About the Nonprofit Security Project
Our Story
Seeing the need and being uniquely situated to understand how best to address it, Co-Founders Ardiente and Speckhardt formed a team of capable people ready to tackle this challenge in a way that would be measurable, scalable, and most of all, effective.
Throughout a distinguished career as a security contractor, federal law enforcement officer, and governmental security specialist, Co-founder Franklin Ardiente brings a uniquely comprehensive perspective to the protection of critical infrastructure, facilities, personnel, and operational continuity.
Ardiente dedicated his career to developing and implementing forward-thinking strategies that safeguard organizations from an ever-evolving spectrum of threats, both internal and external. Ardiente explained that “My lifelong passion for keeping people safe is rooted in my profound belief that every person has the right to work in a safe and secure environment—free from harm, distraction, or disruption.” This guiding principle informs every decision made at the Nonprofit Security Project, driving a mission to not only respond to threats but to anticipate and prevent them with strategic clarity.
​
Whether leading a vulnerability and risk assessment for a federal agency or managing a security systems project on a government-sensitive site, Mr. Ardiente brings unmatched integrity, insight, and purpose to his role. At the Nonprofit Security Project, he continues to elevate industry standards by applying hard-earned expertise to today’s most urgent safety and security challenges.
In Co-founder Roy Speckhardt’s decades of leadership experience with nonprofits, he and his colleagues encountered many threats to physical security in the workplace. Speckhardt explains, “The first time I faced a threat was while working at the Interfaith Alliance in Washington, DC. An employee of mine who left a relationship after experiencing abuse was careful not to disclose her new residence, but her ex-boyfriend knew where she worked and said he would come to our office to kill her. I escorted her to the DC court to help her obtain a restraining order, but we had virtually no security measures to prevent him from acting on his threat.”
Later, while working for the American Humanist Association (AHA), which was actively litigating church-state separation cases, Speckhardt became familiar with other types of threats, as he describes, “At the AHA we would get so many threats via mail and email that we got to know more about when to take them to authorities, such as when we received an envelope containing white powder in the mail during an anthrax scare, another time when I was threatened on-air during a radio interview, and still another, when our attorney was very specifically threatened to be murdered by his rifle when she left the office.”
