A Hollywood Journeyman Finds a Nonprofit Fund-Raising Career

I am a first generation Cuban-American, born and raised in Miami. My parents came over to the States shortly after Castro took over.

When I was young, it was my ambition to break into the movie business. I went to school at Penn State University and graduated there with a bachelor’s in film and video, and moved to New York City to break into the film business. I pounded the pavement for a month or two

Juan Ros Age: 40 First professional job: Production assistant, Life Under Water (a film produced for PBS’s American Playhouse), New York Current job: Director of development, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Foundation, Simi Valley, Calif.

and finally got my first job working on a one-hour TV movie, and that led me to more work. As a young single guy fresh out of college, I had the energy to do the job. It’s incredibly demanding: I was on my feet upward of 18, 20 hours a day, on the streets of New York doing jobs like crowd control.

I then worked as a production assistant on lots of different movies, responsible for the management and logistics of the shoot. For example, I would sometimes be in charge of keeping track of the crew’s walkie-talkies, or I would drive the film footage shot on a given day to the Technicolor lab for processing. On The Godfather: Part III, I was in charge of the extras — I would check them in, get them through hair and makeup, walk them to the set.

All along I really wanted to break into screenwriting. A buddy of mine and I started writing screenplays together, and in the fall of 1992 we decided to move to Los Angeles, where we thought there could be greater opportunities. He continued to work in production, but I didn’t — I worked at Warner Brothers Studios for a while, and then I worked as an assistant at a Hollywood management company called Brillstein-Grey Entertainment. My partner and I wrote a number of screenplays, but none of them ever got produced.

Then I met my wife, and I wanted to find a career that was conducive to a family life. I enjoyed working in Hollywood, but after a while I think I had a nagging sense that there was something better I could be doing with my life. I loved the movie business so much, though, I wasn’t sure what that would be.

Then I got involved with politics during the 1996 elections, when I volunteered with California’s Libertarian Party. I organized this one fund raiser that was almost accidentally successful — and they ended up hiring me as the executive director of the Libertarian Party of California.

Initially, they wanted me to do public relations and press: I did talk-radio interviews, I would write op-ed pieces and press releases. But I realized that if I wanted to keep my job and expand the party I needed to do some fund raising, and I saw that the easiest way to raise money was to go and cultivate relationships with the people who had money. So I started cultivating major donors.

I raised $10,000 gifts, $5,000 gifts, which for the Libertarian Party was huge when their entire operating budget in a year was $300,000. So I sort of had a natural ability to do it, and it turns out I really enjoyed it, too. I had skills that I hadn’t previously recognized.

So that was kind of on-the-job training in fund raising, at an institution where I was the only staff member for my first two years. And then, in 2001, I got hired by the ALS Association, in Calabasas Hills, Calif., which provides care and support for those suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease and finances research to find a cure, as their director of major gifts. I eventually became their vice president for philanthropy.

I love working in the nonprofit world, I love speaking with donors, talking with them about their philanthropic goals, finding a match between their goals and our institution and making that happen, and letting them know the impact that their giving will have. At ALS, I was in charge of fund raising at the national level.

Before I came on board I had heard of Lou Gehrig’s disease, but I didn’t realize truly how devastating it was. The person who hired me was smart enough to take me, in my first week on the job, to meet an ALS patient. This gentleman was in the final stages of the disease where he could not move at all, could not even respond to me when I introduced myself. It was shocking to see how someone could be so debilitated, needing nurses to even blink his eyes for him.

Through electrodes attached to his forehead, he could indicate yes or no answers to questions, and to see that his mind was still active and intact though his body was immobilized really drove the mission of the association home for me in a way that nothing else could have. So once I met him, it was very easy to get behind my job raising as much money as I possibly could to help fight this.

I hope that my tenure at the ALS Association left the organization in a better place than when I found it. In December I will be starting as director of development for the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Foundation. From a fund-raising standpoint there is a lot of potential to raise significant dollars in major gifts and planned giving for the foundation, and I am really looking forward to diving into that.

The ALS is an organization that has been an important part of my life, and I will continue to support it and its mission will always be important to me. But as a Cuban-American I have a lot of fond memories of Reagan’s presidency, and my grandfather — who was a big role model for me — was a great fan of Reagan’s. And now as an adult I realize that his ideas about government are very congruent with the Libertarian side of me. So going to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Foundation now really circles me back to the Libertarian Party, which is the last thing I would expect.

You can look at working in Hollywood as being a lot of fun and creative; you are entertaining people, but if you think about the lasting impact you are having in this world, it’s fleeting. At least that’s how it felt to me. There was so much money being spent on the movies I worked on, it was kind of dispiriting in a way. It just seems like maybe there is a better, more lasting use for that money.

Both my political and film work helped me to recognize the value of relationships, and to know how to deal with people of all different kinds of personalities. I realized that listening was a skill that came easily to me. Fund raising is all about relationships, and how to move a relationship forward. Fund raising is also partly sales, though you do it in a way that is sensitive to the donor and their needs.

Working in film taught me how to handle people when they have egos, or people with a lot of money, or high-profile people — they don’t scare me, I’m not intimidated by that. To me they’re just another person, and so when there’s a high-dollar donor that I’m going to be talking to, I never get nervous about it. I just see each person as an individual; I worked with Kevin Costner on a day-to-day basis on the set of JFK, and I saw him stepping out of his car first thing in the morning, not made up, just a regular guy grumpy because he hadn’t had his coffee yet. People are just people.

But I haven’t left that life completely behind. I finally got a screenplay produced, in 2003. My partner had a majority role in writing it. I was already working for the ALS Association, but he was gracious enough to allow me to have some creative credit on it. He got it independently funded, and he even directed it. It’s called They Call Him Sasquatch — a very low-budget, independent movie. My buddy got it into a few film festivals, and it’s available on DVD. That’s about as far as it’s gone, but I finally met my goal of having a movie produced with my name as a screenwriter. A little late in the game, but I guess better late than never.