Elaine M. Decker
Position: Executive director, The Fund for Community Progress
Background: Elaine Decker began her career in marketing and communications, working for 17 years as a category director for Colgate-Palmolive Co. in New York City, where she had full profit and loss responsibility for $90 million in national sales. She moved to Providence in 1992, after getting married, and worked for two years at Health Enterprises in North Attleboro as marketing director. Then she worked for Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., where in two years as director of annual giving, she helped the college raise $3 million to help cover operating costs. She joined The Fund for Community Progress on Sept. 21, succeeding Nondas Voll, who had led the group for more than 13 years.
Education: B.A. in art, 1967, Brown University
Residence: Providence
Age: WND
Elaine Decker says she wants to draw on her rich marketing and communications background to help put a human face on the 24-year-old Fund for Community Progress, an alliance of 26 grassroots agencies devoted to strengthening neighborhoods and fighting poverty, violence and discrimination, with the motto “change not charity.”
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In a recent PBN interview, she discussed her plans and the climate for initiating social change in Rhode Island.
PBN: How receptive is Rhode Island to efforts to bring about social change?
DECKER: It’s a big question for me because I’m coming into the area new, but my sense from what I’ve learned – and I’ve only been here five weeks – [is] it’s improving, in large part, because the cumulative impact of all of these smaller agencies bringing these issues to peoples’ consciousness has enabled them to get it on the radar of some of the larger companies and organizations. I think that the affordable-housing issue is a terrific example. It’s something that started very grassroots and has now become embraced by those that have the power and the voice to make it a reality.
PBN: Did you make any endorsements for this election?
DECKER: I would be very reluctant to make any observations from a political point of view. I personally don’t feel it is appropriate for me to be doing that. And I think that we really should be looking at more issues, and the primary issue that relates to us is the affordable housing.
PBN: Why is the distinction between change and charity so important for the fund?
DECKER: Because, I think, the people who are willing to make contributions to these causes want to know that those who are benefiting are also making an effort to improve their lives, so that hopefully, they’ll reach a point where they won’t need assistance from other people. And our agencies, many of them, have strong components that have to do with education and awareness and support and services.
PBN: Advocacy is part of the nonprofits’ missions as well. Does the fund participate in the advocacy, promoting certain legislation, etc.?
DECKER: We’re legally not allowed to be formal advocates for legislation. What we do is, we advocate for issues, in the sense of trying to bring public awareness to them. Where the fund is different from, say, United Way, is that we have a tendency to find those issues at the ground level, grassroots, before they have percolated up enough in the public consciousness. We tend to kind of act as an incubator.
PBN: What is an example?
DECKER: The Childhood Lead Action Project would be an example. … They were extremely instrumental in getting [the state’s lead paint abatement law] passed. … It was quite a while in coming. It took a lot of persistence to get the legislators behind it. Fortunately, they’ve all embraced it.
PBN: What are your immediate plans for the fund?
DECKER: One of the things they asked in the interview was: What is your first day going to be like? [My response was:] I’m going to be on the phone with every one of my member agencies, setting up appointments, so I can go out and meet them and meet their constituents and actually see what it is they’re doing in their communities … to see the people whose lives they are changing, so I can hear firsthand the stories of what they’ve done.
PBN: Why is that important to you?
DECKER: Because, from my perspective, that will help me put forth a better message to the people we’re asking to support us financially – to be able to have them better understand the real difference their contributions make in the lives of actual people.
PBN: What would you like to change and what would you like to keep the same about the fund?
DECKER: The things I plan to keep the same would be the wonderful partnerships that we have with the member agencies, because they are, on a day-to-day basis, involved in all of the work the fund does. They help with the campaign. They go to the workplaces. They make presentations, so it is their fund. The things I would do a little differently – and it would have to do with my background being a business background – is I will have a more formalized planning process, and to do that, planning a little further upstream.
PBN: How big is the fund?
DECKER: We will bring in about $300,000. That’s our goal for this year.
PBN: Does that include operating costs?
DECKER: Yes. We’re a two-person office, that’s a maximum. And the way we keep costs down is, we get a lot of people to volunteer to do work we might otherwise have to pay someone to do. We keep our expenses as low as we possibly can. We’re not going to be increasing expenses, so that if we bring in extra money, all of that increase will go to the agencies.
