Football players collided on the lighted field, cheerleaders high-kicked and the crowd roared as the Langley High School Saxons ran roughshod over the South Lakes Seahawks. In the stands, Charles Anderson -- watching with his wife and youngest daughter, while their three older girls played in the Langley band -- surveyed the crowd, hoping to find someone with a radio tuned to the Yankees-Red Sox game.
Anderson -- suburban dad, Yankees devotee, football fan -- knows about American icons and traditions. After taking over 17 months ago as chief executive of the United Way of the National Capital Area, which had been sacked by scandal, he has learned a lot about trying to revive a once-proud tradition. At 51, he has spent a quarter-century working for United Ways nationwide and wants to finish his career by restoring the local United Way to its former status as one of the largest in the country.
Football games are family time for Charles Anderson, chief executive of the United Way of the National Capital Area, and daughters Caitlyn, 16, left, and Elizabeth, 14. Three of Anderson's four daughters play in the Langley High band.
(Ricky Carioti -- The Washington Post)
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But first he has to save it.
Earlier that week, Anderson placed a call from his office to the director of a local nonprofit, hoping to be put in touch with executives whose companies left the United Way when financial scandal ripped through the organization almost three years ago. Deserters have cost area charities millions of dollars in contributions, and one of Anderson's most important -- and difficult -- jobs is trying to win them back.
Hanging up, he rubbed his face in disappointment, having learned that the director was no longer there. "I was hoping for some immediate help," he said.
It was a rare gloomy moment for the soft-spoken Anderson, who prefers to be upbeat. "With this organization, with everything that happened around here, everybody is not inclined to give us a break," he said. "We just need to work harder to create our own breaks."
In such moments, he recalls the words of Leo Durocher, irascible manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants baseball teams: "You make your own luck."
Anderson grew up in Durocher's era, in 1950s and '60s New Milford, Conn., but his sun rose and set with the New York Yankees -- to the dismay of his father, a die-hard Boston Red Sox fan. His father worked two jobs to support the family, a work ethic that Anderson, the youngest of five children, never forgot.
At Southern Connecticut State College, he majored in social work and was a Big Brother to two abused boys. He graduated with the conviction that his calling lay in raising money for nonprofits and seeing that it was used effectively, and he joined the United Way in Meriden, Conn.
The century-old United Way system -- 1,361 autonomous United Ways -- works with corporations to set up fundraising drives among their employees. The money raised goes to charities designated by employees or into a common pot that is allocated to local charities. Last year, United Ways nationwide raised $3.6 billion.
Anderson moved up in the hierarchy, leading successively larger United Ways in Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Michigan until 1996, when he became director of the struggling United Way of Delaware. Corporations began backing out of its campaign as three United Ways in the state fought each other.
Former colleagues say Anderson combined them into one smooth-running organization, replaced troublesome employees and lured corporations back with a low-key, nuts-and-bolts approach. In his eight-year tenure, overhead costs were reduced from 14 percent of donations to 10 percent, according to officials there, and fundraising almost doubled to $30 million.
"He's not your typical sort of emotional social worker," said Kurt Landgraf, a friend and former DuPont executive who volunteered for the United Way in Delaware. "He doesn't make his pitch on the basis of . . . emotional [issues]. He makes his pitch on the basis of analytical need in the community."
Anderson's success there brought him to the attention of the board in Washington. Among the things he brought from his Delaware office to his new one is a poster of great baseball players, whose stats he can reel off from memory. But the numbers he deals with every day are much grimmer.
