Alumni Hall of Fame
Lawrence N. Hansen
Lawrence N. Hansen is a 1963 graduate of UIUC, with a double major in Political Science and History. He also studied Modern European History at Heidelberg University and Law at UIUC. As an undergraduate at UIUC, Mr. Hansen was president of the Student Senate (1962-63) and he was a delegate to the Peace Corps Founding and Organizing Conference in 1961. In 1962 he worked with American and Peruvian student leaders in constructing the first modern sanitation facilities in two barrios of Lima.
Upon graduation from UIUC Mr. Hansen continued his work in public service. As a paralegal and field organizer he worked in Greenwood, Mississippi with the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights. He helped to register African Americans to vote, to legally challenge overt institutional discrimination, and to organize the Freedom Democratic Party. After a brief internship in the Illinois House of Representatives, Mr. Hansen began an extended period of government service in Illinois. After three-year stints in the offices of the State Treasurer and the Superintendent of Public Instruction, he worked as an assistant for Senator Adlai E. Stevenson, III between 1974 and 1981. His responsibilities included staff supervision; work on legislative programs and strategies; and maintaining liaisons with Illinois-based elected officials, party leaders, journalists, interest groups, and community-based organizations. Hansen also worked with Walter F. Mondale, serving as his confident, political advisor and troubleshooter for the fourteen-month period prior to Mondale’s announcement of his campaign for president.
After 1983, Mr. Hansen began a career in the public interest sphere as a policy analyst, consultant and corporate officer. He served as Vice President for Public Programs and as a Senior Fellow in the Roosevelt Center for Policy Studies, which he helped create. He also served as a Research Professor at the National Center for Communications Studies at George Washington University. From there Hansen went to the Joyce Foundation where he has served as Vice President, Corporate Secretary, and Program Officer since 1994.
Throughout his career Mr. Hansen has served on the governing boards of a number of civic and community organizations, including the YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago and the Center for Voting and Democracy. He is also a member of the National Council for Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations and the Chicago Historical Society. In 1993 he was named to the Samuel K. Gove Legislative Internship Hall of Fame (located at the state capitol in Springfield, Illinois) in recognition of his outstanding record of achievements in the field of public service.