Corporate & Tax Attorney for Nonprofits Artist-Collector & Sportswoman Author & Memoirist
Ethnicity:
Father was of Irish and Scottish heritage, while mother was of German-Swiss heritage.
On September 7, 1955, Susan L. Q. Flaherty was born the last of nine daughters of James G. and Alberta C. Flaherty of Turtle Creek, Pennsylvania.
Like her father and sisters before her, Susan attended the local Roman Catholic elementary school in Turtle Creek, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. She completed the elementary years with a love of reading and strong grounding in grammar. She was the first in her family to attend public middle school in Turtle Creek. And again like her father and sisters, she graduated as salutatorian from Turtle Creek High School where her favorite subjects were physics, speed reading and typing and where she participated and led a range of student activities.
Susan's decades-long career in the private practice of law has been devoted to service worldwide to the nonprofit sector organizations and major donors, particularly in arts, education and professional societies. She also helped frame legislation to encourage development of the nonprofit sector in the former Soviet Bloc and in Japan. Preceding law practice, as a Revson Congressional Fellow on Women and Public Policy, she served as a legislative assistant to Senator Nancy Landon Kassebaum, as a law clerk to the general counsel at the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, as a law clerk in the office of regulations and rulings, US Customs Service of the US Treasury Department. She also edited a law journal on government contracts.
In 2001, Susan began her quest to build something about the cause of peace on or near the National Mall in Washington, DC, and this may soon come to fruition. Susan is one of three Founding Directors of The Peace Corps Foundation, which she formed in 2001 in honor of her husband to create a park near the National Mall to celebrate the founding of the Peace Corps. The project is now known as Peace Corps Park. Susan's husband, Kevin Quigley, was a Peace Corps Volunteer and later Country Director for Thailand, US Peace Corps. While he led the Peace Corps alumni organization as President and CEO, Kevin spearheaded the lobbying effort that culminated in President Obama signing into law the legislation authorizing the park. The site is identified and the design has been approved by all necessary authorities. Fundraising is underway. Please give peace a chance on the mall by contributing at https://www.peacecorpscommemorative.org/
Susan also takes pride in her work in the former Soviet Bloc and Japan on fostering nonprofit sectors and shaping legislation to encourage their growth. In the US, over the years, she created dozens of start-up nonprofits many of which continue to operate today and which will continue for a long time to come. Thirty years after completing work on legislation for more equitable treatment of women under the US tax system, Senator Kassebaum publicly cited Susan for this work and said that the passage of this legislation was among the Senator's proudest legislative achievements.
Me: A Scrapbook Memoir, Vol. 1 1955-1965; Vol. 2 1965-1975
(Published by Great Gaels Press.)
Moderator/Presenter, National Business Institute, intensive one-day continuing legal education course entitled, Exempt Organizations: A Legal Guide (October 2006)
Author of chapter on international law and co-author (with L. Salamon) of legal issues chapter in The International Guide to Nonprofit Law, (L. Salamon (ed.), John Wiley & Sons, New York 1997)
Co-author (with L. Salamon), “Nonprofit Law: Ten Issues in Search of Resolution,” in Working Papers of the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project, Working Paper No. 20 (1996)
Presenter, Japanese Government, Economic Planning Agency, Study Team (on the governing law and development of independent nongovernmental organizations), International Visitor Program, United States Information Agency (March 1995)
Faculty, Author, with Lester Salamon for Management Training Workshop for Leaders of Nonprofit Organizations in Bulgaria, Bansko, Bulgaria, sponsored by the Institute for Policy Studies Third Sector Project, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD (September 1993)
"Philanthropy without Borders: US Private Foundation Activity in Eastern Europe", Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations (University of Kent, UK, 1993)(published in Uruguay in Spanish)
"Legal Procedure for Creating an Institution in the US" in A Japanese Think Tank: Exploring Alternative Models, Appendix C (Urban Institute, Washington, DC 1993)(published in Japanese in April 1994)
The Japanese Corporation the United States: Aspects of Corporate Philanthropy, Kezai Koho Center [Japan Institute for Social and Economic Affairs] (Tokyo, Japan, 1989) (in Japanese and English). Pioneering comparative law study designed to facilitate Japanese corporate giving in the US as a means of easing trade and investment friction and to encourage liberalization of Japanese charitable deduction and exemption laws; initial distribution to 2,600 corporate executives in Japan, including 1,100 to external affairs departments for forwarding to US subsidiaries. https://lccn.loc.gov/91800128
(Moderator/Presenter, National Business Institute, intensi...)
(Client organization profiles their attorney.)
2023(A swim in Devil's Pool, Victoria Falls!)
(2024 open air swimming adventures)
2024As the last of nine daughters, Susan became a feminist early on. In law school, she focused on civil rights, particularly the rights of women, employment discrimination, and constitutional law. She served in the first class of Revson Congressional Fellows on Women and Public Policy. She went on to a career in support of nonprofit organizations in the arts, education the professions, and international affairs. She believes in giving back, and is now in the process of donating her many collections to public institutions for posterity. So far, the following institutions have accepted gifts of Flaherty's work or collections: Indian Arts Research Center, School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, NM--pottery; International Museum of the Horse, Lexington, KY (a Smithsonian Affiliate)--160+ horses; Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design Library, New York, NY--pop-up paper engineered book collection; Merry-Go-Round Museum, Sandusky, OH--300+ carousel themed objects; Sen. John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center, Pittsburgh, PA (a Smithsonian Affiliate)--wearable art bio of her mother; Pueblo of San Ildefonso Library, NM--collection of pottery books, southwest books, and children's literature of the southwest region; Swarthmore College, special collections library, Swarthmore, PA--Cuala Press Prints from W.B. Yeats family, Dublin, Ireland, a joint gift with her husband.
Susan was born and artist, but trained as a tax attorney. She has pursued art all her life both as an artist (collage) and a collector--of Native American pottery, Yixing teaware, horse objects, charm bracelets, carousel objects, pop-up books, etc. She early became a world traveler and continues to this day having visited some 50 countries, many for repeat visits. Early on, she traveled by bicycle, meeting her husband on a 900 mile bike ride in the Canadian Rockies. With him she traveled by bike then by more conventional means, and now they are swimming the world together. She has been a journal keeper all her life and now in a time of deep reflection has written two volumes of memoirs based on her journals.
Susan and Kevin F.F. Quigley have been traveling the world together since 1985, initially by bike, then by more conventional means, and now by swimming. They reside in Arlington, Virginia. Susan has one daughter, Fiona L. Q. Flaherty, a recent graduate of Columbia University Climate School and ASU Barret Honors College and Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Communications. Fiona is pursuing her passion in the UK, focusing on ESG in motorsport.
Member District of Columbia Bar; Member American Bar Association; practitioner before the Internal Revenue Service; member Bar of US Supreme Court and other federal and DC courts.
