An Accidental CEO Builds Up a Grass-Roots Charity

St. Baldrick’s Foundation

Kathleen Ruddy, the leader of St. Baldrick’s Foundation, the second-largest supporter of childhood cancer research after the federal government, can tirelessly rattle off data about her charity’s mission.

She tells how children with cancer are often diagnosed much later in their disease’s progression than adults are, about the toll treatments take on young, developing bodies, and how little government funding for cancer research — only 4 percent — is earmarked for children’s diseases.

She tells the story of St. Baldrick’s, the charity she has steered since it was a grass-roots fundraising project in 2001, which raised $39 million last year and a quarter-billion dollars since its founding. The organization’s rapid rise is all the more remarkable because Ruddy had never previously led a nonprofit.

She reels off the organization’s accomplishments with crisp aplomb. But when she talks about individual kids who’ve suffered from illness, her voice breaks. She sniffles. The tears flow.

It all started, says the 52-year-old leader, when she was a high-school freshman who aspired to become a doctor. Her first day as a volunteer in a hospital pediatrics ward, an ailing toddler spent her entire shift crying for his mother.

“He was 2, and there’s only so much you can do to reason with him. He needed comforting in a way that no one else could provide,” the charity leader says, dabbing her eyes.

Her dream career of pediatrician would mean seeing a lot more children in distress, she realized. That day after her volunteer shift, she told her mother that she wasn’t sure she could handle it. “My mom was like, ‘Honey, you’ve got plenty of time. You’ll figure something out.’ And I was like, What am I going to do with my life?”

‘A Classic Bait-and-Switch’

Ruddy found a mission in 2001, when she took a job at what is now called CureSearch National Childhood Cancer Foundation and was asked to take charge of the St. Baldrick’s events, which were being incubated at CureSearch and rapidly growing. The events, which started as a St. Patrick’s Day fundraising event by a trio of men who worked for insurance companies, asked participants to secure pledges in return for shaving their heads, in solidarity with young chemotherapy patients. The money was earmarked for pediatric cancer research.

CureSearch had hired her away from the American Red Cross’s Los Angeles chapter to start its first serious effort to win big gifts. Instead, she was immediately asked to oversee the St. Baldrick’s project. “It was the classic bait-and-switch,” Ruddy says.

Her protests proved futile: “My boss said, ‘You’ve run events before — and you’re Irish.’ "

Ruddy grew up near Los Angeles. In addition to her sensitivity to children’s pain, high-school chemistry derailed her plans to become a doctor. But she embraced volunteerism, creating a youth-volunteering program at her local hospital.

At Loyola Marymount University, where she led the service club, she called alumni for the college’s phone-athon.

“It wasn’t scary,” she says. “I wasn’t asking for something for myself, which would feel awkward. I was just asking for something I believed in, to people who shared that affinity.” Fundraising just felt like a natural career path, she says.

A call from a recruiter led her to CureSearch and a cause she wanted to work for because she had lost several friends and family members to cancer. Since taking the job at St. Baldrick’s, she says, both her parents have survived cancer; her father is currently winding up successful treatment for his third bout with the disease.

Rapid Growth

Under Ruddy’s leadership, St. Baldrick’s, now ensconced in a warren of offices in this Los Angeles suburb, began as a home-office enterprise — an all-consuming one.

“For the first year, she probably never got out of her pajamas except when she was going for groceries,” says John Bender, one of the insurance-industry executives who started St. Baldrick’s and who still serves on its board.

Becky Weaver, St. Baldrick’s chief mission officer, was added to the team just as the fundraising project became a full-fledged charity in 2005. She says Ruddy was well equipped to lead the organization through a period of rapid growth.

“What she’s really good at is relationships,” Weaver says. “Even in the early years, there would be people who called up to create an event. Sometimes they barely knew how to use a computer. She was very patient with them. She meets people where they are.”

The charity leader has also, twice, gone bald for the cause, each time in honor of specific children she befriended in the course of doing her job. “I can’t ask people to do something I wouldn’t do myself,” Ruddy says.

Talking to Volunteers

This afternoon, the charity leader settles in her office and calls some of St. Baldrick’s most stalwart volunteers to deliver news about the charity’s latest round of grants ($19 million), invite the volunteers to meetings near them with the researchers their work supports, and ask if they need help.

Her third call of the afternoon is to Ken Kluth, who has raised more than $500,000 in Montana over the course of 11 years. Kluth is joined by Tammy Buchanan, an eight-year volunteer whose 11-year-old son, a cancer survivor, also volunteers. Together, he and his mom have raised about $55,000.

“That’s a research grant!” Ruddy happily tells Buchanan.

Ruddy asks Kluth about his two nephews, whose deaths spurred his involvement in the cause. Where were they treated?, she asks. One of the boys, Kluth says, was never treated.

“His brain tumor wasn’t discovered till the autopsy,” Kluth says.

Ruddy exhales sharply.

“There’s nothing harder than going to a child’s funeral,” Kluth adds quietly.

The charity leader dabs her eyes, murmurs agreement.

After hanging up with Kluth and Buchanan — two hours after she started on this round of calls — Ruddy sits at her desk, wet eyed and trembling.

How does she cope with this job? Not always well, she acknowledges. “There are times when you lose a kid, and you feel like you’re personally failing,” she says. “For a long time, I thought I just had to run faster on the treadmill.”

Learning on the Job

As St. Baldrick’s grew, the leader who stumbled into her role found herself growing, too, and not always comfortably. “I was the executive director, but I never had any formal training for that,” says Ruddy, whose previous experience had strictly been fundraising. “I’m happy to figure out HR and IT and accounting and board governance and all these things I’ve never before.”

The result, however, was that when problems outside of her expertise arose, “I would have to go to Google. I would acquaint myself with the issue before I could even go to the lawyer and say, I think I need some legal guidance,’ and frame my question professionally.”

Last year, Ruddy hired a chief operating officer — Bill Warnick, who came from Lombardia Capital Partners — to focus on internal day-to-day matters so that she could spend more time meeting with donors and partners, and being the organization’s public voice.

“We did suggest it because Kathleen was stretched too thin,” Bender says. “And when you have to put out fires, you can’t focus on the mission.”

Ruddy says she regrets not hiring a chief operating officer sooner. “Over time, I have become better at accepting the things I’m not great at. When you’re not great at something, then it’s like: I stink at this. And I’m letting kids down.”

Part of the problem, she believes, is the nonprofit management mind-set of doing more with less. “You want to be efficient. So you think, I can learn this, I can save us money. Like many leaders, I’ve learned this the hard way. But the big mistakes, I only make once.”