Charity Leader Sees New Urgency for Global Outreach in Trump Era

Kira Horvath

The migrants were chased, robbed, and beaten as they tried to cross Libya. One man was shot in the foot; infection set in and the appendage had to be amputated. Gathered in the migrant waypoint of Agadez, Niger, the group of about 80 recounted how they ultimately abandoned efforts to reach Europe via the Mediterranean Sea.

Present and listening that February day was Sean Callahan, one month into his tenure as chief executive of Catholic Relief Services.

Soon thereafter, he was on another continent in a different meeting. In front of him in Louisville, Ky., was Mitch McConnell. The task: persuade the Senate majority leader to maintain U.S. spending on foreign assistance, currently about 1 percent of all federal outlays. In recent years, the money has been used to stem HIV/AIDS and slash malaria-related deaths, Mr. Callahan says, and it’s critical for improving security and economic conditions to keep the world’s tally of 65 million displaced people from rising.

“We are having these successes, but do people know it?” he says. “Does anyone know that the money invested in these things is actually having a result?”

That’s the message the 57-year-old charity leader is determined to carry to private donors and government officials alike. He will have to do so even as a Republican-controlled Congress looks to cut nonmilitary spending. And it will have to come alongside other priorities set out by Mr. Callahan as he settles in at the helm. They include growing Catholic Relief Services’ major-donor list and drawing more planned gifts; seeing through an overhaul of its management-software system that will streamline data analysis and audits; and spearheading a major campaign to address the global refugee crisis.

If Mr. Callahan is daunted by the responsibility of translating the needs of the world’s poorest for its most powerful while managing an organization that had a roughly $900 million operating budget in 2016, he doesn’t let on. His dedication to the charity and its work is reflected in a myriad of ways, according to colleagues. They cite as one example an early decision by the newly installed leader to move into a modest office at the organization’s Baltimore headquarters.

“He has given his life and his whole professional career to this work,” says Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City, a Catholic Relief Services board member. “It is a uniquely challenging time, but I think the organization is certainly ready for it.”

‘Sketchy Checkpoints’

Mr. Callahan studied Spanish as an undergraduate at Tufts University and earned a master’s degree there in law and diplomacy. He started with Catholic Relief Services in 1988 as a fellow. The aid organization sent him on a one-year assignment to Costa Rica, where he lived on $12 a day.

Then Hurricane Joan hit the region, devastating the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua. Mr. Callahan would spend four and half years in that country, building important and longstanding relationships and, he says, learning invaluable lessons about disaster response and development.

He moved on to other roles at Catholic Relief Services, including head of its East India office (where he met and worked alongside Mother Teresa in Kolkata) and head of human resources.

Bill O’Keefe, the charity’s vice president for government relations and advocacy, traveled extensively through Africa with Mr. Callahan in the early 1990s. He recalls a trip to Liberia and Sierra Leone, both then ravaged by brutal civil wars. The Catholic Relief Services team had to make its way “through multiple sketchy checkpoints” to reach food-distribution sites operated by the organization.

“What I have learned about Sean in being in these types of situations is, one, he is extremely levelheaded,” Mr. O’Keefe says. “He has been in very difficult situations and had to keep focused on the tasks at hand.”

Annemarie Reilly, another longtime colleague who currently serves as the nonprofit’s executive vice president for strategy, describes working with Mr. Callahan in Pakistan soon after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The U.S. government was mobilizing to attack the Taliban and hunt down Osama bin Laden, and Catholic Relief Services was readying for a wave of Afghan refugees to spill over the border into Pakistan.

“I remember meeting with Sean several times and [seeing] just how supportive he was of his staff” as they tried to decide how to respond, Ms. Reilly says.

“He cares deeply and listens deeply to people. He wants to hear different perspectives and hear about real experiences that people are having.”

Mr. O’Keefe and Ms. Reilly both describe Mr. Callahan as someone able to connect with everyone from world leaders to Catholic Relief Services’ most vulnerable and suffering beneficiaries. And he has a gift for remembering names and stories, they say, something that serves him well with co-workers, government and nonprofit partners, and donors. In September, when Archbishop Coakley and his fellow board members assembled the charity’s staff in its Baltimore headquarters to name the new chief executive, the announcement was met with spontaneous and sustained applause, according several people present.

Catholic Relief Services did not provide information on Mr. Callahan’s current compensation. His predecessor as CEO, Carolyn Woo, was paid $478,545 in salary and benefits in fiscal 2015, according to tax filings. Mr. Callahan, who was chief operating officer at that time, was paid $272,177.

Michael Stulman/Catholic Relief Services

Shifting Budget

Catholic Relief Services raised $390 million from private sources in 2015 — up $29 million from the year before — placing it 61st on The Chronicle’s most recent ranking of the U.S. charities that receive the most donor support. It spent about $900 million in 2016 responding to disasters, aiding refugees, and running health, agriculture, education, and economic-development programs, according to the organization.

Some years, the charity gets as much as 60 percent of its operating budget from government sources. As with many global aid groups, its budget can swing by tens of millions of dollars or more a year due to world events. Example: Catholic Relief Services spent more $269 million last year in drought-ridden Ethiopia, more than three times what was budgeted.

