John Courtin

Bio

John Courtin, a vice president of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, has had a multi-faceted career as practicing lawyer, historic preservation activist, university executive, law professor, varsity rowing coach, conservationist, and as founder/leader of non-profit organizations. Among other assignments in his Kauffman Foundation portfolio, Courtin is responsible for administrative oversight of the Kauffman Campuses Initiative, through which the Foundation has committed more than $50 million to eighteen American colleges and universities. This historic commitment by the Kauffman Foundation is further leveraged by more than $150 million in matching dollars—all devoted to infuse the spirit of entrepreneurship across these campuses, to weave ideas about entrepreneurship into the curricula in many disciplines as well as to support co-curricular experiences in the field of entrepreneurship. As vice president for special projects at the Kauffman Foundation, Mr. Courtin works closely with the Foundation's president and with other senior staff in advancing the Foundation in a manner consistent with its place as the nation's leading foundation for entrepreneurship. Prior to joining the Kauffman Foundation in 2007, Courtin served as a founding director and later as executive director of the Martin House Restoration Corporation in Buffalo, New York. In that capacity for much of the last decade, Courtin directed the most successful Frank Lloyd Wright restoration project in America—raising more than $40 million to acquire, reconstruct, and restore Frank Lloyd Wright's six-building Darwin D. Martin House Complex (1903-05), a National Historic Landmark. Operating as a historic house museum, the Martin House serves as a national model for the restoration of historic landmarks and was recently featured in a PBS special, "Frank Lloyd Wright's Buffalo." In 2000, Courtin served as founding director of Frank Lloyd Wright's Rowing Boathouse Corporation, a nonprofit corporation that acquired the rights and raised the money to build a rowing boathouse designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1905 that was never previously built. This remarkable boathouse was built on the Buffalo waterfront exactly as designed by Wright a century earlier, with ribbon-cutting in September 2007. Earlier in his career, Courtin was a practicing attorney in Buffalo and Washington, D.C. He also served as executive director of the Georgetown University Alumni Association, Inc., an affiliated corporation of Georgetown University, and as adjunct professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center. Courtin earned his Bachelor of Science degree from Georgetown University, and his Juris Doctor degree from the Georgetown University Law Center.