If you are a volunteerism practitioner in North America, you have probably heard the name "Harriet Naylor" somewhere. The Association for Volunteer Administration has named its most prestigious award after her, as have several state associations. She is frequently referenced as a pioneer and many of the current leaders in the field speak of her mentorship with fondness and respect.

"Hat," as she was always called (in later years she frequently referred to herself as "old Hat"), was truly a seminal force in the evolution of volunteer management. Trained both as a social worker and then as an adult educator, Hat worked tirelessly to persuade both of these academic disciplines to recognize the importance of the effective leadership of volunteers. In the early 1970s, she was a key staff member of the National Center for Voluntary Action, from which the Points of Light Foundation eventually evolved more than twenty years later. In 1973, she published Volunteers Today (Dryden Press), the first real book written about volunteer program management. It was Hat who coined the word "volunteerism" in a booklet she wrote in 1969, in order to differentiate it from "voluntarism" and "'voluntary."