Students interested in philanthropy have a home at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS).

“The primary goal of the Center is to nurture and support some very basic research on civil society and the role of civil society in addressing pressing social problems,” said PACS Faculty co-Director Debra Meyerson, an associate professor at the School of Education. “Within that, we are looking at the role of philanthropy as an important civil society institution.”

PACS, which opened in September 2006, is a program of the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS). Since its inception, the Center has been located in the Haas Center for Public Service. Unlike other centers, PACS is not located in a specific school because its research covers a broad spectrum of disciplines.

Discussions over the Center’s establishment started about two and a half years ago.

“Because of the recent rise in interest in philanthropy around the country and around the world there was talk about developing more research on it,” said PACS Managing Director Malka Kopell. “There have been other research centers in other academic institutions, but none at Stanford.”

To fulfill its goal of examining civil society institutions’ roles, PACS offers fellowships, seminars, courses and workshops to further research and help train future scholars interested in the field.

“We have workshops where they can share their work and work through their ideas,” Meyerson said. “Students from across campus can come together as a community.”

Workshops and seminars such as these have helped Hilary Schaffer, a PACS fellow and Ph.D. candidate in the School of Earth Sciences, develop her project.

“Because I spend a lot of time in the field and a lot of time interviewing people in the trenches,” Schaffer said, “it helps to come back to this community of scholars and connect those ideas with academic and theoretical literatures so that they can be applied to a broader field.”

Schaffer’s project examines the effects of community support or opposition on proposals for liquified natural gas terminals, which prepare gases for use with home appliances. Threatened by pollution problems and unwanted changes, communities may rally together to deny a company’s construction proposal.

“There have been nine proposals in California,” Schaffer said. “I’m comparing three and seeing how the community responded to it in opposition or support. In many ways the companies that are proposing are competing to get through regulations because the market only supports one or two terminals.”

After growing up near a national laboratory in a town with a legacy of waste management problems, Schaffer found this topic to be a natural choice.

Yet, graduate students such as Schaffer are not the only ones welcome at PACS. Faculty and undergraduate students may take advantage of the center’s many resources, as well. However, according to Kopell, undergraduates have not yet utilized the Center as much as graduate students.

“We are interested in hearing from undergraduates as to how we can better support their interest in philanthropy and civil society and their works in those areas,” Kopell said.