Lester M. Salamon, a pioneering researcher of the field of civil society and philanthropy, died last Friday at the age of 78, according to the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civil Society Studies.

In addition to serving as founding director of CCSS, Salamon was professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins, where he previously was founding director of the Institute for Policy Studies. He came to the field of nonprofit research after serving as deputy associate director in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget under the Carter administration and seeing the lack of systematic information about government funding streams to nonprofits for social services delivery. For the next four decades he worked to generate basic economic data about nonprofit, social economy, civil society organizations, and volunteer work — with the goal of enhancing the understanding and credibility of those institutions and supporting sound public and economic policy.

Through his work at the Urban Institute, where he conceived of and managed the Nonprofit Sector Project, and at CCSS and ISP, Salamon and his colleagues developed the seminal structural-operational definition of the nonprofit sector — a definition that remains fundamental to the collective understanding of the organizational core of the sector. At the time of his passing, Salamon also held an appointment as senior research professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) Bologna Center and served as the founding scientific director of the International Laboratory for Nonprofit Sector Studies at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow.

Salamon authored more than twenty books, including America's Nonprofit Sector: A Primer, Third Edition, (Foundation Center, 2012), the standard text used in U.S. college-level courses on the nonprofit sector; Partners in Public Service: Government and the Nonprofit Sector in the Modern Welfare State (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), which won the 1996 ARNOVA Award for Distinguished Book in Nonprofit and Voluntary Action Research and in 2012 was awarded the Aaron Wildavsky Enduring Contribution Award from the American Political Science Association; and the Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project's Global Civil Society: Dimensions of the Nonprofit Sector (1999), which showcased the globally comparative results produced by the international team of colleagues and won the Virginia Hodgkinson Award for best publication in the nonprofit field in 2001, and its capstone book, Explaining Civil Society Development: A Social Origins Approach (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017).

"While Dr. Salamon's passing catches many of us off guard, true-to-form, he was actively working until the very last possible moment," CCSS said in a statement. "His dedication, energy, and passion will be hard to match."

(Photo credit:Johns Hopkins University Center for Civil Society Studies)