Rate My Professor Erica Barnhart

Erica Barnhart serves as Associate Teaching Professor and Executive MPA Program Director at the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy & Governance, University of Washington. An alumna of the institution, she earned her Master of Public Administration from the Evans School in 2001, a Bachelor’s degree with honors in French and Political Science from the University of Washington, and a Certificat d’Études Politique from L’Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris. Her career encompasses roles in legal support, higher education administration, program evaluation, nonprofit leadership, and consulting. Immediately after her undergraduate studies, Barnhart founded a contract paralegal company that supported lawyers focused on immigration and refugee law. She subsequently served as Associate Director of Commerce Undergraduate Programs at the University of British Columbia, overseeing the largest undergraduate commerce program in Canada. During her MPA studies, she worked with Professors Andy and Margot Gordon on the evaluation of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s libraries program.

After graduate school, Barnhart became Director of Development & Communications at NPower, a social enterprise providing technology training to nonprofits, expanding it from a local organization to a national network with twelve affiliates, which later became part of 501 Commons. As a consultant, she has worked with and trained hundreds of organizations, including Art with Heart, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Cloud Mountain Farm Center, Mission Aviation Fellowship, PATH, Splash, Thrive Washington, and the UN Foundation. Barnhart is recognized for her work on using language to increase organizational and individual impact. Her Stanford Social Innovation Review article, “Good mission. Bad statement: why the social sector should worry about words,” was one of SSIR’s top 10 articles of 2016. She began teaching in the University of Washington’s Certificate in Nonprofit Management in 2008 and added “Marketing for Mission-Driven Organizations” to the MPA program in 2012. She has also taught marketing in Seattle University’s MNPL program and guest lectured on branding and social innovation at the University of Chicago. Her expertise spans nonprofit management and philanthropy as well as public leadership, management, and decision-making.