Jack L. Harris

Main Content

Biography

Jack L. Harris is an Assistant Teaching Professor and Program Director in Sustainability in the Department of Human Ecology. Before coming to Rutgers, Jack was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where he also served as an interim internship director during the program’s transition. Jack has also worked at SUNY New Paltz as an Assistant Professor where he was selected as a Sustainability Faculty Fellow, and a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Faculty Fellow. At SUNY New Paltz, In addition to teaching and advising, Jack developed new courses and led the transition of the public relations concentration into a broader strategic communications concentration providing broader opportunities for students interested in the field.

Jack started his academic career at Northwestern’s Network for Nonprofit and Social Impact (NNSI) where he helped lead one of the largest community network analysis projects to date while the Principal Investigator was on sabbatical, taught the core PhD core course in Responsible Conduct of Research in the School of Communication, and Nonprofit Management in the Executive M.A. program. Before making a mid-career transition to academia, he worked in strategy consulting, technology research, and financial services across a range of industries and worked on strategic communication and board governance projects in the nonprofit sector.

Jack is the author of Hyperlocal Organizing: Collaborating for Recovery over Time which explores the critical role of local knowledge and organizing and the diverse community networks needed to solve complex problems of long-term recovery and similar community challenges. The book uses eight years of field research to explore long-term recovery in the Mid-Atlantic United States following Hurricane Sandy.

Current research explores the role of community networks and multi-stakeholder engagement in increasing community economic and social well-being with a particular interest in the role of grassroots and hyperlocal organizations in these collaborations. Current projects focus on food systems in urban coastal communities in the Mid-Atlantic United States.