Andrew Swanson

Andrew Swanson was born in Providence RI. He graduated from Brown University with a BA in Music, 1950. He spent two summers at the Boston Symphony's Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood. Over the years he has served on 36 boards mostly nonprofits. He was president of six and held other various offices in others. He served in the US Army Field Artillery for a year and one half in 1946-47. He moved to Tucson in 1994.

Andrew Swanson spent the last twenty-seven years of his career as a consultant to nonprofit boards of directors throughout the United States and Canada. He was the first consultant to devote full time to this activity and it involved him in a wide variety of fields of service. His work involved training workshops, strategic planning, leadership training, board/staff relations and assisting clients in funding proposal preparation. During this time he authored four books, three monographs, two manual systems and 175 essays called “Board Sense – Common Sense for Nonprofit Board Members”. During its last two years Board Sense was available only by free subscription on the Internet and had over 800 subscribers world wide. All of these were related to his work.

Since retiring from consulting he has turned to writing novels. “The Grantor” is his first work of fiction, some of which is drawn from his experience with nonprofit boards. A second short novel, “Nancy and I” was published in October of 2009. He is currently working on three other novels in various stages of preparation. Two of these will probably be grouped with a third (as yet to be written) into a single volume.

In his writing he generally stays within subjects or topics he knows something about in detail from his vocations, hobbies and interests. These include but are not limited to social work, construction, music (classical and pre bebop jazz), sports cars, F1 racing, astronomy, photography, mentoring young people, mountaineering, skiing (participation in these latter two sports has been curtailed by loss of right side balance nerve due to surgery), community affairs and others.

He married his wife, Shirley, in 1953. They have two children and three grand children. All things considered he has been blessed with a happy, interesting and useful life