Thanks For Saving My Child, Mr. AmeriCares
by Rebekah Rombom '08
“Essentially everyone who works here could be making more money somewhere
else,” Curt Welling ’71 says of the organization he now runs.
Welling, who in addition to his Bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth has a law
degree and an MBA, is now the President and CEO of AmeriCares, a nonprofit
organization that provides disaster relief and humanitarian aid within the
United States and abroad.
“You have this extraordinarily high level of alignment in terms of goals and
reason for being here, from top to bottom in the organization.”
Welling joined AmeriCares in 2002 after a long career in securities and
investment banking, but the English major’s career aspirations – which have
morphed into and melded with his life aspirations – were far from concrete when
he graduated from Dartmouth. After a year in military training, Welling
decided the army wasn’t for him and went to Vanderbilt Law. He then
returned to Hanover and spent two years earning his MBA at the Tuck School of
Business before embarking upon a career in corporate finance.
“I’ve been fortunate in my life that I’ve been in places where there’s been
a dramatic dynamic of change,” he says, “and change creates opportunities for
young people. There was nobody who’d been in the business 20 years who
could walk into a meeting and pretend they knew more than you did.”
During his more than two decades in the private sector, Welling was
President and CEO of SG Cowen Securities and Princeton eCom Corporation, an
electronic billing and payment company. Welling also held top positions at
Credit Suisse First Boston and Bear Stearns.
While he says working for a nonprofit is a different experience, Welling
maintains that the leadership skills are transferable.
"There are some things that are generic to being a chief
executive," he says. "Those things, conceptually, don't change. They
change in application."
In implementation and goal-setting, though, AmeriCares represents a new kind
of job for Welling.
"What's quite different about the nonprofit world is how you define and
measure success; the task of measuring success is a more sophisticated and
subtle one," he says, that deals with much more than quarterly earnings
reports.
At AmeriCares, Welling divides his time roughly into thirds: a third goes to
strategy and planning, another third to the companies and individuals who
supply AmeriCares with resources, and a third to management of the organization
itself.
"Everybody who walks in the door here every day comes here primarily
because they believe in the mission and they want to do what they can to help
people," Welling says. "That has a way of centering the organization.
Whenever you get into a debate with anybody, you can at least agree on your
core objective...it eliminates a lot of difficult dynamics of power and
politics."
Welling stresses the importance of communication in his field – “you can’t
overcommunicate the mission,” he says – along with realistic assessments of
situations, especially in third world countries that lack on-the-ground
infrastructures so common in the U.S. Wherever possible, AmeriCares
partners with local organizations to implement aid programs and distribute
supplies.
While AmeriCares provides disaster relief, Welling says that the
organization has been allocating significant resources to aid in manmade crises
like the Darfur genocide.
“Increasingly in the last five years we’ve been spending more and more time
thinking about what’s involved in responding to these crises. Sadly, we
think we’re in a world where there are likely to be more and more of them.”
With almost infinite demand for the types of services AmeriCares provides,
Welling has found himself amid an operating model different from those in the
finance industry.
“We know that as much of our ‘product’ as we can create we can distribute,
because our product is humanitarian systems. That’s the biggest
difference for me, is operating in a world where demand is infinite and supply
is the constraint.”
Because AmeriCares relies on donors for supplies, the organization expends
significant energy courting those donors. Welling uses some of the same
sales strategies that proved successful in the for-profit world, such as
“solution-oriented selling,” to encourage donations.
In addition to the practical, day-to-day problems involved with running any
business, Welling and his employees contend with the much more nebulous problem
of working in a field where the need for their products and services is so
large and so fundamental.
“It’s intellectually and emotionally quite challenging,” he says. “You
have to keep reminding yourself that one person can only do what one person can
do.”
“The reason I’m here is that I thought I could help this organization
institutionally, so that the organization could help more people…so one of the
ways I get satisfaction is when I look back and say, we now have the capability
to do something we couldn’t do two years ago.”
Welling has been an active volunteer in nonprofit organizations throughout
his entire career, and now says that he can see himself working at AmeriCares
indefinitely; the prospect of retirement just doesn’t appeal to him.
“I’m personally comfortable with change, so it’s never been a problem for me
to think about moving from one organization to another or taking on a task,” he
says.
Becoming more involved in the nonprofit sector had been one of Welling’s
goals for some time.
“You have a life list of things, and you get to a point in your life where
you either have to do them or cross them off. I’m pretty much reconciled
to the fact that I’m not going to be a concert pianist, but I still have on my
list the ability to learn how to play the Moonlight Sonata,” he says.
“There was this moment of clarity when I realized that I needed to take some
time and do this.”
And his current job has its rewards.
“There isn’t anything with more impact than, ‘Thank you Mr. AmeriCares, you
saved my child.’ You don’t get that every day, in fact you get it only a
few times a year, but it’s got a long half-life.”
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