William Glenn

William D. Glenn, a former Jesuit and high school dean, is a licensed psychotherapist with a private practice in San Francisco and Santa Rosa, California. Glenn’s education includes graduate studies that have led to three master’s degrees. He received a Masters in American Studies from Saint Louis University in 1974. He received a Master of Divinity degree from the Pacific School of Religion (2000), where he was awarded the Paul Wesley Yinger Award for Distinguished Preaching. He also gained a Masters in Clinical Psychology from the University of San Francisco in 1986.

In his career, Glenn has provided leadership to a variety of not-for-profit organizations, both as head and a senior manager. He has served on many community boards, from arts organizations and a mutual fund to a variety of social services providers, often in the capacity of chair or in other positions of executive leadership, with a particular focus on development and internal operations.

After several years of teaching in a Jesuit prep school and completing the first segment of his extensive education, Glenn served as principal of an inner city elementary school in Oakland. He then went to serve as a vice-principal and dean at a large, multi-cultural private girls' high school in San Francisco from 1980-1988.

Glenn was the executive director of Continuum, a multi-service AIDS health care agency in San Francisco’s beleaguered Tenderloin neighborhood, where he worked from 1993 until 1999. He was named the director of development at the San Francisco Foundation, where in his brief tenure from 2003-2004, he led an operation that increased the resources of the Foundation by $100M+. He is currently a trustee of the Morris K. Stulsaft Foundation in San Francisco.

Glenn is a member of the national advisory board of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Ministry and Religion at the Pacific School of Religion.  He has also served on the board of  the  Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. an interreligious graduate degree granting institution affiliated with the University of California Berkeley.   He was elected chair of the board in 2019.   He was also the recipient of a Leading Light Award along with his husband Scott Hafner, whom he married in 2008 after a twenty-seven year courtship. He is past vice president of the board of KQED, past president of the socially responsible mutual fund group Working Assets/Citizens Funds, past president of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, and served on the boards of 18th Street Services and the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation. For nine years, he co-facilitated Katargeo, a men’s group for people in prison for life at San Quentin State Penitentiary and is immediate past secretary of the board of the Insight Prison Project.

Glenn has also received the James R. Harrison Leadership Award of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, the Michael Switzer Leadership Award from New Leaf Services, the AIDS Champion Award from the AIDS Health Project of the University of California, San Francisco and the Adult Day Health Care Annual Award from San Francisco’s Adult Day Health Care collaboration.

Glenn has written extensively, and been published in White Crane, Review for Religious, America, and has chapters in two recently published books, including Neither Do I: A Meditation on Scapegoating, and Four Flights. His reflection on growing up gay and Catholic, As God Intended, is used in the curriculum of many universities, high schools and parishes. A noted speaker and writer, Glenn has recently published chapters in two anthologies and his columns have been collected at www.avoluptuousgod.com.    He is writing a spiritual autobiography, I Came Here Seeking a Person: Notes from the Interior,   

(This biographical statement provided by William Glenn, edited by Joel Layton) 

Biography Date: April, 2012; rev. August 2021

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