From Capitol Hill

Scooping Chili Gives Warm Feeling To New Red Cross Boss

By Eleanor Clift

“If you knew where I was right now you’d be shocked,” Red Cross President Gail McGovern confided over the phone. To take the call, she had found an empty supply closet in the Hart Building on the Senate side of Capitol Hill. “It’s very roomy, and if you need a chair, I have about 100 of them in here,” she continued with gritty good humor, a trait that should serve her well in the trying days ahead.  

McGovern had just returned from surveying the damage done by Hurricane Gustav in Houston and Galveston, and she was asking Congress for $150 million to help the Red Cross replenish its disaster relief reserves after a string of events she terms “epic.”  Since April, when she took over an organization still reeling from the sudden resignation of its previous CEO, Mark Everson, there has been a record tornado season, the worst Midwest flooding in 50 years, wild fires in the West, and back-to-back hurricanes that threatened New Orleans, wreaked havoc on coastal cities, and disrupted the Republican Convention. 

The last time the Red Cross turned to Congress for money was 2004 after four hurricanes hit Florida in rapid succession. Of the $70 million Congress awarded, the Red Cross was able to return about half to the federal treasury. Since then, the magnitude of the natural disasters and their frequency underscore the growing enormity of the challenge. The Red Cross estimates that Hurricane Gustav relief efforts alone will cost $70 million. With Wall Street in a meltdown and federal dollars scarcer than ever, the competition for charitable contributions is intense.

Governors are now setting up their own funds for disaster relief, a phenomenon that could siphon funds from the Red Cross. When asked about it, McGovern says, “People when they’re philanthropic have certain causes they have an affinity for. I don’t think if we don’t collect a dollar that it’s going to the governor’s fund for example.” There are a lot of players in any major relief effort. McGovern calls them partners, and they include everyone from the NAACP and the National Urban League to the Southern Baptist Convention and all kinds of faith-based organizations. The McCain and Obama campaigns direct visitors to their Web sites to contribute to the Red Cross but they also direct people to other organizations.

McGovern taught marketing at Harvard Business School before joining the Red Cross, and she’s new to grassroots volunteering. She flew to Texas in the wake of Gustav to see for herself how the Red Cross shelter set up in Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center was operating. There were cots lined up as far as the eye could see. “I was there to pump up the troops, say hello to the chapter, give out a lot of hugs, and experience what the volunteers go through every day,” she said. She went from there to a huge staging area where one of the faith-based partners had brought in a mobile kitchen capable of making 45,000 meals a day. Volunteers were loading up American Red Cross vehicles to bring the food into neighborhoods where the power was out and homes damaged. McGovern spent two hours ladling out chili from the back of a truck.

She went from there to the airport wearing her Red Cross shirt and smelling of chili. People stopped her to say thank you, and when she arrived home after midnight, she says. “My faith in the human race had been restored and I’d fallen even more in love with the mission of the Red Cross. I walked into the house just floating on air.” Harnessing that passion to her expertise in marketing and management might help rebuild the Red Cross as a premiere service organization after the tough times of the last few years.  

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Eleanor Clift is a contributing editor for Newsweek magazine. Her column, “Capitol Letter” is posted each week on Newsweek.com and MSNBC. She is a regular political panelist on the nationally syndicated show The McLaughlin Group, which she has compared to “a televised food fight.” She is also a political contributor for the Fox News Channel.