June 11, 2026
Tara Kolar Bryan did not set out to become a professor.
She started her career in nonprofit fundraising, working in corporate and foundation giving. At the time, her focus was on building relationships, securing resources, and keeping mission-driven work on track. However, the deeper she worked in that space, the more questions surfaced.
“I was asking these bigger questions about management and leadership,” she recalls. “My boss at the time told me, ‘You’re not going to get the answers to those questions here. Have you thought about going back to school?’”
Bryan had not considered returning to the classroom. She had no clear academic path in mind, no long-term plan to pivot into higher education. She found a nearby PhD program, enrolled, and slowly realized she was not just studying public affairs and nonprofit organizations, she was stepping into a new professional identity as a researcher and scholar.
Today, Bryan is an associate professor and director of the Master of Public Administration programs at the Baker School. Her work sits at the intersection of nonprofit leadership, public management, and what she calls “pracademic” inquiry, a blend of practice and academic research grounded in real-world experience of public affairs practitioners.
That orientation shapes everything she does. Rather than starting with abstract theory, her research often begins in conversation.
“I get a lot of my ideas from practitioners,” she says. “Someone will say, ‘I’m sure there’s research on this,’ and I’m thinking, I’m not sure there is. So I’ll start there.”
She examines how non-profit organizations respond to pressure, adapt to constraints, and collaborate across sectors. This orientation consistently draws her toward questions grounded in practice – questions that illuminate not only how organizations function in theory, but how public and nonprofit leaders make decisions, sustain missions, and solve problems under real-world conditions.
One of the persistent challenges she studies is how nonprofits define and measure impact. Much of her work focuses on the capacities that enable nonprofits to pursue meaningful public impact under complex conditions. As she explains, the difficulty is that most nonprofits are working on problems far larger than any single organization can solve alone. Questions of impact, therefore, are rarely just about individual organizational performance; they are also about the relationships, resources, governance environments, and collaborative capacities that make sustained public problem-solving possible.
“The biggest public challenges don’t have organizational boundaries,” Bryan says. “Addressing issues like poverty or housing affordability requires resources, partnerships, and coordination across an entire system. That makes impact much harder to define and measure because success is rarely attributable to a single organization—it emerges from collective effort.”
That reality has pushed the field toward “collective impact” models, where organizations work together across boundaries rather than in isolation.
Much of Bryan’s current work also examines how nonprofits navigate changing relationships with government and respond strategically as policy environments shift. In one project with a colleague at Vanderbilt, she is studying how nonprofits engage in policy advocacy across Tennessee’s 95 counties.
Another study examines how nonprofit organizations adjust their communication and coalition-building strategies when shifts in funding structures or regulatory environments alter the risks and opportunities they face. The research focuses on how organizations respond when government expectations, resource dependencies, or political conditions change, and how those shifts influence whether nonprofits speak publicly, collaborate with partners, or reposition themselves within broader advocacy networks.
Across it all, Bryan returns to a consistent theme: alignment among research, teaching, and community needs. Whether she is designing a study or structuring a classroom project, she emphasizes that the work should not be extractive.
“I don’t want to take from organizations without giving something back,” she says. “We’re training students, but we should also be providing value to the community.”
That commitment is shaping the Baker School’s approach to community-engaged teaching, particularly through experiential capstone work that connects students directly with real clients and real problems.
She shares that the energy behind it all is grounded in people, both those who work in nonprofits and those they serve.
“They are so committed to the mission, even in really difficult circumstances,” she says. “They’re trying to help their neighbor have the best life possible.”
That optimism carries into her view of the field’s future. Even as the nonprofit landscape grows more complex and increasingly affected by political dynamics, she sees continued deep purpose in the work.
Nonprofits, she states, often act as the connective tissue between government services and communities, translating systems into access and advocacy into action. For her, nonprofits remain essential institutions for addressing public problems, strengthening communities, and creating spaces where people can collectively respond to challenges that neither government nor markets can solve alone.
Bryan is focused on strengthening that connection between research and practice, students and communities, and ideas and impact.