Allison Russell

Allison Russell serves as Assistant Professor in the Public and Nonprofit Management Program at the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences, University of Texas at Dallas, a position held since 2021. Previously, she was Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Social Impact Strategy and Instructor in the MS in Nonprofit Leadership program at the University of Pennsylvania (2019–2021).

Her academic credentials include:

• Ph.D. in Social Welfare from the University of Pennsylvania
• Master of Public Administration from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington
• B.A. in Latin American and Latino Studies from Fordham University

Dr. Russell's research critically examines nonprofit management, volunteering dynamics, and ethical decision-making through frameworks of organizational behavior and social innovation. Her work investigates volunteer retirement transitions among aging populations, the 'NGO halo effect' where moral identity paradoxically enables unethical conduct, and nonprofit responses to social movements during crises like the pandemic. Methodologically, she employs experimental designs and longitudinal analyses to uncover practical insights for sector management.

Her recent publications (2022–2025) reveal three dominant trajectories: (1) volunteering psychology in aging populations, (2) ethical paradoxes in nonprofit governance, and (3) crisis-responsive organizational adaptation. These studies—published in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Nonprofit Policy Forum, and Nonprofit Management & Leadership—demonstrate how autonomous volunteering affects well-being, how social movements reshape public trust, and how mutual aid models can transform traditional nonprofit service delivery during emergencies.

Her expertise has been featured in Real Simple magazine discussing holiday volunteering patterns, and she developed a three-stage model for managing volunteer retirement transitions that enhances older adults' well-being while preserving organizational capacity.