World-renowned St. Jude Children’s Hospital and its sole fundraising organization ALSAC (American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities) are both located in Memphis. Richard Shadyac, Jr. was appointed last year as ALSAC’s CEO. A practicing attorney for almost three decades in Washington D.C., Shadyac has also been involved with ALSAC since childhood, and continues in the tradition of his late father, himself former CEO Richard Shadyac, Sr. For the Chamber’s “Corner Office” feature, Shadyac recently sat down with Tara McAdams to talk about his work.

A version of this interview is also available in the winter edition of Memphis Crossroads, the Chamber’s quarterly magazine, currently available free at the Chamber offices (2nd floor of the Falls Building, 22 N. Front Street) and at select Memphis-area locations, including Schnuck’s markets.

Q: You’ve been involved with St. Jude nearly all your life. What are your earliest memories of St. Jude and of ALSAC?

A: I remember being a young kid going door to door with canisters raising money for St. Jude back in the 1960s. Then, ALSAC’s No. 1 way of raising money was the Teenage March. I was a pre-teen and my brother and I went around our neighborhood and collected nickels, dimes, quarters, and dollar bills. I have this vivid memory of father and Baddia J. “Bud” Rashid (who also later became CEO here)—they arranged for a bank to open for us on a Saturday. We would put all the money on the floor, count it, and announce these totals. It was very special.

At my elementary and junior high school in Falls Church, Va., we raised the most money of anybody in the country. The prize was that Marlo Thomas came to my school. She starred in the TV show “That Girl” at the time, and it was so cool. We were all in love with her.

Q: Is Marlo Thomas still involved?

A: Absolutely. She and her siblings remain very active here. Her sister and her brother are really incredible ambassadors as well.

Q: How long have you been involved?

A: ALSAC started in 1957, the year I was born. My father was involved then, though he didn’t formally join the board until 1963, the year after the hospital opened. I became a national committee member in the late 1980s, then a board member, and later Chairman of the Board. I feel like the luckiest person on the planet to have been given the opportunity to carry on Danny Thomas’s dream. Our mission is magical.

Q: It must also carry a lot of responsibility.

A: Yes. We have to raise $704 million this year, so the task is significant. My dad used to say it’s a labor of love and I now know what he means. It’s not really a job. I get to interact with amazing moms and dads and kids that need our help. It’s really an amazing place.

Q: You’ve relocated to Memphis.

A: I’m the first CEO to live in Memphis, and I love our community. My predecessors split their time between Memphis and their homes, but given where we are with the economy and the growth that we’ve experienced and the amount of responsibility involved… I felt like I needed to be here. However, I’m on the road almost half of my time.

Q: How has the adjustment been from the East Coast to Memphis?

A: I don’t think this city gives itself enough credit. The single biggest asset of this city is its people. Memphians are incredibly warm, friendly, and welcoming. When I came here I was blown away by how everyone embraced me and made me feel a part of this community. I live on Mud Island. There’s no traffic here, so I don’t lose a lot of time commuting like I did in D.C. We have wonderful restaurants here, and the music and the cultural scene. The theater is great. The Playhouse on the Square is fantastic. I love going to the Orpheum, I enjoy Beale Street. The music here is better than any place in the United States. And the restaurants are really good, too! I think my wife and I are enjoying a really good quality of life.

Q: How do you raise your money?

A: We really rely on grassroots fundraising events in communities across the United States. That makes us unique. We have 34,000 fundraisers a year, a lot of wonderful volunteers, and a staff of a thousand to pull them off. Those events are critically important for us. They not only raise money but they raise the awareness of our mission.

Q: Do you have any favorite fundraising events?

A: I like the ones where our patients and our families are involved. This year I was very fortunate to participate in a run for people that came from Peoria to Memphis, and then we ran back. I met them in St. Louis, and they raised over $20 million for St. Jude. It was organized by Mike McCoy, a board member. He’s the sheriff of Peoria and an incredible volunteer. A lot of the people that do this run are survivors, so it was very, very touching for me to be able to spend time with them that way.

Q: What is the average donation size that you get and how does that effect fundraising?

A: The average donation is a little over $30, so we’re a true middle-America grassroots fundraising organization. But St. Jude appeals to so many, and people give according to their means. Danny Thomas used to say that we’d rather have a million $1 givers than a single $1 million giver. I think that’s what’s allowed us to weather the economic storm better than many of our sister charities—we derive our revenues from a diverse, really broad population.

Q: Do you have advice for other nonprofits in creating a low administrative overhead?

A: Over the last five years, 81 cents on every dollar received goes to support the current and future needs of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. But these are difficult times to fundraise. Agencies are now spending more than they have historically to raise money because there is less revenue available. Your overhead continues, but you’re raising less money, so your cost percentages are going up. That doesn’t necessarily make a charity inefficient. We have to be a little less judgmental about certain charities and understand that these are different times than they were just two or three years ago.

Q: Can you give me a sense of the size of ALSAC’s mission?

A: We are the second-largest health charity in the country. The only one bigger is American Cancer. We’re the 12th largest charity in America. We’ve got a wonderful mission and
St. Jude was ranked the number one pediatric cancer hospital in the United States by U.S. News and World Report. According to Harris Interactive, we’re the most trusted charity in America.

Q: What new goals or projects are you working on?

A: I want to do a better job of messaging the impact that St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital has in the international arena. We have partner sites in 20 countries. I just came back from Beirut, where we have our largest partner site. We’re treating about 75 kids there.

One of the first things I did as CEO was to form an… interactive group. We’re in the first phase of a redesign of the website—www.stjude.org. I want to give our donors a virtual experience as if they’re here on our campus. We have a Cure for Kids website that’s available to people across the world. Some of our protocols are actually on the Internet, so that’s one area we’re making progress in.

Also, we’re investing in a constituent relationship management system, a CRM system. It will give us insights into how we can better interact with our donor. I think we have areas of opportunity in sports marketing. Fox Sports picked us as their charity of choice for this NFL season. All the announcers wear our St. Jude logo on their lapels. The Fox Sports talent came to visit our campus, and they filmed public service announcements here. And Fox Sports will broadcast the Super Bowl this year, so we will be able to tell the St. Jude story internationally through that.

Q: What’s one thing you want everyone to know about St. Jude and ALSAC?

A: How amazing the patients and the families are. Recently we were at the Fox Sports Supports event and all the Fox talent was there. This little boy, about six years old, who is undergoing treatment for cancer—he should have just been coming there thinking about the party and all these sports people -- but he sought me out and said, “Mr. Rick, I’ve been thinking about this, and I want to give a gift to St. Jude so you could take care of the other kids that have cancer. So I asked Mom if I could take all my money out of my piggy bank and give it to the kids at St. Jude. And this boy gave me his cash and his change in a little baggy.

Q: How is it for you to be following in your father’s footsteps?

A: It’s great for me to be here and to go around the country and hear people tell me Dad stories, how he touched them and what a great man he was. I’m very, very proud of him and I miss him a lot. One treat is that I work in his office. This was his very desk, so, it’s pretty cool.