National Health Charities Face Challenge of Preserving Local Focus Amid Mergers

A cool $500,000 a year.

That’s what the American Cancer Society’s Great Lakes Division — formed from the recent merger of the society’s Indiana and Michigan divisions — expects to save in accounting, clerical, and other costs as a result of the consolidation.

The money, says Theresa Bentz, chief executive officer of the Great Lakes Division, will go to cancer programs in both states.

Finding more dollars for programs is one of the chief goals of a reorganization trend that is reshaping several of the nation’s large health charities.

But as the formation of the Great Lakes Division underscores, the benefits of reorganization often are accompanied by a big challenge: insuring that local programs don’t suffer because of a centralization in governance and finances.

“It’s important for each state, each community, to keep its own culture,” acknowledges Ms. Bentz. “If you approach it in that manner and you still get your economies of scale, then you’ve got a win-win situation.”

Ms. Bentz, a 23-year cancer-society veteran who previously served as executive vice-president of the Michigan division, says the merger has made for a more efficient organization that still allows volunteers, staff members, and donors to maintain their local identity and a degree of autonomy.

Before the merger, the separate Indiana and Michigan boards totaled 79 people. Now, Great Lakes is governed by a 21-member board made up of Ms. Bentz, 10 volunteers from Michigan, and 10 from Indiana.

The new board makes budget and administrative decisions for cancer-society operations in both states. The entire territory has been divided into three regions — Indiana, metropolitan Detroit, and the remainder of Michigan.

A Great Lakes vice-president is in charge of each region, with the aim of bringing a local focus to cancer programs and services. The vice-president for the Indiana region works closely with staff members and also lobbies the legislatures in both Indiana and Michigan on policies that prevent cancer and help people who have the disease.

“The expertise is closer to the local communities than it’s ever been,” Ms. Bentz says.

Cancer officials say it is too early to tell whether the merger will make much difference to fund raising, but the preliminary indications are encouraging. Donations in both Michigan and Indiana have risen about 12 per cent for the current fiscal year, which began September 1, compared with the same period in the previous year, a Great Lakes spokesman says.

For donors, the system may look quite different than it did before the merger. Under the old system, when a donor in, say, Indianapolis, gave $100 to the cancer society, $40 of it went to headquarters in Atlanta for national programs and administration, and $60 stayed in Indiana. With the merger, $40 will still go to the national office, but any portion of the remaining $60 can be spent in either Indiana or Michigan, depending on how a majority of Great Lakes board members vote on the goals and needs of the three regions.

With an equal number of directors from Indiana and Michigan, turf wars seem unlikely at this point. But the makeup of the Great Lakes board could change, Ms. Bentz concedes.

“It’s not written in the bylaws that it has to stay 10 for 10,” she says. “The philosophy of the board is that you get the best people. It doesn’t matter where they live.”

Programs in each state will get more money than before, Ms. Bentz says, because the merger has lowered overhead and made more resources available for fund raising and local programs.

“Our goal is not to go in and take all of Indiana’s money and spend it in Michigan. That will not work,” she says.

Great Lakes officials play down any question of controversy over the cancer-society merger, but they do hint that there were a few bruised feelings among some volunteers.

“The sense of loss — to the extent there is a sense of loss — was a very limited group of people who happened to have been on the (Indiana) division board for some time,” concedes Gregory L. Pemberton, an Indianapolis lawyer and long-time cancer-society volunteer who now sits on the board of the Great Lakes unit.

Still, he says, the Indiana and Michigan boards voted “95 per cent in favor” of the merger.

“The only dissent was not that this is a bad idea, the dissent was, ‘Maybe the timing isn’t right,’ ” Mr. Pemberton says. “It was a very positive vote.”