Marsha J. Evans, who was brought in to help restore the reputation of the American Red Cross after the Sept. 11 attacks, said yesterday that she was resigning as president of the organization, which has been barraged by fresh criticism over its response to Hurricane Katrina.

The American Red Cross announced that Marsha J. Evans, its president and chief executive, has resigned, effective at the end of this month.
Related The Announcement (redcross.org)

Public officials, survivors and even Red Cross volunteers have lobbed complaints about the organization’s performance, on issues like its absence in the flood plains most directly affected by the storm and its failure to provide enough blankets in shelters.

The organization made a number of serious missteps, providing an inaccurate count of the evacuees it was housing in hotels and handing out some debit cards that did not work.

But Charles D. Connor, the organization’s chief spokesman, said Ms. Evans’s departure had little to do with those complaints. “It had to do more with coordination and communication with the board,” he said.

The board, which is dominated by representatives of the local chapters, has clashed with a succession of leaders. Ms. Evans’s predecessor, Dr. Bernadine Healy, left over major policy differences with the board after the Sept. 11 attacks, and before that, Elizabeth Dole, a consummate politician, struggled with the board over her eight-year tenure, according to longtime staff members.

Mrs. Dole declines to speak about the Red Cross, and a spokeswoman for the organization said Ms. Evans and the board’s chairwoman, Bonnie McElveen-Hunter, would not conduct interviews.

Since 1999, the Red Cross has had two presidents and, with the appointment of John F. McGuire, the head of the organization’s blood operations, as Ms. Evans’s immediate successor, two interim presidents.

Experts say the turnover suggests a level of instability that is troubling at an organization charged by Congress with maintaining the nation’s blood supply and with responding first to the needs of people whose lives have been upended by disasters.

“The board seems to think it is a hiring and firing agency, and does not see its role as building a strong Red Cross,” said Paul C. Light, a professor of public service at New York University. “The constant change in leadership is debilitating and does nothing to address the real problem, which is years and years of underinvestment in telecommunications, technology and other infrastructure to help the organization with its mission.”

The appointment of Mr. McGuire, the executive vice president for biomedical services, only highlights the organization’s leadership crisis, Professor Light and others said. Mr. McGuire, who joined the Red Cross last year, previously oversaw the United States operations of a British company that makes filtration and separation materials and devices for labs and businesses.

He took over a part of the Red Cross that generates billions of dollars in revenue but has repeatedly run afoul of the Food and Drug Administration and incurred millions of dollars of fines. In June, it was fined more than $3 million after reporting 135 instances of retrieving unsuitable blood products it had distributed.

“You have a very large board with three-year terms, and you have management turnover all the time, which creates problems of stability and cohesive management,” Dr. Healy said.

The announcement of Ms. Evans’s resignation came just hours before Representative Jim McCrery, Republican of Louisiana, and other witnesses laid out a list of shortcomings in the organization’s response to the hurricane in testimony before the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Oversight.

“To date, the American Red Cross has attributed its shortcomings in my district to their local chapter,” Mr. McCrery said. “The federal government named the American National Red Cross as its partner in the national response plan, not the local chapter in my district. If it is not the responsibility of the national Red Cross to step in when a Category 4 hurricane decimates a major metropolitan area and overwhelms one of their local chapters, whose responsibility is it?”

Mr. McCrery said the federal government needed to consider whether the Red Cross should continue to be the only charity charged by Congress with handling the initial emergency response in disasters.

Nonprofit experts have been clamoring for a thorough overhaul of the Red Cross. They say its problems are not its leadership, but rather its failure to identify shortcomings and fix them, leaving it doomed to repeat its mistakes.

The Red Cross was publicly chastened after it collected money for families of the 9/11 victims and announced plans to use some of it for terror response preparedness. It ultimately agreed to use all of the money for the victims and promised better accountability, among other things.

“It is an organization so lacking in self-awareness institutionally that no leader, no matter how good, could take up the reins and make it succeed without major introspection and a serious examination of the organization’s management and processes,” said Peter Dobkin Hall, a lecturer at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard.

But in a message to the staff issued with the announcement of her departure, Ms. Evans painted a rosy picture of the organization, declaring its response to Hurricane Katrina a success and praising its efforts to enhance its chapters’ capabilities and improve its relationship with donors.

“I strongly believe the American Red Cross finds itself on solid footing today and is far better prepared to face the challenges of the future than when I joined you all in August 2002, and this is reflected in the renewed trust and confidence voiced in us by the American people,” Ms. Evans said.

The Red Cross collected $1.8 billion of the total $2.96 billion that Americans donated for Hurricane Katrina relief and recovery, an amount that surpasses what they gave after 9/11, according to the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. In the year that ended June 2004, the Red Cross had $3.3 billion in revenue.

Ms. Evans, like her predecessors, had a rocky relationship with the board, according to staff members and to people who knew her from her previous position as head of the Girl Scouts of America. A polished executive, Ms. Evans spent 29 years in the Navy, achieving the rank of rear admiral.

Just a little over a year into her tenure, she voiced reservations about her decision to those people, saying the board was trying to micromanage her. The 50-member board is unwieldy, nonprofit experts say, with the chapters electing 30 members.

“My impression from talking with her is that she was really trying to deal straightforwardly with issues of governance in the organization that her predecessors had either failed to confront or failed in trying to confront,” said William Josephson, an expert on nonprofit affairs who ran the charities bureau in the New York attorney general’s office and who last talked with Ms. Evans about a year ago. “Her resignation means to me that those governance issues just have to be faced by the president and Congress, who have responsibility for this organization.”

The president, who is honorary chairman, appoints eight members of her administration to the board, but they rarely attend the meetings and only occasionally dispatch representatives. The board members, with the Red Cross president and chief executive, elect the 12 other members at large.

It is the chapters’ representatives who control the board, however, and their interests do not always align with those at headquarters.

“This bitter struggle between management and the board is emasculating to the organization and is undermining its mission,” said Christopher Thomas, who was director of communications during Dr. Healy’s tenure. “Until the board is restructured to a manageable size and its members reflect and represent the communities it serves, this vicious cycle will not end.”

Last year, President Bush named Ms. McElveen-Hunter, the founder of the nation’s largest custom publishing company and a major Republican fund-raiser, as the board chairwoman.

She took a much more hands-on approach to her role at the Red Cross than did her predecessor, David McLaughlin. She was more visible at headquarters, spending considerable time in her office there, hiring a staff for herself and taking on more of the daily operations of the organization.

Staff members said that Ms. McElveen-Hunter and Ms. Evans never got along, and that late last summer Ms. Evans wrote a memorandum to Ms. McElveen-Hunter titled “Guiding Principles for a Successful Board-Management Partnership.”

“I am committed to improving the relationship with you and more broadly the senior management team’s partnership with the board of governors,” Ms. Evans wrote.

Stephanie Strom – New York Times

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