Profile: we need more wiggle room

The IB’s new development director, Andrea Lucard, has the ideas, enthusiasm and experience to dramatically change the way the organization views fundraising, says Pam Upton

For a woman who’s had six hours’ sleep in the last two days Andrea Lucard is remarkably alert. Two months after becoming development director for the IB, her first day in her new office in Geneva had been delayed by thunderstorms in the United States.

“I’ve been travelling pretty much non-stop since taking up the post, meeting people in the organization and learning about the IB,” she explains. “It’s been quite a whirlwind.”

The whirlwind began as soon as Andrea saw the advert for the post, in November 2005. As a successful director of development at Colorado College, USA, in charge of a $300 million fundraising campaign, she wasn’t planning a career move.

“But this was something special,” she says, taking up the story. “I’ve always wanted to get involved in international work, I’m committed to education, and here was this international educational organization that needed a fundraiser. It was incredibly exciting.”

She called her husband to ask how he would feel about moving to Geneva. Once it was clear that it was Geneva in Switzerland,
and not Geneva in the USA (“a little town in up-state New York where it snows all the time”), Malcolm, a musician and stay-at-home dad for their sons Ulysses, aged seven, and Gideon, five, was wholly supportive.

Andrea’s preparation for her interview was a typical mixture of practicality and inventiveness. She talked to everybody she knew who might be remotely connected to the IB, including school coordinators in Colorado Springs, who talked to her at 7.30am with no incentive other than Starbucks coffee and the chance to talk about the IB.

Andrea was particularly impressed by Christina Allem, the Primary Years Programme coordinator at Midland Elementary, an IB World School in a disadvantaged part of town.

“My jaw dropped when she used this huge matrix to demonstrate how the programme had been developed to meet both the IB standards and the State testing requirements,” she recalls.

“When I asked her why she did all this extra work, Christina replied, ‘Because I don’t believe that only the children of wealthy people in the USA should get a good education. And this is the best on offer.’”

Since then, Andrea has met people from all levels in the organization and the message has been the same. “I’m still amazed at the passion of people across the organization,” she says. “And I never realized just how many people are connected to the IB in some way or another. Since starting the
job, I’ve had so many people call me, people who are
friends-of-friends twice removed, who want to tell me what a great organization this is.”

Now Andrea’s job is to tap this vast reservoir of interest
and involvement, and when asked why fundraising is so important, she introduces the intriguing management concept of ‘wiggle room’.

“Fundraising,”, she explains, “creates a bit of breathing space, or ‘wiggle room’, so that an organization can continue to do what it does best, in this case delivering high-quality,
international-based education. If we’re entirely dependent on
fees, we can’t extend and strengthen our programmes without raising those fees. A major priority for the IB is access, but without fundraising we won’t have the resources to develop any of the exciting projects we have in the pipeline.”

It’s crucial that Andrea’s post is now at director level. She pays tribute to her predecessor, Zhanna O’Clery, who did “a magnificent job” in raising funds from her base in New York. But now that access has become an issue across the organization, fundraising has to be managed centrally from the IB headquarters in Geneva. Andrea knows that other changes will be necessary.

“Even though people have been donating for a long time, the IB as a whole doesn’t yet understand itself as a fundraising
organization and so doesn’t have all of the necessary structures in place,” she argues.

As well as providing challenges, she believes that fundraising can strengthen the organization by making it more self-aware.

“People in the IB are often so close to what they do that they don’t have the language to describe it,” explains Andrea. “It’s a bit like asking me: ‘What’s it like to be an American?’ I can’t tell you because it’s so much a part of me. We need to be more conscious of who we are and what we do, so we can communicate it to other people who share our ideals and want to contribute.”

Andrea is certain that donation benefits both givers and receivers.

“I genuinely believe that virtually anybody in the world who has any surplus at all ends up giving some of it away to something they care about,” she says. “Whether they give a coin to somebody on the street because they don’t believe that person should go hungry or they give tens of millions to build a new church, people look for meaning in their lives by making a
commitment to something bigger than themselves.”

Right now it’s down to practicalities, as Andrea prepares to bring her family over to Geneva, find an apartment and have it furnished.

No wonder she smiles when asked what she does in her spare time. Then it emerges that she has a black belt in karate and intends to visit ‘dojos’ as she travels around the world for the IB. This is clearly a woman with a gift for creating ‘wiggle room’.