The charity currently has about 350,000 individual donors. Mr. Callahan says he and his colleagues are working to increase that number. He is focused particularly on boosting planned giving and major gifts. He wants to show wealthy donors the impact of a gift to Catholic Relief Services compared with donating to well-heeled universities and big arts institutions.

“You might give to Notre Dame,” Mr. Callahan says. “What will that get you? What will you get if you give to CRS? You could save the life of the child and provide the antiretroviral therapy for $500 a year. Now think about that going someplace else and having your name on the back of a chair.”

Asked if he enjoys fundraising, Mr. Callahan is frank: “It was not something that I was really cherishing doing.”

What he does enjoy is sharing the work that his organization is doing around the world, he says, and explaining to donors how they can take part. He likes to think of it as selling programs, not fundraising.

“My own family, we give to CRS because I think we’re doing a good job in development,” Mr. Callahan says. “I think if I’m going to ask other people to do it, then we need to pony up as well.”

American donors, he says, like to know that the work is cost-efficient. He cites the success of Catholic Relief Services’ work with the Global Fund to reduce malaria in West Africa by distributing bed nets, an effort involving numerous governments and aid groups that is estimated to have saved the lives of 6 million children during the last five years.

“If [donors] can see those things, then they feel comfortable,” he says.

Tablets and Drones

Mr. Callahan and his colleagues say the biggest changes in development work in the past decade have been wrought by technology. Twenty years ago, when aid workers went out into a remote, rural region of Africa or Asia, they might be out of communication for a week or more. Now Catholic Relief Services and other groups use mobile hardware and software systems that provide real-time data collection in the field.

For example, the charity has used feedback collected with computer tablets in the Central African Republic to modify procurement and distribution of building materials for people returning to villages destroyed during that nation’s civil war. Recipients might report needing less of one item and more of something else.

“We right away now can report that back, so for the next shipment we don’t give them any plastic tarps,” Mr. Callahan says. “They need zinc sheets.”

Catholic Relief Services is also using drones and geospatial data collected by satellite to work with particularly isolated populations, Mr. Callahan says. In poverty-stricken Madagascar, staff noted that one of the charity’s sites providing basic nutrition and health services for mothers and children had far lower usage rates than others. A review of satellite data about the immediate area showed that users of the health stop had “to go down this real steep ravine into a river and then across the river and then up the ravine,” he says.

Staff determined that an alternative location, though a bit farther away, would actually be easier for mothers to access.

In concert with the increasingly sophisticated field technology, Catholic Relief Services is overhauling its enterprise-management-software system, a seven-figure investment started under Mr. Callahan’s predecessor and scheduled to be completed in 2018. The new system will serve as a central hub for accounting, human-resources, and supply-chain-management work. It will enable the charity to better monitor and evaluate projects, improve accountability and learning, and quickly access data from across the organization, Mr. Callahan says.

“I can tell you how many farmers we have around the world. The problem with it is I’m asking people to do a lot of work” to manually compile that information, he says by way of example. The new software system will allow him to find such details without burdening his staff.

No Promises

At his February meeting with Mr. McConnell, Mr. Callahan says, the senator praised Catholic Relief Services’ work but stopped short of saying foreign-aid spending would be spared from the budget ax. In March, the Trump administration released a preliminary budget that called for more than $10 billion in cuts to foreign assistance.

Catholic Relief Services has long enjoyed bipartisan support, say the charity’s leaders, and they expect that to continue. They are meeting with members of Congress and encouraging religious leaders and individual donors to call and write their elected officials.

“I think Americans are really busy, and to have time to think of the other isn’t always in our priority,” Mr. Callahan says. Still, “right now, there seems to be a lot of energy behind thinking of other people, and people are getting engaged. We would like to continue that.”

When asked about his nearly three decades at Catholic Relief Services, Mr. Callahan, who is married with two children, puts it this way: “I think people do see the work of CRS not as a job but as a mission and a vocation.”

He saw that reflected most recently when the charity spoke out against President Trump’s executive order to suspend refugee admissions to the United States. Mr. Callahan received messages from staff members in places like Iraq who said they had never been more proud to work for the charity.

“When you have great people that you share this with, when you feel the validation that your work is having an impact and doing things, it isn’t a job; it isn’t being paid,” Mr. Callahan says.

Another of his priorities is to help spearhead a campaign with Caritas Internationalis, a global network of 160 Catholic charities, to address the refugee crisis. He aims to kick it off in September, in conjunction with International Peace Day.

One goal of that effort, he says, is to bring Americans into contact with refugees and foster understanding “that they are not all jihadis coming over here but actually women and children and families that can contribute and make our country more diverse and interesting and different.” When it comes to this particular message, Mr. Callahan notes, his organization has some higher-up help than do most charities.

“It is nice for us,” he says. “We have Pope Francis, who speaks that same language and wants people to get involved.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported that Catholic Relief Services used drones rather than satellite data to scout a health-services site in Madagascar.