Former Diplomat to Seek More Partnerships as Head of Lutheran World Relief

Daniel Speckhard comes from a long line of Lutheran pastors. His great-great-grandfather, George, started the first faith-based U.S. school for the deaf in the 1870s, and his great-grandfather, grandfather, and father were all Lutheran pastors.

Mr. Speckhard took a different path, working in some of the world’s hot spots. He served as U.S. ambassador in Belarus and in Greece during an economic crisis, and was a diplomat in Iraq. Next month he will return to his family roots as he assumes leadership of Lutheran World Relief.

“I’ve always had a passion for public service and that led me to government,” says Mr. Speckhard, 54. “But there are similarities between that and pastoring; it’s a service mentality.”

The charity he will lead seeks to improve the lives of small-scale farmers and others struggling with poverty in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Part of what attracted Mr. Speckhard to the job is the organization’s commitment to supporting needy people of all faiths.

“That’s an important core value that I care about, and that Lutherans in general care about,” he says. “You help your fellow man and you don’t ask questions.”

Broad Experience

He is also excited, he says, about applying experience from other parts of his career. As the Office of Management and Budget’s expert on Africa in the 1980s, he reviewed foreign-aid programs, including nearly every U.S. food-aid project before it was approved. He also helped promote the idea of debt forgiveness for Africa, he says. Later, he was an examiner for the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, where he worked with officials in Africa and India on development programs.

When Mr. Speckhard moved to State Department assignments in Greece, Belarus, and Iraq, he drew on all that experience and began to see more clearly how poverty, natural disasters, hunger, and debt can lead a country to long-term instability and make it vulnerable to corruption, uprisings, and terrorism—which can spill over to the United States and threaten its security.

“It’s impossible to do development in the middle of conflict,” he says. “It creates huge challenges when you’re trying to restore infrastructure and get an economy on a new path to development.”

Mr. Speckhard’s depth of knowledge about development was one reason he was picked to succeed the Rev. John Nunes, who stepped down last year to take a job at Valparaiso University, says Gloria Edwards, the group’s board chair.

“His skill set is very amazing,” she says. “It was just very clear that he was the right choice.”

Mr. Speckhard says one of his main goals for the charity is building strong partnerships with corporations. He says in his most recent work—as an adviser to a software company, Palantir Technologies, which builds software that can integrate large amounts of data for nonprofits, government agencies, and others—he was struck by how businesses today are taking steps to align their business interests with doing good around the world.

“They’re not just interested in giving a couple million dollars so they can be seen as having a good social conscience,” he says.

Corporations are much more interested, he says, in working on longer-term projects with global nonprofits, which he calls “a really cool dynamic.”
As an example of the kind of corporate partnerships he wants to create, he points to the Hershey Company’s work providing expertise and assistance to cocoa farmers who are among the groups aided by Lutheran World Relief.

Data Integration

Mr. Speckhard also wants to apply what he learned at Palantir about using technology to integrate data and other information to make the work of the Lutheran World Relief’s employees, whether they operate in other countries or at its Baltimore headquarters, easier and less redundant.

To that end, he wants to provide the nonprofit’s workers with mobile devices so that things like photos of the charity’s work, program data, and marketing information can be smoothly integrated.

“I want a system to cut across all the different aspects, whether it’s the international program groups responsible for the projects or the marketing and donor-relations groups who want to be able to use that information to reach out to donors and update them on our work,” he says.

Integrated data systems cost money. That’s why Mr. Speckhard wants to help the charity double its budget, now at slightly more than $45-million, in the next eight years.

Mr. Speckhard says he is not intimidated by the challenges of fundraising, and that raising money for charity is not that different from being a diplomat.

“What you’re doing as a diplomat is working across cultures and countries to sell ideas and policies and identifying common purpose,” he says. “I’m basically going to be doing the same thing with Lutheran World Relief, which is creating an interest and a passion in what we’re doing.”