Charity Official Delivers Message in Washington

Jeffrey Jordan had his first experience with international development back in the mid-1970s when, as a high-school student in Charlotte, N.C., he helped his church raise money for a water and sanitation project in Haiti.

Now, after more than 15 years working for organizations that promote international development, Mr. Jordan has been named senior vice president for programs at the nonprofit Catholic Medical Mission Board and the head of the New York charity’s newly established Washington office. The group hopes its new office and a new leader will allow it to establish a greater presence in the nation’s capital, and to attract more government money.

“I had a strong bent toward economics and I’ve always been very active in the church. I always knew that would be a strong part of my focus, so it’s kind of fun to be back in a faith-based organization,” says Mr. Jordan, 48, who is Presbyterian.

Mr. Jordan’s background includes work as a missionary in South Korea in the 1980s, teaching English to college students and seminarians. After earning a master’s degree in public affairs at Princeton University in 1990, he focused on international development, first at the nonprofit Population Resource Center, in New York, and later at the for-profit Futures Group International, in Washington. While at Futures, which he joined in 1994 and left in 2007, he ran a project supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development that pushes for the expansion of reproductive-health and HIV/AIDS programs around the world. For the past year, he has served as chief of program development at another charity, International Relief & Development, in Arlington, Va.

Catholic Medical Mission Board, which was founded in 1922, operates health-care programs in Haiti, Honduras, India, Kenya, South Africa, and Zambia, and works to create lasting health-care services around the globe.

Since he started his new job in January, Mr. Jordan has been responsible for the Catholic Medical Mission Board’s worldwide health-care programs, and its program for the approximately 200 doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals who volunteer their time. He is also leading the organization’s push for greater visibility in Washington and more U.S. government and international support for its programs.

Seeking more federal aid may seem a daunting task in the face of the recession and uncertainty over President Obama’s fiscal plan. But Mr. Jordan says he is cautiously hopeful that the charity’s presence in Washington will eventually pay off with greater support not only from government organizations such as the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but also from the World Bank, the Global Fund to Combat AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, and other entities.

John F. Galbraith, Catholic Medical Mission Board’s chief executive, says Mr. Jordan comes to the charity with not only a deep understanding of the business side of development, but with a knowledge of health care and an interest in working for a religious charity.

“We didn’t want someone in the position who was just a good manager,” says Mr. Galbraith. “We wanted someone who could also move us to the next level as far as looking at larger sustainable grants to do the work that we do.”

(Mr. Jordan declined to say how much he would be paid in the new job, and Mr. Galbraith also refused to provide that information.)

In its 2008 fiscal year, the last year for which figures are available, the charity operated on a budget of about $220-million, the lion’s share of that total — about $190-million — in the form of donated pharmaceuticals and other medical products and services. About $10-million came from individuals, and most of the remainder from corporations and foundations. The smallest slice of the pie, $791,568, came directly from government agencies.

If his organization can raise more government money, says Mr. Jordan, it may help stir private sources too.

“We could bring private funds to match what we might receive from a U.S. government grant and therefore make everyone’s dollars go farther,” he says.

Government grants may also be more likely to support multiple years of his charity’s programs, as opposed to the more short-term help Catholic Medical Mission Board usually receives from foundations. Such support, Mr. Jordan says, would help the charity have a broader and more permanent impact on the people it helps.

In an interview, Mr. Jordan spoke about his new job.

Having worked with both religious and secular groups, what is the biggest difference you’ve seen between them?

Charitable organizations, whether they’re faith-based or not, do come at this with heart. But one of the things that hasn’t been as much within the faith-based community is, where and how do you prove what you’re doing makes a difference? You know what you’re doing. You work off the anecdotal, you work off your heart and your feeling, you work off of all kinds of things, and so where and how do you step back and say, “That’s fabulous, now let’s come back in and really show people why this makes a difference.” How do you make sure that for every dollar that you’re spending, you’re doing the maximum that you can do to meet the mission? Part of it is applying some of the lessons from corporate structure.

Some religious groups are facing cutbacks in government support. Do you expect that to happen to your charity?

As we put together our budgets for the year in terms of how we do our fund raising, it’s certainly a concern. The profile of our average individual donor is a 60-or-older female Catholic who’s giving $55 a year to the organization. And we’ve got a lot of them.

How many of them are working off of pension checks? Are they going to continue what they were doing, or do they have to cut back? Is our corporate philanthropy going to be off? To date it hasn’t been, but this is still relatively early in terms of funding cycles. And what happens with government and multilateral funding? So certainly those questions are in the forefront. Where and how well we are diversified to weather storms in any one or other sector is what we have to be worried about.

Do you expect international development funds to shrink or grow under the Obama administration?

I don’t anticipate it shrinking. To give him credit, President Bush did a tremendous amount to expand funding for a variety of different issues, particularly HIV/AIDS, malaria, and a couple of different things, and so while we still as a country give a very small portion of our gross national product toward international development, it’s just a tiny fraction of our budget. It probably doubled during the Bush administration, which is significant, but it still leaves us, as a country, fairly low.

I wouldn’t expect, under President Obama, to see that figure go down at all. The question will be, What are the emphasis areas? Does the Obama administration want to focus more on education and less on democracy?

Will the stimulus package have an effect on international development and relief groups?

To the degree that jobs are saved and jobs are created, and to the degree that people who give to organizations like CMMB, or the American Red Cross, or any charitable organization, the stimulus should help us not lose funding. Part of it depends on how much the package itself changes the debate in Congress over the normal budget.

Do you expect other international-aid charities to open Washington offices?

I don’t see that as a necessary trend. I think the biggest thing for any of these groups, whether they’re faith-based or non-faith-based, are concepts of transparency and accountability. So where and how any organization proves the effectiveness of what it does, that’s what, in my mind, is going to be most important.

For international development work, it’s really going to come down to: Are you transparent? Are you achieving the goals that you said you would and within the resources that you said you’d do it? And that’s probably the most overwhelming trend I see continuing.