Curtis Welling Interview

L.G.: But explain to people who think of charitable organizations a certain way, why the C.E.O. of a charitable organization should be making $300,000 or whatever your last paycheck was. I saw $275,000 quoted in one story.

C.W.: That's right. That's the salary I got when I came here, and that's been my salary for the entire time I've been here. I think that the answer to that is pretty straightforward actually. Charitable organizations, whether they're churches or universities or humanitarian-aid organizations, need quality leadership in order to be well run and to be successful and to be good stewards of the money they get. And there's a marketplace for people who do that, there's a standard of compensation in that marketplace, and if you want to have a high-quality team in any organization, whether it's profit or nonprofit, you need to pay people what the market is for people to do what they do best.

L.G.: You mentioned that you were not quite clear on what the policies of the incoming administration are going to be. What are you not clear on? What would you like to have defined that would help you out in deciding where to allocate your resources?

C.W.: I'm not sure it'll have as much impact on us directly, because, like I said, we don't take any money from the government.

L.G.: Right, but presumably if they're doing something, you don't need to be terribly redundant, if they're taking care of an area you might otherwise feel compelled to fund.

C.W.: That's one aspect of it. The bigger aspect is that most of the large humanitarian-aid organizations in this country, from the American Red Cross to CARE to Save The Children and so on, get somewhere between 30 to 70 percent of their money from the U.S. government. So they're very concerned about what the foreign assistance priorities, policies, and budget allocation in the new administration will be. We're concerned more from the perspective of what's the playing field going to look like, what are their priorities going to be, how much money are they going to be devoting to areas like global health, what is their universal health-insurance program really going to be, that will be relevant to our free clinic program here in the United States, and what's their approach to the economy going to be? We're really much more dependent on the prosperity of individuals and corporations than lots of organizations, and so we have a vested interest in having tax policy be favorable to philanthropy, for example. We have a vested interest in having tax policy not be confiscatory to people that have wealth in the sense that the biggest individual philanthropists are the people who have accumulated the most wealth. Those are all things we're concerned about and interested in. What I meant by the uncertainty of policy priorities is we've got a lot of campaign rhetoric, but right now in the reality, where you're confronted with a trillion-dollar federal budget deficit and the worst economic situation since the Great Depression and I think the most complex economic situation in the history of the republic, there are going to be all kinds of unintended, unforeseeable effects on all kinds of entities. And certainly the not-for-profit world is going to be affected dramatically, foreign assistance of not-for-profit is going to be affected too. There is this uncertainty, and it will gradually resolve itself. I think the president-elect is doing a good job in managing the transition. I think he's done a good job in honoring his commitment to focus on competence rather than traditional politics. But being president of the United States is a political job, so he can't be completely free from that. The biggest uncertainty we're going to deal with in the next two months is fundraising. This is the time of the year when American charities raise 50 to 70 percent of their money. So we're spending a lot of time here coming up with contingency plans for what we'll do if our fundraising is down anywhere from 5 to 25 percent relative to last year.

L.G.: It seems like the bulk of your fundraising is in-kind contributions of goods and services.

C.W.: That's correct. The value proposition, the leverage in our operations, comes from the fact that AmeriCares is the world's largest recipient of quality donated medicines and medical supplies from all the world's great pharmaceutical and medical-supply companies. We have very good relationships with you-name-a-company and the odds are that they're a donor to us. And so we raise cash to allow us to deliver those medicines, medical supplies, and other health-oriented relief supplies to needy communities around the world and increasingly even in the United States.

L.G.: I see that about 20 percent of your work, delivery of services, is domestically in the United States.

C.W.: That's right, and that's actually been a program which has been growing in the last couple years. And we think we'll grow significantly in 2009, obviously subject to the overall economic climate. But the combination of the magnitude of the uninsured population and the consequences of the economic downturn have put very much greater demand on safety-net suppliers of health services. So free clinics, federally qualified clinics, so-called safety-net clinics that provide either no-cost or very-low-cost primary care to individuals as an alternative to going out into the emergency room. And we are supplying medicines and medical supplies to over 100 of those clinics in more than 30 states last year, and we expect there to be more demand for that this year.

L.G.: So you think that the domestic part of your mission will increase relative to the other parts?

C.W.: You know, it's the sad reality of the context in which we work, which is quite different than the for-profit world. If you're in the for-profit world, you spend all your time trying to figure out a product, and how you go capture a demand for your product. Here in a world where there are somewhere between 2 to 3 billion people that don't have access to medicine, the demand for what we do is essentially infinite. So, yes, I think we will do more in the United States, and whether that will be more relative to what we do outside the United States depends on how big the overall pie is. We're resource-constrained, based on that amount of cash donations we get as well as the amount of donated medicine we get.

L.G.: Do you raise money outside the United States?

C.W.: We do, but not very much. We don't have a staff which is focused other than anecdotally on people outside the United States.

L.G.: And it might be more difficult this time to shake down Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.

C.W.: Yeah, there was a lot more discussion about international philanthropy and generosity at 150 bucks a barrel than there is at 40 bucks a barrel. But, as you probably have seen, we opened earlier this year our first integrated program office outside the United States in Mumbai, India. We did that for a couple reasons. One is, India has become a very important site of manufacturing of pharmaceuticals and medical supplies, and it's located in such a way that strategically it allows us to get assistance to a part of the world which is very tough for us to get to from here economically. We'll be spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to raise money from wealthy individuals, companies, and foundations in India, but 98 percent of the money we raise, or maybe a little bit more, comes from the United States.