Charles MacCormack chose to attend Middlebury College in Vermont because it had a nice campus, of all things. “I basically went there because it was a beautiful place, and I wanted to attend a liberal arts school in a rural area,” he said. He even got to pick apples at a nearby orchard, the region was so rural. Middlebury, he said, “fit the bill.”
But once there, MacCormack discovered something else about Middlebury, something that was to set the course for his life. The college had a “great interest in languages and international studies,” he said, and that focus dovetailed with the Kennedy administration”™s Peace Corps founding in the early 1960s, heightening MacCormack”™s interest in international affairs.
But it was a visiting professor ”“ Eduard Mondlane, exiled head of the Mozambique Liberation Movement and “kind of a Nelson Mandela of Mozambique” ”“ who helped translate MacCormack”™s incipient interest into a career that led him, eventually, to Save the Children in Westport as its president and chief executive officer.
Mondlane, MacCormack remembers, said “issues of international development and cooperation will be the most interesting and important issues in your lifetime,” that “you”™re lucky to live in a country where you”™ll be safe and where you”™ll be reasonably well educated. Getting involved in these issues and giving something back will be a very exciting career.”
Mondlane”™s comments proved prophetic, at least for MacCormack. “They did set my goals for being involved in the great issues of these decades,” he said. “Now, 40 years later, it has stood the test of time. It doesn”™t always work out that way, but it did in my case.”
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Ideal situation
MacCormack”™s journey to Save the Children was a twofold sort of thing. After graduating from Middlebury in 1963, he went on to the not-very-rural Columbia University for a master”™s degree in international relations in 1965 followed by a Ph.D. in 1974. Between his master”™s and Ph.D. studies he was, among other things, a Fulbright professor in Venezuela for a year ”“ “It was a very volatile time, as it is today. The dormitory I was in was called Stalingrad, and there was a lot of suspicion about were we CIA agents or not” ”“ and a National Science Foundation fellow at the National University of Mexico for another year.
When he returned from Mexico in 1969, he became a research fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., in the think tank”™s foreign policy studies. “I was not positive I wanted to teach, and wanted to learn more about think tanks,” he said. “Brookings was the premier think tank in foreign policy at the time.” After a year at Brookings, he was named dean of the master”™s program in international affairs at the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vt., in 1970, “so I was kind of putting off finishing the (Ph.D.) dissertation while I was in academia,” he said.
Five years earlier MacCormack had been a summer exchange student with the school”™s parent organization, called Experiment in International Living, and “when they were looking for somebody who had an academic background but had lived abroad and had been involved with them, they got in touch with me.”
The position “turned out to be ideal, from my point of view,” he said. “It had management responsibilities, teaching responsibilities and curriculum development responsibilities.” It also turned out to be ideal because MacCormack met his wife, Susan, there. “She was teaching in Massachusetts, and was taking a student exchange group to Israel to work on a kibbutz. We met in the orientation program for students and leaders, and the rest is history.” They married in 1972.
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Desperate circumstances
Two years later Save the Children”™s CEO, who had earlier come to the school as a combination practitioner-lecturer-outside teacher, contacted MacCormack about joining the nonprofit as vice president of programs. “I had been running this master”™s degree program for four years and I pretty well knew how to do that,” MacCormack said. “The learning curve for the courses I was teaching was not as steep, and this sounded like a great idea, so I took it.”
Save the Children, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary in the United States this year, was originally founded in Great Britain in 1919 to help children in Germany and Austria who were dying of malnutrition because of an Allied blockade to force the countries to the bargaining table, MacDonald said.
“We were founded in this country in 1932, the beginning of the Great Depression here,” after the UK and Scandinavian countries learned of widespread malnutrition here and raised money to help America”™s children. A group of ministers in New York City set up a board of directors and opened a Save the Children office in Harlan County, Ky., in the heart of Appalachia, then moved the offices to New York City in the late 1930s to raise money for refugee children in Europe. “The Europeans were already at war and had large refugee flows leaving Europe and settling with families in Great Britain,” MacCormack said. “We were raising money here for those kids. As we speak, we”™re raising money for Iraqi refugee kids in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. About 2 million Iraqis have fled and are in quite desperate circumstances in those three countries.”
When MacCormack arrived at the nonprofit in 1974, “the entire U.S. budget was $5.5 million, we had maybe 35 staff members and we were working in 10 or 11 countries,” he said. “I was responsible for all our programs in the United States and around the world. Part of my job was to expand programs in Africa and Asia.”
He stayed at Save the Children until 1977, when Experiment for International Living offered him its CEO position. “It was a chance to run something myself,” he said of “the world”™s largest student exchange organization” that sent high school and college students around the globe. He remained at the school for 16 years, leaving in 1993 to return to Save the Children as its president and CEO.
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Significant growth
Save the Children is one of the top 200 charities in the United States, according to the Forbes listing last year. About two-thirds of its $375 million budget comes from the private sector, the rest from 20 different governments around the globe ”“ the United States and Great Britain being the largest government contributors. It has just under 300 employees at its Westport headquarters, 6,000 full-time staff scattered around 50 countries, and more than a half-million frontline workers like teachers and midwives who are paid in rice or pennies by those they help.
“We have been fortunate to have had significant growth and success,” MacCormack said of his 14 years steering the global nonprofit ”“ an unusually long period of time for a nonprofit, which have a turnover of five to 10 years, he said. “I”™ll certainly be here for a while longer, but I won”™t impose myself on Save the Children forever,” the 65-year-old said. “But I find this work of seeing children getting health care and education very, very rewarding, so I hope to stay here as long as I can.”
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