One of D.C.’s more interesting gunsmoke duels is over. The shoot-out between Bill Novelli, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and Richard Sauer, national executive director of the National 4-H Council, erupted over the 4-H Council’s acceptance of $4.3 million from tobacco giant Phillip Morris. It ended with both sides wounded. Novelli’s public pistol-whipping of Sauer miffed other executives of national youth service agencies by criticizing one of their own for doing what comes naturally – taking legal money from all comers. Sauer got grief from at least 31 state 4-H councils who have refused to toke from the Philip Morris peace pipe. Now both men, with very different visions of healthy youth development, are retiring from the OK Corral.
In October the National 4-H Council’s board of trustees emerged from their smoke-filled room (note to 4-H staff at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, whose sense of humor rivals a soybean: we’re just kidding) with a new CEO to replace Sauer when he retires in June. Tapped for the assignment is Don Floyd. Currently Floyd is the Chevy Chase, Md.-based nonprofit’s chief operating officer. He joined the 4-H Council in 1991 after 17 years with Junior Achievement in New York and at JA’s Colorado Springs headquarters.
The 4-H, which involves an estimated 6.5 million youth (ages 5-19), takes youth development and youth involvement seriously. The 4-H Council board, chaired by Lynn Luckow, CEO of Jossey-Bass, the social welfare field’s largest publisher, also includes 10 youth on its 39-member governing body. Floyd says he will follow Sauer’s policies and looks forward to “partnering with youth and youth workers to build a brighter future.” Will that future include a renewal of the 4-H Council’s three-year $4.3 million grant from Philip Morris for that controversial anti-smoking campaign? “We’ll see” says Floyd. “Our intent is to deliver a good curriculum” which will prevent youth smoking and demonstrate “the quality of work that 4-H can do.”
That 4-H Council anti-smoking effort “Free for Life: Youth Empowered to be Tobacco-Free” is now looking for state or local partners – with or without 4-H ties – with a $10,000 grant to each “demonstration site.” A letter of interest to 4-H is due by March 1st. The program says the 4-H Council focuses on positive youth development for 10-14 year olds. Contact: (301) 961-2800 or www.4-hcouncil.org.
While the 4-H Council’s Sauer heads for retirement, Bill Novelli has departed from the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, where he has served as the group’s only president since its September 1995 launch. He’s now the number two official at the mighty 32-million member AARP (known until recently as the American Association of Retired Persons) handling legislation, public policy and communications. No one, even in the heart of Marlboro country, was surprised when Novelli’s equally high profile deputy, Matthew Myers, was named president. A 20-year veteran of the anti-smoking crusade, Myers was an attorney at the Federal Trade Commission’s Division of Advertising Practices when he began to tangle with the-then invincible tobacco industry. After leaving the FTC he represented the Coalition on Smoking OR Health before joining the Campaign.
At the Campaign, he became the primary public health representative in the negotiations between the tobacco companies and the state attorneys general that ended in the June 1997 landmark $368.5 billion settlement of pending law suits in 46 states. At least until a new president and Congress take office in January 2001, the action has shifted to the states. There weakly organized anti-tobacco forces are all too often witnessing defeat being wrested from the jaws of victory as state legislators have found numerous uses for their no-strings attached windfall (other than campaigning against youth smoking). Myers is no stranger to uphill causes. From 1974 until 1977, he was an attorney for the then ACLU-linked National Prison Project.
At the Campaign he’s backed by the kind of grant support that the National Prison Project could only dream about. An April 1999 grant renewal of $50 million over five years from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation means Myers and his 40-person staff don’t have to sweat the payroll. The Campaign’s budget for 2000 is $13 million, $3 million of which will go into its even by Washington’s harsh political standards. in-your-face advertising campaign. Contact: (202) 296-5469 or www.tobaccofreekids.org.
