Lobbyists Can Boast of Their Share of Good Deeds

Joel Wood is best known as a co-founder of Red Hot & Blue, the Washington area's most successful barbecue franchise. He's also the top lobbyist for the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers, an obscure but powerful trade group.

But his heart and a lot of his time are devoted to pleading on Capitol Hill for funds to eradicate Duchenne's syndrome, a deadly form of muscular dystrophy that his 8-year-old son James was diagnosed with five years ago.

Since then, Joel and his wife, Dana Wood, who is also a professional lobbyist, have persuaded lawmakers to appropriate $25 million in research grants, including $4 million this year. And through their Foundation to Eradicate Duchenne, they have raised millions more. The Foundation's annual dinner, Dining Away Duchenne, is organized with the help of Wood's fellow restaurateurs in the region.

It's pro bono lobbying, however, that has produced the most help. Within a month of James's diagnosis, 25 financial-services lobbyists, many of them Wood's rivals in the normal course of events, were meeting together to pool their congressional contacts. Duchenne's, once a largely neglected disease, is now being studied vigorously and with solid federal backing thanks to the lobbyists' efforts.

"I've got a wonderful employer and extraordinary friends," Wood said. "Dana and I are incredibly blessed that we both are lobbyists."

That's a rare statement in the era of Jack Abramoff; lobbyists have never been more maligned. What's more, one person's charity can be someone else's "pork." The prime vehicles for lobbyists' generosity are earmarks -- the giveaways in appropriations bills made infamous this year by the Bridge to Nowhere.

Nonetheless, lobbyists produce a lot of good works. They spend thousands of hours each year donating their services to charitable causes. Food banks, community centers and homeless shelters have been funded through congressional action as a result.

What better time than the holiday season to acknowledge these wonderful, pro bono deeds?

One campaign has literally brought smiles to faces of children. Operation Smile Inc. repairs children's facial deformities around the world. Since the autumn of 2004, Patton Boggs partner Ed Newberry and associate Billy Wynne have guided the group's congressional lobbying free of charge. Last July, with the assistance of an appropriation that Patton Boggs lobbied to get, Operation Smile performed reconstructive surgery on 41 Iraqi children in Amman, Jordan. Thanks to a new appropriation, the organization will soon be treating other needy Iraqi children.

Closer to home, Sarah G. Vilms and John F. Jonas, also of Patton Boggs, provided lobbying for the Lab School of Washington, a renowned educator of children and adults with learning disabilities. The lobbyists secured federal funding for the Lab School, including for its well-regarded program to train District teachers in the latest in educational methods and technologies.

DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary has volunteered to spearhead efforts to gain federal financing for a new Capital Area Food Bank warehouse. Partner William H. Minor and others in the firm also helped the D.C. Food Bank secure a new $1.3 million appropriation. Meanwhile, the Maryland Food Bank, which serves the Baltimore area, received $300,000 in the same legislation with help from Marta D. Harting, a partner in the firm's Baltimore and Annapolis offices.

For the first time, the U.S. Olympic team will have a chance to medal in pairs ice dancing thanks to pro bono lobbying by a team led by Barney J. Skladany Jr. at Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld. Tanith Belbin, the 21-year-old ice skating phenom, would have been barred from the U.S. team were it not for a provision that Skladany got inserted in an appropriations bill this year. Belbin, who's from Canada, will be able to get her U.S. citizenship in time to compete with her partner Ben Agosto in the winter games in Turin, Italy, in February.