Dr. Carol A. Kolmerten

Dr. Kolmerten, a founding partner of Charitable Development Consulting, was a tenured full professor of English at Hood College for 39 years. She also served as Assistant to the Dean of Academic Affairs, Director of the Honors Program, Academic Grants Writer, and Director of Major Gifts and Planned Giving.

As the Director of Major Gifts and Planned Giving at Hood from 1999-2002, Dr. Kolmerten designed the structure for all major gifts activities. One of her most important responsibilities was to work with major donors to increase their giving by helping them design innovative blended gifts.  Dr. Kolmerten also has directed a number of campaigns including campaigns to match federal grants (NEH, NSF) and campaigns to renovate historic buildings.

As a knowledgeable consultant, Dr. Kolmerten has advised presidents, CEOs, and boards of trustees from a variety of nonprofit groups. She has performed planned giving and major gifts audits, conducted feasibility studies, and served as campaign counsel. She has designed and taught a variety of interactive workshops on such topics as “Five Easy Ways to Give a Legacy Gift” and “Development for Deans.” Dr. Kolmerten has been an invited speaker at a variety of fundraising conferences including NCPG (now CGP), ACGA, the Chesapeake Planned Giving Council, and Planned Giving Days in Washington, D.C. She has served as faculty for several CASE conferences, for Pentera Advanced Planned Giving seminars, for AACU pre-conference workshops on fundraising, and has written numerous articles for Planned Giving Today and for the Journal of Gift Planning.

Dr. Kolmerten is also an active scholar. She has given over 200 talks at academic conferences, including keynote speeches in such places at Recife, Brazil and Rome, Italy. She has published five scholarly books and over 75 articles; one of her books, Women in Utopia: The Ideology of Gender in the American Owenite Communities (Indiana University Press), was recognized by Phi Beta Kappa as one of the 22 best books of 1990. Her biography of women’s rights activist Ernestine Rose has been said to “revise the history of the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement in America.” Her book on Toni Morrison and William Faulkner received an award from the Toni Morrison Society in 1996. Four of her full-page essays in the Chronicle of Higher Education generated hundreds of e-mails in the months they were published.

Dr. Kolmerten, who received her BA in English from the University of Louisville and her Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue University, has received numerous teaching awards and research grants.