Novelli’s new employer, AARP, was recently ranked #1 by Fortune Magazine in its lobbying and political clout in Washington. Coming in #2 was Eddie “The Gun-totin” Eagle’s sponsor, the National Rifle Association; while its nemesis, Handgun Control, was #60. The AFL-CIO was #5, the Anti-abortion National Right to Life Committee was # 8, while its bitter rival the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League only managed #42. The Children’s Defense Fund, the only non-education group devoted exclusively to children and youth to make the top one hundred list, ranked #73, a drop from #69 a year ago.
The pro-minimum wage for youth National Restaurant Association ranked #10 and the Job Corps (FY ’00 budget 1.36 billion) promoting of the National Association of Home Builders ranked #16. The teachers’ unions ranked high garnering #9 on Fortune’s list for the NEA, while the AFT was #34.
Jeannie I. Rosoff, only the second president of the Alan Guttmacher Institute since it was founded as a part of Planned Parenthood in 1968, recently retired from the reproductive research and policy advocacy organization after 21 years. Representative Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) dubbed Ms. Rosoff “the ‘mother’ of Title X,” which currently provides $239 million for family planning services. Secretary of Health and Human Services, Donna Shalala, waxed nostalgic about Ms. Rosoff successfully playing “the political game” as a pioneering woman in reproductive health policy in the 1960s. Sara Seims, previously the Associate Director of Population Sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, is the new matriarch of AGI. She began her post-doc career in 1979 at AGI as a Senior Research Associate. Although AGI separated from PPFA in 1977, the two organizations operate in tandem. In the future, “the political game” says Seims will expand to international issues. “We in the United States are living with many paradoxes but one which affects us in particular is the reality and importance of globalization coupled with increasing isolationist sentiments.” Contact: (212) 248-1111 ext. 2208.
While Seims offers up one-world bromides, Charles Donavan, the acting honcho for the Family Research Council while Gary Bauer is off running for president, is in a nasty mood. It seems Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood included FRC on a list that “might bomb” an abortion clinic in one of those scare-the-bejesus-out-of-your-supporters fundraising letters long in use on both sides of the bombastic abortion debate. But then, writes Donavan “What are a few lies to a group ruthless enough to kill an unborn child by cruelty and painfully sucking out his brains?” Bauer could be back at FRC by April given the way his campaign, stuck at single digits even among GOP voters, is going. He will not return empty handed, but as a well-known public figure positioned to double the number of members who numbered 500,000 in 1998, accounting for the bulk of the $15 million in FRC revenue. Contact: (202) 393-2100.
Belatedly catching the now $450 million per year 21st Century Community Learning Centers afterschool wave is D.C.-based WAVE, Inc. headed by Larry Brown. The after-school boosting Charles S. Mott Foundation has given the beleaguered group $250,000 along with the most candid write up of its grantmaking rationale in memory. “For the past eight years WAVE, a long-standing grantee of the Mott Foundation, has faced tremendous financial instability due to an administrative battle with the U.S. Department of Labor. WAVE has successfully won the legal battle, but with huge financial costs. This grant is to help financially stabilize WAVE so that it can direct its resources towards continuing to adapt its training for afterschool programs.”
One of WAVE’s now eight staffers who won’t be around to stabilize the youth employment and school-to-work oriented outfit is Bob McCarthy, Brown’s deputy for the past 23 years. A one-time detached youth worker for St. Paul’s Outreach Program in Worcester, Mass., McCarthy will join a teacher exchange group, the Center for International Education in, charge of the Chapel Hill, N.C.-based groups operations in South Carolina. Contact: (202) 484-0103.
Isabel Carter Stewart, the national executive director of New York-based Girls Incorporated has announced her departure some time before September 2000. Girls Inc., wrote Stewart in an October letter to colleagues, “is in terrific shape” noting that the group which aims to make girls “strong, smart and bold” has doubled its budget to $9.9 million in the past decade. She will move back home to Chicago along with her husband Don Stewart, the former CEO of The College Board who became president in January of the Chicago Community Trust (assets $1.1 billion) which allocates much of its $35 million in annual spending to youth related efforts.
