When AmeriCares hired Ridgefield resident Leslie McGuire last month to lead its U.S. programs, it wasn”™t just any old hire at any old nonprofit ”“ CEO Curt Welling sees a domestic expansion as the Stamford-based nonprofit”™s perhaps biggest initiative in the coming year.
And like all nonprofits, Welling wonders what the coming year will bring in financial resources that can underwrite such efforts.
As the U.S. presidential election hits the homestretch, the philanthropy sector is anxious over vows by President Obama and Republican candidate Mitt Romney to overhaul the U.S. tax code with an eye on simplification and closing loopholes.
Long a fixture in oversees crises, AmeriCares increasingly is becoming better known on the home front via its medicine distribution network for U.S. citizens lacking health insurance to pay for drugs or health care. Now the philanthropic system that is the lifeblood for nonprofits like AmeriCares could be in for profound changes.
“If you have a reformation of the tax code which eliminates the deduction for charitable contributions or materially reduces it in some way, (it) will have a profound impact on American philanthropy,” Welling said. “There are disagreements about the order of magnitude, but there isn”™t any economist that doesn”™t believe that if you reduce or eliminate the deduction for charitable contributions, you will materially reduce philanthropy at the individual level.”
Welling knows what he is talking about, and not just at AmeriCares, which he has led 10 years as of October. Before joining the late Bob MacauleyӪs nonprofit, Welling had a long career in finance in New York City at First Boston, Bear Stearns and Soci̩t̩ G̩n̩rale. He then left to lead a Princeton, N.J. software company before the terrorist attacks of 2001 cemented his resolve to segue into the nonprofit sector, ultimately finding the AmeriCares opportunity through a chance meeting.
He was already familiar with AmeriCares, having participated in a program called Home Front to fix up homes for needy people throughout Fairfield County, and later discussing it more extensively with a friend considering a board seat there.
With McGuire now on board, AmeriCares will amp up its U.S. medicine distribution system in the coming year. Welling said it”™s an initiative that will change the organization at a fundamental level, including how it relates to donors and how it thinks about fundraising.
“People ask me all the time what”™s the biggest difference between the for-profit sector and the nonprofit sector,” Welling said. “Obviously there are cultural differences and there are mission-oriented differences and so on, but I”™ve come to understand that the single biggest difference structurally is in the for-profit sector there is a central marketplace for capital. And you go with your numbers and your business plan for raising capital and the only question is the price.”
“In the nonprofit world there is no such central marketplace, so the way you raise money in the nonprofit world is by storytelling and persuasion. It”™s a much less efficient marketplace and so that dynamic has a profound impact on what all these organizations look like and what their challenges are.”