite for that kind of challenge. Toner, who has been co-president for six years, says he expects continued growth and influence for NPQ under Suarez’s editorial leadership. “We could not be more pleased to see this position go to an innovative journalist and thinker of her caliber.”
Suarez is entering her new role at the organization after a grueling year where NPQ worked overtime to cover the effects of an intensified public reckoning with racism, an increasingly stratified economy, and the many effects of the pandemic.
“This past year has proved a good point of transition,” says departing editor in chief Ruth McCambridge. “It has helped to more fully expose some of the massive potential in civil society to drive transformational change but bringing that potential into clear focus requires a grounded yet visionary curator with equal parts seasoned discernment and tenacity for truth. NPQ has always been not only independent but iconoclastic, and that sensibility along with a rare passion for advancing collective action learning is what we are getting in Cyndi.”
