TRACY E. GARLAND: Well, Wendy I think is taking a little bit of a leap of faith here in terms of asking such a disparate crowd, but we're all willing to play ball here and my thought this morning was to simply share with you a little thumbnail sketch of my background and what the world of corporate philanthropy is all about and end with my notion of what leadership skills are and I'm hopeful that this relates to the world that you live in. Just in terms of my background, I have an undergraduate degree from Cornell University in South East Asian Studies and a master degree in urban planning from the University Washington and the only reason really that I mentioned that is that it was an early indication to me that I was a flaming generalist, not needing to pick particular discipline and also both of the fields of study that I chose really required a sort of broad thinking or thinking beyond the boundaries. I have career experience in both the public sector and the private sector.

 In the public sector for both state government and then here in the Seattle area for regional government my role was to financial officer. You may wonder as I did from time to time how did I get in that role with the educational background that I had, but what I found was that there was a niche that I very easily filled, and that was the niche of being able to synthesize numbers, to be able to speak to the meaning in the numbers in such a way as to enable other people to make meaningful decision. And also to basically tell stories to financial communities that were trying to decide what interest rate they were going to charge the bonds that my organization was selling and to the extent that I made sense of what are plans were and our commitment to those plans. It had a direct effect on the long-term cost of our doing business, so it was my job to inspire confidence.

After the 20 years in the public sector I decided there was somewhat of a blind alley for me and so I demonstrated one of what I consider a leadership skill and that is the ability to pirouette at the end of a blind alley, so I did so and landed in the health insurance industry, a subset of that the dental insurance industry and I served as both the chief financial officer of the company that I now work for as well as becoming an executive in the field of philanthropy. The skill that were easy for me to put in place in the private sector were basically corporate business planning discussion and attention to the issues of mission and to specific business strategies that might achieve that.

Today, what I thought I would try to give you a sense for just as Joel has talked about business and Bruder's talked about life in academia, I wanted to just, sort of, talk about what corporate philanthropy is all about and in order to do that, it really starts with the parent company because corporate philanthropy really refers to activities that a corporation decides to invest in. And in this case, my parent company is Washington Dental Service, one of the Delta Dental plans in the country and this business is in the business of selling dental benefits and we say that our mission is to improve oral health, and in my role as chief financial officer, I basically led our corporate board through a thinking and planning process that had as it's result their decision to identify philanthropy as a core business strategy.

You may say, "Now, what's that all about. How can philanthropy be a core business strategy? What I pointed out to them was that it takes more than insurance to improve health and it says right here, "Our mission is to improve health and there are lots of recent studies fortunately that also point out the fact that it is good business to be engaged in philanthropy," why?  Because you're more attractive to your customers, to your employees, companies that have a strong track record in corporate citizenship tend to get treated in a more lenient way by legislators and regulators and in addition to that, in our particular case what I pointed out wearing my CFO hat was that we were structured as a public benefit non-profit and enjoy tax exemption from the federal government as a social welfare organization. And it was really that linking of the finances of the company, the legal structure and it's mission that convinced our corporate board that yes, you know, it makes sense to do this and basically, they said, "Well, if you're so smart go do it."  And that was my launch into the field of philanthropy and in my role presently as the president and chief executive officer of the Washington Dental Service Foundation, what I see myself doing is really a, sort of, flow in both directions on the one hand bringing business practices to the field of philanthropy, a secondly bringing and ethic of social justice to our business. What we're really, you know, had the privilege and joy to experience in the field of philanthropy and this is what gets different from the other speakers is that the field of philanthropy isn't really constrained in the same way that business by the bottom dollar and that government is by the bottom line. So, I have the luxury, if you will, of operating without those constraints and for that reason, all of what we do--this is sort of the equivalent of Joel's thermometer. In our organization we keep criteria in front of us to challenge us on a daily basis and what they say are think big, take the long view, look to impact large numbers of people, focus on prevention, and come up with sustainable solutions. So those parameters are what guide all of our thinking and decision making about how to use the resources that the company--excuse me--makes available to us.

My definition of leadership is somebody who can create vision and commitment and another dimension that I enjoy talking about is I think a definition of leadership involves comfort with power and the ability to share it. And I have the opportunity to play with both of those concepts on a daily basis. The approach that we use in our organization is to constantly for a balance, a balance between thinking and action, a balance between what science knows already and trying to get that into practice, a balance between boldness and realism, and I net all of that out to say that our organization is in the business of being practical visionaries. And some examples in the field of oral health since that's where we operate that really demonstrate the way in which we do our work, and I should just start by saying the way in which we do our work is to constantly be searching, not for the problems. Those are all over the place and quite obvious that we're searching for energy. We're looking for the ability to find people and combine resources to make something happen that wouldn't have otherwise. We're constantly asking the question, "What's possible now?" And that does change over time. We're looking to cultivate champions and most importantly to let them go. Let them get the credit. Let them carry forward the ideas that we think are important.

Two examples of that that I can share with you. One, you, everyone in the audience has probably has heard the jingle that one of the most successful public health ventures in the 20^th Century is public water fluoridation, and of course that relates to our goal of improving oral health and in Washington State, only 50% of the population lives in areas where the water is fluoridated. So, our foundation using the criteria that I talked about and the practical visionary role that we try to carve out for ourselves basically works with communities where thee is a need for public water fluoridation very much in a political manner. We seek out champions. We broaden the constituency for the issue so it is not just dentists who are out there speaking. It's PTA representatives. It's business and labor representatives and so on. We pay for the political infrastructure to manage a campaign up until the point of the vote, if there is a vote, and then if there is a success we come in and fund the actual equipment requirements that are involved. So, I think that to me is a good example of our success as really a function of whether we can find enough critical mass of energy in the form of champions at the local level who want to go forward. Likewise, one of the initiatives of ours that's very near and dear to my heart in light of the constrained amount of resources available in the field of oral health, is a strategy that we talk about in terms of multiplying the number of interveners and what we're talking about is capturing imagination basically of the primary medical system to actually understand and have confidence in their ability to identify, treat, and refer oral disease. And I've been very pleased with the success and the progress that we've been able to make in that arena, and one more time, it's about letting go of our issue and hoping that other people pick up and run with it.

Just to summarize, I would say that the skills, you know, that I've experienced in my life and the way I go about exercising the leadership opportunity that I have is to think across disciplines, to spend time reflecting on that question, "What's possible now?"  To have savvy about who has power and how to influence it, to have patience and tolerance, respecting the legitimacy of the other party's interest even if they're anti-fluoridations, to have a low profile. Actually, I like to credit myself with having what I call a subdued ego and being resourceful, knowing how to pirouette when you get to the end of those blind alleys. Thank you, Wendy, for this opportunity.