Ethiopian Review

On a tiny airstrip near Guéréda, in eastern Chad, Christine Ward recalls, she stepped off a small plane. Her flight had been slightly delayed—not by weather or air traffic, but by small arms and rocket fire on the ground. With the help of her companions, and under the watchful eye of Chadian soldiers, Ward moved boxes from the plane into a Land Cruiser. She rode through the desert to a hospital in Guéréda, just outside Sudan. It was 2007 and both sides of the border were torn by civil war. With her nascent charity, the Darfur Project, Ward brought the same medical and nutritional supplies that other charities send to the region—therapeutic powdered milk, burn medicine, intravenous transfusion bags—but her cargo bore the logos of some of the most powerful corporations in American finance—Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, PNC Financial Services Group and Blue Mountain Capital.

The hospital in Guéréda, and the nearby camp that Ward visited that week, served thousands of refugees who had fled Darfur in the wake of hostilities between the African-Arab Janjaweed militia and non-Arab rebel groups, a conflict that, by some estimates, has killed 300,000 people and displaced more than 2 million and stirred debate over the slow international response to what many regard as genocide. “It was like the Wild West,” Ward, 42, says of her mission. “But personally, it was one of the most peaceful times in my life. Despite the fact there was all this chaos and massive degrees of human suffering, I felt we were bringing hope.”

It’s never easy to make people care about suffering halfway around the world, Ward says. And it’s rare to convince American banks to support causes outside of their own communities, especially if those causes might be seen as having political undertones. “One of the people in one of the larger firms told me I might want to change my pitch slightly,” Ward remembers. “And I just looked at him and said, ‘I don’t have a pitch. I’m not selling you anything. I actually think I’m giving you a gift. I’m giving you the opportunity to do something incredible with the money that you have available to you.’ ”

Fifteen years ago, Ward was employed by Buckingham Palace doing philanthropic work for the Duke and Duchess of York, and she handles herself well in confident company. Born in the Gambia, raised in Britain and now living in Westchester County, N.Y., with her four children, she has been drawn to the world’s hot spots. Ward, who does not take a salary for her philanthropic endeavors, worked on efforts to bring relief to Asia after the 2004 tsunami, and to Pakistan after the 2005 earthquake. She knew that with careful logistical planning, small homegrown organizations could deliver direct and measurable humanitarian aid. In 2006, after hearing the activist John Prendergast and the actor Don
Cheadle give a talk on Darfur at the Clinton Global Initiative conference in New York City, Ward was moved to act again. She hoped that the direct impact of her work and her willingness to travel to dangerous places would give potential donors in the financial sector good reason to believe in her.

One of the first Wall Street power brokers to sign on was Bill Demchak, senior vice chairman at PNC and a longtime friend of Ward’s. “I have always found it more rewarding to be actively involved in something as opposed to just giving money to something,” he says. “People you know are delivering these supplies, and you’re putting the thing together with your friends.” In January 2007, Demchak helped Ward recruit a handful of his peers, including Andrew Feldstein, the chief executive of Blue Mountain Capital and a former colleague of Demchak’s when the two were young stars at J.P. Morgan.

Quickly, Ward and the others raised enough money—$250,000—to send the first plane full of medical supplies. But even once that plane was loaded there was still plenty that could go wrong: The aid could be turned away, hijacked or misappropriated. To see it through, Ward enlisted the help of Andrew Hannah and Stephen Skakel of the relief organization Bridge Foundation, who hired pilots and worked with customs, the United Nations and the International Medical Corps, which would be in charge of distributing the lifesaving material. The first payload arrived without incident, and soon reports and photos of the aid reaching those in need made the rounds on email. Donations escalated, and the Darfur Project sent three full planes in its first year. Ward ramped up her ambitions and set a goal of sending eight planes, for a total cost of $2 million. The sum seemed doable—Prendergast points out that Cheadle, Matt Damon, George Clooney, Brad Pitt and others were able to raise over $10 million for a variety of causes with their Not On Our Watch campaign. But Ward’s efforts hit a wall when the financial sector that supported the Darfur Project took its famous tumble last year.

As it happens, Demchak led the 1990s J.P. Morgan team that developed the financial instrument that many blame for the damage to the banking industry: the credit derivative. Demchak is well aware of the role their invention played but emphasizes that they were initially used to decrease a bank’s risk. “Like anything else,” he says, “people can take things and morph them into things they shouldn’t be.”

For any banker feeling stung by the growing intangibility of finance, Ward says, her charity offers a more hands-on, measurable reward. “The beauty of Darfur Project is that you can touch it, you can feel it, you can see what you’re doing,” she says. “When we went to a refugee camp in Chad, a little boy had just fallen into a fire. We had burn cream.”

The testimonials and photos that the Darfur Project donors receive after each trip drive this point home. “When you start hearing and understanding what can be done and the thousands of children that can be helped by a single planeload,” Feldstein says, “$250,000 begins to sound like a relatively small amount to pay.”

Last December, Ward began to rally her troops, who’d been beaten down by six months of economic turbulence. It took longer than before, but she managed to raise enough money to send out another plane in July. Hannah and Skakel from Bridge Foundation delivered the goods to the International Medical Corps in Nyala, Sudan. “Their warehouse was bone-dry when we got there,” Skakel reports. “It was a very timely shipment.” Workers from IMC rushed one carload of drugs directly to the nearby Kalma camp, where the Corps was in the process of reopening health clinics that had closed after the expulsion of other aid groups in recent months.

Ward is hopeful the Darfur Project will continue its comeback this fall. And it’s clear that she enjoys helping the bankers, too. “It prompted them to read about Darfur,” she says. “It’s about being kinder, about giving and not getting in an industry that’s all about being first, being best and being the most important. I feel like my tiny little contribution is to try to separate them from that.”

- By Matt Dellinger | WSJ