International Red Cross, Red Crescent president and ASU alum returns to celebrate Lodestar Center’s 25 years
International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies President Kate Forbes listens to leaders and volunteers of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society during a February 2024 trip to Gaza. She also met with people displaced by the war and attended a program that helps children with the trauma of war. Forbes will speak at a Feb. 5 reception on the Downtown Phoenix campus marking 25 years of impact of the ASU Lodestar Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Innovation. Photo courtesy of IFRC
Forbes, president of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, will be the keynote speaker at a Feb. 5 reception marking 25 years of Arizona State University's Lodestar Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Innovation.
An ASU alum, Forbes in 1981 began aiding families in crisis as part of the Phoenix chapter of the American Red Cross. And a quarter-century ago, she helped guide the early years of what now is the Lodestar Center.
The center has positively affected thousands of lives and hundreds of communities in Arizona and beyond, achievements Forbes said are extraordinary given that Lodestar is only 25 years old.
“I think ASU has leapfrogged everyone. What they’re doing now is nothing short of remarkable,” Forbes said.
Lodestar offers a broad-based portfolio of programs and services that strengthen and empower a multitude of individuals and nonprofit organizations. Forbes cited one such example: assisting houses of worship to become financially and organizationally effective through Best Skills Best Churches.
The center tailors its efforts to the specific needs of those it helps, she said.
“They’re running small and large seminars and being a voice in the community,” Forbes said of Lodestar’s overall efforts. “All of that is huge.”
Forbes’ office is at IFRC headquarters in Geneva, but she still lives in the Valley, where in the 1970s she earned her undergraduate degree in accounting at ASU.
Her career involved stints at APS, Valley National Bank and Bank One. Her volunteer service at the Red Cross took her from the local to the regional to the national level, being elected vice chair of the American Red Cross Board of Governors, then national chair of all the ARC’s volunteers.
Today the IFRC has 16.5 million volunteers in 192 countries.
The first community leader sought
Twenty-five years ago, she met Robert Ashcraft, today the Lodestar Center’s executive director and ASU’s Saguaro Professor of Civic Enterprise, while both had national volunteer responsibilities with the Red Cross. Ashcraft said as he was organizing what became Lodestar, Forbes was the first community volunteer leader he sought for help.
“Our initial grant was from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and as principal investigator, I was exploring ways to build capacity of the nonprofit and philanthropic sector to advance community well-being. Part of that involved listening deeply to the community, and I couldn’t do that without help,” Ashcraft said. “Kate jumped right in and added others, today what became our center’s Leadership Council. You can’t celebrate 25 years of impact without paying homage to the beginning, and Kate was a huge part of that."
Forbes recalled an early encounter with students through the Lodestar Center that had her teaching business etiquette — notably, how to dine with donors — to the young men and women.
“They were used to fast food, but they’d be meeting with donors and community leaders and needed to know how to conduct themselves,” she said.
Other activities included instructing how to recruit and keep board members, and “creating a space where people collaborated and, if they had a great idea, knowing how to implement that idea and meet community needs.”
Someone needs to say, ‘You have help’
Forbes said the nonprofit sector continues to expand, representing a larger share of economies everywhere, while the community and human needs that nonprofits like the Red Cross address also keep growing. The current, massive wildfires in and around Los Angeles are a timely example.
“If I had this interview three months ago and was told there was going to be a huge humanitarian crisis in some of the wealthiest suburbs in the world (Pacific Palisades and Malibu), people wouldn’t have believed me,” she said, saying the Red Cross is often the only link victims have to the outside world.
“People are standing in their pajamas with nothing else. Someone needs to be there to say, ‘You have help.’”
The Israel-Hamas war has posed challenges to serving those in need as well, she said, creating a complicated and multifaceted situation in which those providing aid must convince all sides to allow them to serve in war-torn areas.
Ashcraft said the Lodestar Center’s reach and impact extend beyond Arizona through a portfolio of signature programs like Public Allies Arizona. The center’s place-based projects exist from Los Angeles to the Middle East, while online courses through its Nonprofit Management Institute, such as its Executive Leadership Certificate program, now reach learners on every continent but Antarctica.
The center’s mission, vision and values, first developed 25 years ago, remain just as relevant today, he said.
“The strategies and programs have changed,” Ashcraft said. “But the mission and framework we laid all those years ago still exist as our enduring foundation.”
Forbes will speak Feb. 5 at an anniversary celebration at the Thunderbird School of Global Management on the Downtown Phoenix campus. More information on her appearance is available on the Lodestar Center website.
The Lodestar Center is part of the School of Community Resources and Development in the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions.
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