Spring 2004 Issue
A Conversation with National Advocacy Council Member Hazel Sanger
Hazel Sanger, senior director at Mellon Private Wealth Management, is vice chair of the CDC Foundation’s Finance Committee and a member of the CDC Foundation’s National Advocacy Council. Sanger has had a distinguished career in wealth management, serving as vice president at Thorndike, Doran, Paine & Lewis; director of Atlanta Capital Management; and director of The Arden Group before its acquisition by Mellon last summer. A graduate of Oxford University, Sanger is chairman of the Advisory Council of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She also is a member of the Georgia Advisory Board for the Trust for Public Land and an Honorary Board member of The Atlanta Opera.
As a member of the CDC Foundation’s Finance Committee, you advise the Foundation on how best to manage its resources. What do you see as the Foundation’s biggest challenges in this area?
I would like to see the Foundation build a substantial endowment fund so that it could make a more significant contribution to the budget. That would be the best protection against the inevitable fluctuations in the markets that affect fundraising and therefore program funding. Unlike many of the well-known foundations, which were funded by successful entrepreneurs such as Ford, Rockefeller or Gates, the CDC Foundation was established by Congress in 1995 and started life with modest resources. So the Foundation must depend today on financial support from individuals, corporations and foundations. But we have no guarantee of what that total amount will be from year to year.
You have been very enthusiastic about the work of the CDC Foundation. What value does the CDC Foundation bring to CDC?
Public health is subject to the same budgetary constraints as all the other activities of the federal government. The CDC Foundation exists only to enable the CDC to extend its reach. Without the resources that come in through the CDC Foundation, CDC’s ability to fund specialized activities would be diminished.
Peter Drucker, the management expert, has observed that the problems facing government today are so large that public-private partnerships are the only way to address them, while private sector skills and thinking have much to contribute to the public sector. What interests me is seeing how these ideas are being put into practice at the Foundation and at CDC.
Through your affiliation with the CDC Foundation you have had the opportunity to learn more about CDC and its programs. What has surprised you the most?
The two things that stand out are the extraordinary range of CDC’s work and the caliber of the people. From the original work on malaria and, later, the eradication of smallpox, the CDC is now active in many more areas of public health, such as violence prevention, environmental health, birth defects and response to terrorists. The scientists who work at CDC would be prized in any commercial laboratory, but they choose to work at CDC, as government employees, because of the value, satisfaction - and sometimes - the excitement of the work.
Which public health issues are you most interested in?
Preventable diseases resulting from obesity and tobacco use are an obvious priority. Less obvious is CDC’s work in environmental health. Because CDC scientists have advanced technology that enables them to measure the levels of toxins inside the human body, we can now have evidence-based grounds for policy recommendations, as distinct from conjecture about what levels of toxins in the external environment are potentially dangerous to people. And given that travel and terrorism are two facts of life today, the increasingly global scope of preventive action.
What other challenges does the CDC Foundation face?
Those of us who live in Atlanta have had the good fortune to hear many of the extraordinary scientists at CDC speak at meetings organized by the Foundation, so we have some insight into the depth and breadth - and value - of the activities at CDC. The challenge is how to take this across the country, to broaden support for CDC. The Foundation’s newly established National Advocacy Council is a step in this direction.
-Karen McDonald