Board of Advisors

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend
Chairman, IHV Board of Advisors;
Former Lieutenant Governor, State of Maryland

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University’s School of Public Policy and a Visiting Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. She is a consultant to both national and international corporations and is writing a book about religion and politics to be published by Warners due out Spring 2006.

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend has a long history of accomplishment in the public arena. As Maryland's first woman Lt. Governor, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend was in charge of a multimillion dollar budget and had oversight of major departments including State Police, Economic Development, Transportation, and the Office of Children Youth and Families. She is known nationally for her innovative and results oriented programs such as Hot Spots, Break the Cycle, the development of Maryland’s bio-tech business, the launching of the e-readiness initiative and the establishment of one of the first state wide offices of character education .

Before being elected Lt. Governor, Mrs. Townsend served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the United States. In that role, she led the planning to put 100,000 police officers into the community and she ignited the Police Corps, a program to give college scholarships to young people who pledge to work as police officers for four years after graduating.

Prior to serving at the Department of Justice, Mrs. Townsend spent seven years as the founder and director of the Maryland Student Service Alliance. It was in this role that she led the fight to make Maryland the first state in the nation to require all high school students perform community service. Before launching that initiative, Mrs. Townsend worked as an environmental attorney both in private practice and as an Assistant Attorney General in Maryland. In addition, in 1982 she managed Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s successful re-election campaign.

Mrs. Townsend has taught foreign policy at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She has published articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Washington Monthly, among others. In the mid-eighties she founded the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award— an award whose recipients now include the Comadres of El Salvador, Adam Michnic of Poland, and Beyers Naude of South Africa.

Mrs. Townsend is Chair of the Institute for Human Virology at the University of Maryland and currently serves on the boards of directors of:

• the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation
• Center for American Progress
• Points of Light Foundation
• National Catholic Reporter
• the Institute for Women’s Policy Research
• the Character Education Partnership

She is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations and the Inter-American Dialogue. She previously served on the boards of the Export-Import Bank, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, the Wilderness Society, the Baltimore Urban League and was chair of the Robert Kennedy Memorial. An honors graduate of Harvard University, she received her law degree from the University of New Mexico where she was a member of the law review. She has received ten honorary degrees.

The eldest child of Robert and Ethel Kennedy, Lt. Governor Townsend lives in Baltimore County with her husband, David, a professor at St. John's College in Annapolis. They have four daughters, Meaghan (27), Maeve (25), Kate (21), and Kerry (13).