United Way Leader Picked to Run Child-Advocacy Group

A 10-hour drive last year from an airport in India to the country’s tsunami-ravaged coast exposed Christine James-Brown

to images of poverty that still sear. She remembers seeing hundreds of children lining the dusty, sun-baked streets, drinking from pools of filthy water, and playing beside dilapidated shacks.

Such sights were not unusual during Ms. James-Brown’s three-year tenure as head of United Way International, which took her to nearly 30 countries. But a television program she watched this winter reminded her that children in the United States are not exempt from destitution.

The episode of 20/20 chronicled the lives of three children in the crumbling city of Camden, N.J. One boy, a homeless 4-year-old, slept in parks and unlicensed boarding houses, while a 6-year-old girl begged her father to quit drinking.

“It was almost like someone shaking me and saying, ‘The kids’ pain in India is absolutely unbelievable, but it’s also in every country, including the one you live in, including the backyard of the city you were born in,’” recalls Ms. James-Brown, a Philadelphia native.

The television program piqued Ms. James-Brown’s interest in a job for which she was being recruited: head of the Child Welfare League of America.

In April, Ms. James-Brown, 54, joined the 87-year-old membership and advocacy organization as its chief executive officer.

In that position, she will manage the $15-million organization and help represent its 800 nonprofit members in Washington. She is paid $250,000 a year in her new role.

Ms. James-Brown’s move comes after nearly 30 years spent at United Ways. She began her career in 1979 with the United Way of Southeastern Pennsylvania, rising to its leadership 15 years later.

There, she managed 130 employees and an annual fund-raising drive of $50-million.

Colleagues credited her with recruiting prominent local leaders to serve on the board and helping them recognize the potential of the United Way to effect change.

In 2004, Ms. James-Brown moved to United Way International, where she was charged with strengthening local organizations overseas and helping to develop global standards for affiliated charities.

In one sense, Ms. James-Brown isn’t a typical pick to head the Child Welfare League of America, as she hasn’t spent her career in child welfare.

But board members and people who work in the field say her years with the United Way, which supports all types of human-service organizations, have given her a deep understanding of the importance of collaborating with a range of groups to solve problems.

That kind of collaboration is particularly important for child-welfare organizations, given the increasingly complex public-policy environment in which they operate.

Helping children isn’t just about protecting young people from neglect or abuse, experts say; it’s also about fighting poverty, providing affordable housing, strengthening mental-health programs, and responding to a host of other challenges.

“Christine is almost uniquely qualified,” says Patrick McCarthy, vice president for system and service reform at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which supports the Child Welfare League. “Her experiences in her previous jobs as a United Way executive give her an ease, a natural affinity to think about problems holistically.”

In an interview with The Chronicle, Ms. James-Brown discusses her new job.

Why did you leave United Way International?

I went to United Way International to work toward the development of a global United Way system. That’s moving forward nicely, so I was close to the end of the work I’d gone there to do. Then I got a call from a recruiter. Initially I didn’t think too much about it, but the more I learned about the League and its work, the more excited I became.

How have your past positions prepared you for this job?

The Child Welfare League is a business. It’s a not-for-profit business. I’ve had 13 years of experience simply running a business. You have to be organized, you have to know how to work with the board of directors.

A subset of that is around resource development and the need to be able to think creatively not just about fund raising, but about how you bring resources into an organization.

I’ve had years of having to do that and trying to maximize the dollars that are going out to deliver the services you’re committed to delivering.

Also, I’ve always worked in a very cross-sector way in my jobs. For example, I co-chaired an effort in Philadelphia looking at how to bring more supermarkets into low-income communities. On the surface, that seems like it’s disconnected from children. But if you think about it, a major reason children aren’t doing well in school is because they aren’t getting high-quality food to eat, they’re going to school with a bag of potato chips and a soda. And that’s because they’re living in communities where that’s what there is to offer.

Another example is working on a board that’s focused on work-force-development issues, and being on another board that’s working on job-development issues, and looking where those two things come together. You can look at work-force development and create all kinds of work-force opportunities without working on the supply side and thinking about whether people are going to be able to fill those jobs.

My way of working in the community is to say, We can’t approach this in a very siloed way.

I also think my international work was very helpful in two ways. One is you have to get outside of your country to understand your country better. The other is the whole notion of innovation and how you identify and share innovation.

Outside of the United States there is so much innovation in how people have had to deal with issues, often because there is not a pre-existing system.

You’re representing 800 member organizations. Is it difficult to find one voice for all those groups?

I’ve been visiting with members around the country in small groups, just for us to talk about that very question. Clearly it’s challenging, particularly because the resources are not what they need to be for kids. But I think there is a shared vision around children reaching their potential.

How do you answer concerns that you haven’t spent your career in child welfare?

When I was in the United Way system and they would hire someone from outside the United Way system, I would say, They don’t know about this. So of course there are some people with that concern.

But I do have the commitment, the interest, and the experience working more broadly with child-welfare organizations as a subset of the groups I worked with. Child-welfare organizations are always part of United Ways.

I always feel that you look at the core competencies of people you’re hiring much more than the subject content.

Will I have to be on the fast track around some of the specifics, some of the alphabet soup? Of course I will. But I think I will bring as much to the issue of child welfare because of the broader context I will be able to put it into.