Shalala, Stasch Exchange Leadership Philosophies, Visions for Philanthropies

At the Council’s 2016 Annual Conference, two influential foundation presidents sat down with the Council’s President and CEO Vikki Spruill to share their insights into the conference’s theme of purpose. Spruill opened what became a lively discussion with The Clinton Foundation President Donna Shalala and The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation President Julia Stasch by asking these two leaders about how they found inspiration in philanthropic work.

Shalala recounted how her parents and grandparents, who were Syrian immigrants, taught her the importance of giving back to the community. They taught her to work diligently to make the world a better place. But the former secretary of health and human services and president of the University of Miami (Fla.) said the period of time that had the biggest impact on her life was her first job as a Peace Corps volunteer.

“[When] you send a young American just out of college and put them in a mud village in southern Iran and tell them to do good and if they’re able to do that, that’s the kind of experience that makes you a citizen of the world and gives you a kind of passionate commitment for making wherever you are better.”

Regarding her current position as president of The Clinton Foundation, Shalala said jokingly, “This is actually the smallest job I’ve ever had in my career and probably the only one in which there’s consensus that I was qualified.”

Stasch, a fellow Clinton Administration appointee who served as Deputy Administrator of the General Services Administration, shared that her world view was shaped by the civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s and 70s. Her time at Antioch College (“a hot bed of social movement”) opened her mind before she dropped out to join VISTA (Volunteers In Service To America).

“So I was a hippie in San Francisco by night, because during the day I was a secretary at a stock brokerage. The fact is that the instinct was always there, but execution, not so much. But I have to say my entire career ever since has been atoning and compensating for the failure of my early years.”

Though different paths led them to philanthropic leadership, when the conversation turned to the conference’s theme of community and its future, Stasch and Shalala presented similar perspectives.

“Community to me… brings together everything that is articulated in the mission and the ambitions of everybody in this room,” Stasch said. “Our focus on community is not so much how we can promote it, but how can we remove the challenges to community, both the challenges today and the challenges in the future.

“I think we’re faced with the decision about where on the moral spectrum are we? What is the balance we take of programs that are focused on alleviating suffering or promoting the opportunity of the people that are here today versus a portion of our work that is focused on how do we make sure a world is sustained, that can have less suffering and greater opportunity for the people in the future?”

This drive toward sustainable and moral inclusion also animates Shalala.

“I think of community as a group coming together for shared goals, not shared ethnicity, not shared values, not shared race or religion but shared goals. And whether it’s an international community or whether it’s a local community, there are opportunities for people to work together,” she said. “When you say community in this town, we all want to give lectures on what it would take to come together. It doesn’t make any difference to us whether everybody has the same values or if they have the same type of background, it’s agreeing on the goals, to move the community forward.”

Often, forward movement only occurs when people and associations and organizations shelve their differences in order to pull in the same direction for change.

“Sometimes partnerships emerge in very unexpected places. The MacArthur Foundation is often characterized as being a liberal foundation, but we come at our work in mass incarceration not from a liberal perspective but a pragmatic perspective and that’s what drew us to a partnership with Koch Industries, Laura and John Arnold [Foundation] and the Ford Foundation in support of The Coalition for Public Safety where we all come at this issue, whether it’s over-criminalization or over-incarceration. Those are different things but sometimes the remedies are the same.

“So we felt it was really important to model the kind of across-the-aisle, pragmatic problem-solving that we’d hope our political leaders could have. If we can’t do it in philanthropy, how can we expect others to do it as well?”

Shalala agreed.

“I think that that’s really the future of philanthropy. The more we can all do together, the more we can find unlikely partners and uncommon partners will define philanthropy and make sure that we’re here for years to come.”