Girls Inc. looks first to hire from within, but in recent decades has searched beyond to find outsiders as a CEO to lead its now 138 affiliated member clubs. But don’t look for a man in charge when Stewart departs.
Stewart became national executive director in 1993 and is credited with keeping Girls Inc. on an even keel, despite growing pressure to come up with the kind of goodie bag for affiliates that has fueled the surging growth of Boys & Girls Clubs of America.
Business is still booming at Atlanta-based B&GCA. Topping up its $40 million earmark in the FY’00 budget to $50 million is just part of the reason for the group’s continuing growth which now boosts 2,300 affiliates with about five new clubs opening every week.
Heading up a new effort aimed at statewide youth policy is Kirk Dominick. The former B&GCA national Youth of the Year finalist rose from member to executive director of the Pitt County Boys and Girls Club in Greenville, NC. Now he’s been promoted to senior director of government relations. He’ll work with affiliates in up to 25 states who are interested in banding together to lobby for funds and to get better youth policies out of state government. For example, the Florida Alliance of Boys & Girls Clubs brings together 30 local affiliates that operate 125 clubs to form a 501(c)4 non-profit an IRS tax status designation which will enable the Florida B&GCA to unabashedly pitch its agenda to the state legislature without jeopardizing the tax deductibility of its non-governmental donations. Also on the move, says B&GCA’s senior vice president Robbie Callaway, are alliances in Wisconsin, Illinois and Arkansas.
Promoted to the #2 slot at the B&GCA Southeast office is Lorraine Orr, a former program director of the Greensboro, NC Salvation Army Boys and Girls Club. Taking over the Smart Moves drug, alcohol and pregnancy prevention work, along with its Street Smart gang prevention program, is Sharon Hemphill, director of teen services since 1996 and the one time director of the now merged out of existence Big Sisters of the Washington Metro Area. Contact: (404) 815-5700.
The Urban Institute, the first among equals of liberal-leaning D.C.-based research and policy shops focused on poverty, has a new boss. Robert Reischauer, a renowned economist and former head of the Congressional Budget Office took over from Bill Gorham who has headed the 370-person shop since its War on Poverty launch in 1968. Reischauer takes over a $61 million per year think tank operation whose current activities include an evaluation of teen courts and several other juvenile justice related projects as well as its $30 million Assessing New Federalism project tracking welfare reform, health care, child welfare and related issues in 13 states. Contact: (202) 853-7200.
Departing after nine years as executive director of the National Association of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Counselors is Linda Kaplan. The Arlington, Va.-based group with 17,000 “members and subscribers” is searching for a successor. Contact: (703) 741-7686.
The newly established, by the National League of Cities, Institute for Youth, Education, and Families chaired by Boston Mayor Tom Menino has snagged one of D.C.’s top youth policy operatives. Hired as executive director is Cliff Johnson. For the past four years Johnson was a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. That plus 11 years at the Children’s Defense Fund, his last three as director of programs and policy, made Johnson’s selection for the Institute job which will “help equip local governments to convene, unite and mobilize communities to raise successful, caring and responsible children and adolescents” no surprise. Contact: (202) 626-3013.
On board at the National Youth Employment Coalition as director of its U. S. Department of Labor and Charles S. Mott Foundation-funded Capacity Building Initiative is Mala Thakur. The DoL initiative centers on services to juvenile offenders, while Mott has funded efforts to improve CBO educational programs for school dropouts. Thakur was previously director of Workforce Development at the New York Citywide School to Work Alliance. She continues to serve on the board of Advocates for Children in New York City. Contact: (202) 659-1064.
Cheryl Gully has been appointed as CWLA’s 15 state Western Regional Director, based in Los Angeles. Since 1992 Gully was employed at the Center on Child Welfare at UCLA.
