Tom Burns Chestertown, MD

Tom Burns is an organizational and systems planning consultant to public, non-profit and philanthropic organizations. His expertise is in organizational design and development, strategic management, nonprofit governance, and multi-organizational partnerships. Burns found his way into organizational development work after pursuing undergraduate and graduate studies in architecture and urban planning. After receiving his Ph.D. in organizational behavior and management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, he joined the Wharton faculty, teaching graduate courses in organizational behavior and strategic planning for ten years. While at Penn he was also a senior staff member of the Management and Behavioral Science Center and a Group Director at the Fels Center of Government. He left the academic world to found the OMG Center for Collaborative Learning, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit with a national practice in evaluation and applied research. While at OMG he directed more than a dozen large-scale multi-year evaluations of innovative urban and community revitalization programs. Following his years at OMG he created the Urban Ventures Group in 2003. Urban Ventures is an urban-focused consulting firm offering strategic organizational planning and program development assistance to national and local funders, nonprofits and partnerships.