James Mandiberg

I had a 17 year career as an executive manager of nonprofit and public social services in NY and California, including as the Director of Community Mental Health Services for Santa Clara County (“Silicon Valley”), where I first began developing social enterprises.  In 1991 I began an academic career teaching social work in Japan, moved back to the US to complete a joint PhD in Organizational Psychology and Social Work where I researched the dissemination of non-conforming (“out-of-paradigm”) innovations to try and understand why some effective social enterprises fail to survive.  I have held academic positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Columbia University, and Hunter College in the U.S., and at Shikoku Gakuin University and visiting position at Sophia University and Rikkyo University in Japan.  Most of my work focuses on highly excluded and stigmatized populations, such as people with serious mental health conditions, people with histories of homelessness, and very low income communities.  I regard each of these populations as non-geographic “identity communities,” and I utilize community development approaches based upon concepts of mutual aid to build economic infrastructure within these communities so that they can become more self-sustaining.