A Social-Service Leader Uses Her Expertise to Tackle Global Problems

One April morning in 1993, Nan Dale was getting ready for work when she paused to watch the dedication of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on television. Under a gloomy sky, Elie Wiesel, the author and Holocaust survivor, took the podium and delivered a disturbing message. He warned that the United States was standing by as ethnic cleansing again unfolded in Europe, this time in the former Yugoslavia.

“I was so struck by those words I felt like I needed to do something about it,” says Ms. Dale, then the president of the Children’s Village, a child-welfare organization in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.

Before that moment, Ms. Dale had never considered working overseas. But a week and a half later, she touched down in Croatia for a four-day trip that would leave her with a passion for pursuing international work.

After contacting a local nonprofit group, she visited a refugee center overrun with survivors of the notorious Omarska prison camp. In the squalid army barracks, Ms. Dale saw how she could use her experience working with troubled children from New York to help young people who’d been traumatized by war. Young refugees paraded around the camp with the same bravado she’d seen so often in children from the Bronx or Harlem; they displayed a confidence that belied their inner torment.

Ms. Dale then took a four-month leave of absence from the Children’s Village and returned to the Balkans with seven of her colleagues. There, they built a center to serve teenagers, taught conflict resolution to young people, trained local nonprofit workers, and set up an exchange program for youngsters from their New York charity and young Bosnians, Croats, and Serbs.

When she returned to New York, Ms. Dale developed a program that took residents of the Children’s Village to Ghana, and served on a committee that investigated the impact of sanctions on Iraqi women and children.

In 2003, she was recruited to lead Helen Keller International, a global blindness and malnutrition group. In January, she was hired as executive director of Action Against Hunger USA, the American branch of an international charity that fights famine in 43 countries.

Board members say Ms. Dale, 65, has the management and fund-raising experience necessary to help the $22-million organization expand its reach. She is credited with expanding the budget of the Children’s Village from $3-million to $43-million during her 22-year tenure. She was also the architect of numerous programs, including Work Appreciation for Youth, which provides job training and mentors to young people and has been copied in more than a dozen sites.

“We have grown as an organization despite ourselves,” says Burton K. Haimes, a New York lawyer and board chair of Action Against Hunger USA. “We need someone who can professionalize all aspects of the organization, and I believe she will be able to do that and enable board members to step back and take a less active role in areas they shouldn’t be operating.”

Ms. Dale says one of her top priorities will be expanding the charity’s fund-raising efforts. In the past, the group has raised money primarily through a handful of special events, and she hopes to step up solicitations of foundations and corporations.

She also intends to bring more sophistication to a charity that operates on a lean budget, including by increasing salaries for staff members. While she will make $200,000 a year, she is quick to note that many staff members are not paid what she thinks would be appropriate. To determine how to pursue those and other goals, she has begun a strategic-planning process.

Ms. Dale says she is thrilled to manage a charity that weds her longstanding commitment to helping the disadvantaged with her enthusiasm for tackling global problems.

“I have a deep passion for issues of justice and fairness in the world, whether that’s inner-city kids who’ve never been given a cease-fire in their life or kids who don’t have enough to eat,” she says, sitting in her modest, windowless office in the charity’s headquarters. “Anyone who thinks it’s a level playing field out there just doesn’t understand.”

In an interview with The Chronicle, Ms. Dale discussed her new job.

What are your goals for the organization?

I really don’t know yet. I’m in a mode of listening and learning. But I have learned from discussions with the board and staff that there is a need for some basic systems development. We have such a low administrative rate. It’s about 8 percent.

Sometimes donors look on that as a good thing, but they shouldn’t. We need to build in some of the supports that people need to do their job well.

In the area of fund development, the agency has not yet even begun to tap the interest of the donor community. Yesterday, we got two grants, a $150,000 grant and a $20,000 grant. Neither of them we solicited. That says a lot about the organization, that people found us because of the quality of our work and our reputation. They had an interest in Uganda and Congo, two places where we have major and well-regarded programs. They came to us. As I said to staff here, imagine what we can do when we go to them.

What aspects of the job are you most excited about?

I love the passion of the staff. They work with minimal resources and do an extraordinary amount out of sheer guts and passion and energy. There is a spirit of cooperation that is unusual. The board is very energized and interested in the work.

I see a real need for what I have to offer. I’m not the program expert, but I’ve developed many programs over the years so I know what good programs look like.

What do you think the biggest challenges will be?

Action Against Hunger’s international network has five head offices, in France, Spain, New York, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Some of the challenge will perhaps be working on the programmatic strategic plan with the network as a whole.

Finding the role for the New York office independent of the network — and ensuring that the role is consistent with the network’s overall philosophy and approach — is a ticklish business.

There seems to be a need to determine how broadly to define our work. What do we mean by nutrition and food security? Do we want to embrace food fortification or home gardening? This agency defines nutrition narrowly, meaning therapeutic feeding centers that rescue people from the verge of death. And yet I also detect interest in a broader definition.

Did the deaths of the 17 Action Against Hunger France aid workers in Sri Lanka in August have any influence on the American affiliate?

None that I’ve seen so far. People are wary, but I haven’t heard anybody say I want to withdraw my application, for example, to work in south Sudan. Sometimes the concern is you have to convince aid workers that it’s time to leave. People get so committed to the population. We do have a major security initiative that predates the attack. It is being examined.

Will advocacy be a big part of your work?

Advocacy is part of our founding charter. We’re neutral in the field but we’re not unobservant. We bear witness and make public what we see. That’s a very big difference between Action Against Hunger and other organizations.

One of the things that bothered me the most when I worked in Bosnia was that you couldn’t have a point of view. And it was so clear to me that there was a point of view to be had; it was a genocide.