Jon Van Til

Jon Van Til is one of the pioneers in nonprofit organization research and education and the third sector, with particular interests in voluntary action, civil society and theories of the third sector. Dr. Van Til is Professor Emeritus of Urban Studies and Community Planning at Rutgers University, Camden. He was born in 1939 in Columbus OH to Professor William Van Til and Beatrice (Blaha) Van Til. He is married to Agnes Kover-Van Til; and has two children from an earlier marriage: Ross Van Til of Louisville, Colorado and Claire Van Til of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Van Til received a BA (High Honors; Phi Beta Kappa) from Swarthmore College in Political Science in 1961 and an MA in Sociology from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1963. He earned a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1970. His dissertation title is “Becoming Participants: Dynamics of Access Among the Welfare Poor”. (Robert Blauner, advisor)

Recent Work

His recent writings on social movements in Hungary are reported in two co-edited books and in contributed articles in the Huffington Post. Van Til divides his time between homes in Louisville, Colorado and Budapest. He is married to Agnes Kover, the Hungarian human rights lawyer and sociologist. Van Til is the past director of the Pennsylvania Law and Justice Institute (1972–1974), and served as Editor-in-Chief of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly from 1989-1992 (formerly the Journal of Voluntary Action Research from 1978 through 1989. He was twice elected President of the Association of Voluntary Action Scholars, and is the founding Board Chair of the Center for Nonprofit Corporations (Trenton, New Jersey). Van Til has also served as a Trustee of the George H. Gallup International Institute. Among the national clients of Van Til's consulting in the area of voluntary and nonprofit action have been the National Service Secretariat, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Health Visions Inc., the University of Colorado, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. In 1991 he was recognized as "Creative Teacher of the Year" at Rutgers for developing his campus' program in Citizenship and Service Education. In 1994, he received the Career Award for Distinguished Research and Service from the Association for Research in Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action. Van Til was named Fulbright Distinguished Professor at the University of Ulster during the Spring term, 2004, serving in the Magee College’s INCORE and Centre for Voluntary Action Studies. In the academic year 2005–6 he served as Fulbright Senior Specialist at INCORE. Van Til served as Fulbright Specialist to Hungary's ELTE University for the academic year 2010–11, at the Budapest University of Jewish Studies in 2014, and at Marmara University In Istanbul in 2019. He continues to serve as an active pracademic in the Budapest community. Van Til also served as President of the Philadelphia/Delaware Valley Chapter of the Fulbright Association, and as Anna Deane Carlson Distinguished Visiting Chair in Social Science at West Virginia University from 2003–05. His biography has been included in Who's Who in America after 2006.