Frances Hesselbein is the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management, and served as its founding President and Chief Executive Officer from 1990-2000. Mrs. Hesselbein was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States of America’s highest civilian honor, in 1998. The award recognized her leadership as Chief Executive Officer of Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. from 1976-1990 as well as her role as the Founding President of the Drucker Foundation.

Her contributions were also recognized by former President Bush, who appointed her to two Presidential Commissions on national and community service. She serves on many nonprofit and private sector corporate boards, including the Board of the Mutual of America Life Insurance Company, New York and is the Chairman of the Board of Volunteers of America. She is the recipient of sixteen honorary doctoral degrees.

In 2001 Mrs. Hesselbein was awarded the Henry A. Rosso Medal for lifetime achievement in ethical fund raising from the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University and the International ATHENA Award.

In 2002 Mrs. Hesselbein was the first recipient of the Dwight D. Eisenhower National Security Series Award for her service with the U.S. Army. Mrs. Hesselbein is Editor-in-Chief of the quarterly journal Leader to Leader, and a co-editor of a book of the same name. She also is a co-editor of the Drucker Foundation’s three-volume Future Series and Leading Beyond the Walls, and Leading for Innovation, Organizing for Results, the first two books in the Foundation’s Wisdom to Action Series.

Mrs. Hesselbein was featured in a 2001 Special Issue of the Harvard Business Review as a member of a leadership roundtable of six leaders in an article entitled "All in a Days Work". She is the author of Hesselbein on Leadership, published in August of 2002.

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