After a long career spent mostly in education, it seems fitting that Lynn Luckow is Youth Services Chair on the Rotary Club of San Francisco Board and District 5150 RYLA Director.Lynn was born and spent his early years in the small town of Hettinger, ND, population 1,800, and majored in German, English, and creative writing at the University of North Dakota. At the end of his sophomore year, he was invited by the dean of the freshman college to spend the summer registering and acclimatizing new students to the university. That led to a part-time job talking to prospective students and their parents in North Dakota and Minnesota. By the time he graduated, Lynn had abandoned the idea of teaching German and English, and went to work full-time for the freshman division, continuing to work with students about their options and career paths. That’s when he met his Club sponsor, Membership Chair Dan Joraanstad, who was a member of Delta Upsilon fraternity, which Lynn was advising. On the advice of the dean of students, Lynn earned a master’s degree in higher education administration/college student personnel at Indiana University in Bloomington, working as a graduate scholarship adviser at Delta Upsilon fraternity as part of a full scholarship.
Lynn was recruited back to UND to focus on the registration process and, as dean of continuing education, headed the division of conferences and institutes. In that capacity, he was the only non-lawyer in the state on the legal continuing education committee, the only non-doctor on the medical continuing education committee, the only non-nurse on the nursing continuing education committee, and so on. After four years, he was recruited to the University of Mid-America in Lincoln, NE, which “produced PBS-quality television in the 1980s to extend better education in rural areas of the Midwest.” He says. In that role, he developed a national institute to train people to work with adult learners.
Immediately after moving to San Francisco in 1981, Lynn was recruited by UC San Diego as head of all executive management programs. That’s when he met Jossey Bass, founder of Jossey-Bass, publisher of books on management and leadership, primarily focused at professionals and practitioners, such as teachers, therapists, and counselors. From 1984 to 1991, Lynn progressed from senior editor for adult higher education to director of new business development, then to president and CEO, a position he held until 2000. Lynn then spent three years as CEO of Northern California Grantmakers, which comprises 170 foundations and corporate contribution programs. As a full-time consultant, Lynn has worked with 50 nonprofits nationally to improve their bottom lines.
For eight years, Lynn worked with the Noyce Foundation, the architect behind the Noyce Leadership Institute, which aims to develop the next generation of informal science centers and children’s museums globally, including the Exploratorium, California Academy of Science, and Tech Museum. He has chaired the boards of Project Open Hand and Chanticleer and created the Golden Gate Choral Foundation to support the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus. After serving as chair of the board of the Craigslist Foundation, an operating foundation focused on improving the effectiveness of nonprofits, Lynn became president and CEO from 2008 to 2012. Since then, he has created and runs LikeMinded, a crowd-funding platform that helps nonprofits raise money and have a greater impact in the community. He is currently serving as interim executive director of The Bread Project, which teaches low-income residents of the Bay Area to work in commercial baking and restaurants.
In 2016, Lynn joined the Rotary Club of San Francisco because he enjoyed the Rotarians he met, finding them to be a diverse group representing different part of the city and different fields. He is especially impressed by Rotary’s commitment to impacting the community and "Service Above Self." Last spring, when the Board decided to separate youth programs from community service and create a Youth Services Committee, they looked to Lynn as chair.
The newly-created committee had several two-hour sessions “to focus on the big question: What impact do we want to have?” He says, “The ultimate answer was leadership development. . . .What can we do to develop leadership capacity in high school students?” The committee is currently working on a curriculum to apply in school and the community, “something this Club can do that no one else is doing,” he says, basically “to take the RYLA experience and make it happen over four years.”
The goal, Lynn says, “is for participants to say, ‘Rotary is where I learned leadership, to have a sense of myself, and to work for the betterment of others, Service Above Self.’”