James Hodge

An Ohioan by birth and a graduate with his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Bowling Green State University in Ohio, Jim spent his early career at Bowling Green as director of planned giving and later as director of Development. In 1985 Jim came to Mayo Clinic where he has been a senior development officer responsible for building important relationships with Mayo’s philanthropic partners. Presently Jim is vice chair and director of the principal gifts program, which is responsible for strategic engagements with benefactors who have the capacity and inclination to make $1 million-plus gifts to Mayo Clinic.

Jim is a member of the faculty at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis, giving frequent Master’s Classes in Philanthropy, and an instructor in The Fund Raising School at IUPUI. Jim is a frequent lecturer on the topics of values-based philanthropy, transformational philanthropy, and working with entrepreneurs as philanthropists. He has served on the editorial board of New Directions for Philanthropic Fundraising published by the Center on Philanthropy and is the author of the chapter entitled “Gifts of Significance” in the publication Achieving Excellence in Fund Raising by Jossey-Bass. He consults on fund raising for Healthnetwork, His Holiness the Dalia Lama, and LiveStrong/The Lance Armstrong Foundation.

Jim was the co-founder of a multimillion-dollar for-profit business within Mayo Clinic called Mayo Clinic Preferred Response, a 24/7 service that provides nursing and medical advice worldwide to individuals and organizations such as NetJets. Among committee assignments at Mayo, he serves on the Executive Committee for the President’s Discovery and Translation Program, which makes grants to projects that have the potential to transform the practice of medicine at Mayo and have potential for commercialization. He has received the Mayo Excellence Award for outstanding service to patients and staff of Mayo Clinic, the Mae Berry Award for Service Excellence, and the Mayo Excellence Through Teamwork Award.

Gordon Johnson

Gordon Johnson has worked exclusively in the philanthropic sector in both a management and volunteer capacity since moving to Bermuda in 1992. A graduate of the University of Toronto (B.A. & MSW), Mr. Johnson holds a Certificate in Non-Profit Management from Harvard University. He is currently Chief Executive Officer of The Centre Limited overseeing The Performing Arts Centre Project. He has been a student of Appreciative Inquiry (AI) since 1996. For the last fifteen years, Gordon has been involved in the application of AI to philanthropy specifically in the area of strategic planning and development. Boards he has served on include the Governing Council of ALIA and the Board of Directors The Centre on Philanthropy in Bermuda, among others.

Tiffany Paynter

While teaching creative writing and spoken word performance at highschools, colleges and non-profit organizations Tiffany has been able to collaborate with dancers, models, students, musicians, teachers, authors and lawyers in an effort to help each come into contact with their own internal truths. Tiffany believes that poetry teaches us to respect and engage with our intrinsic wisdom and that each connection we make to that source of our being transforms us.

If you asked her if poetry is really transformative?…necessary?…relevant?, Tiffany would probably reply that everything transformative, necessary and relevant is poetic. Through teaching, performing and writing Tiffany has come to know what the late poet, author and humanist Audre Lorde knew, that “Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change…”

Out of the belief that the words we choose are the lives we lead and the worlds we build Tiffany looks forward to working with anyone interested in wielding their words and thus shaping our world in a more intentional way.