WHERE THEY STAND
Both Democrat Michelle Nunn and Republican David Perdue have offered tantalizing few specifics of what they would do if elected to the U.S. Senate. Here is a look at some of their more vague promises, as well as a few actual concrete proposals.
TOTALLY VAGUE
Nunn: “Promote a strong middle class.”
Perdue: “Too many families and too many businesses are struggling to get by.”
ACTUAL IDEAS
Perdue: “That’s why I support term limits; a maximum three terms in the House, two terms in the Senate. I’ll stick to that commitment myself.”
Nunn: “If Congress can’t do its job and pass a budget, it shouldn’t get paid. And neither should the president.”
Sources: perduesenate.com; michellenunn.com
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In 2007 Michelle Nunn was in the process of merging two charities with radically different approaches to fostering volunteer service. Then the hard part started.
Congress eliminated a $10 million earmark for Points of Light, President George H.W. Bush's legacy organization, killing off more than a third of its revenue. In 2008, less than a year after the merger with Nunn's HandsOn Network, Points of Light discovered that a contractor was defrauding customers through a scheme selling travel vouchers. The charity had to pay out more than $5.2 million to bilked customers.
Nunn was forced to slash jobs. Separately, the organizations had employed 175 people before the merger. By 2009, the staff was down to 80 and the headquarters relocated to Atlanta.
Several of those who lost their jobs were offered the chance to move but did not want to leave Washington, and the number of employees later increased to about 100. In the meantime, Nunn’s salary doubled as she took over the larger combined organization.
“In the non-profit (world), I guess, you can’t generally attack it with the kind of ruthlessness you might with a for-profit organization,” said Jim Geiger, the founder of tech firm Cbeyond and a Points of Light board member. “So I think Michelle very deftly handled a lot of changes.”
Points of Light continued to grow into an organization that relied far less on government funding — though fund-raising revenue fluctuated widely — while engaging 4 million volunteers across the globe in 2012.
Nunn now finds herself in a different kind of tumult. The Democrat has sought to turn a heated campaign against Republican David Perdue for an open U.S. Senate seat into a referendum on his business career, targeting his past in outsourcing and failure to resuscitate North Carolina textile maker Pillowtex. Nunn’s political foes have fought back, challenging her own background.
Nunn, 47, bristles when any parallels are suggested between her own experience, such as shedding jobs in the merger, and Perdue’s.
“Every single organization that I have touched and brought in has been made stronger,” Nunn said in a recent interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “No bankrupted organizations. No organizations in which everyone lost their job. When you make hard choices, you’re trying to preserve the strength of an organization and the employer base of an organization.”
While both have led large, well-known enterprises, Nunn’s and Perdue’s paths to meeting on this stage are strikingly different. Perdue started as a consultant and moved around the world as he climbed the corporate ladder, eventually becoming CEO of Fortune 500 companies such as Reebok and Dollar General.
Nunn’s first job out of college was a part-time gig with a lofty title: Executive director of newly formed HandsOn Atlanta. She stayed for nearly 25 years, guiding the charity’s growth and merger with Points of Light, before taking a leave of absence to try to follow her father, former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn, into high office.
The young professionals who started HandsOn Atlanta hired Nunn not long after she graduated from the University of Virginia. Nunn was a history major without a real career plan.
She ditched a Peace Corps application to start at HandsOn, working out of a Days Inn on Buford Highway. She joined volunteers delivering meals to the home-bound or mentoring children on Saturday mornings.
When The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran an article on the young organization in 1990, the Days Inn was flooded with potential volunteers. Elise Eplan, a co-founder of HandsOn, recalled the 23-year-old Nunn as “unflappable.” She simply found more projects and project leaders for the volunteer surge.
She also proved adept at perhaps the chief task for a non-profit leader – fund-raising.
“She could talk to volunteers, but she could also go to Coke and have a meeting with somebody at the foundation and passionately explain what we were trying to do,” Eplan said.
As the model spread to other cities around the country, the HandsOn Network (originally called City Cares) was formed, with Nunn at the helm. She pushed a somewhat relucant board to have the organization partner with President Bill Clinton’s AmeriCorps, which became another source of growth.
Points of Light was a financial partner but also, at times, a competitor. When Points of Light’s CEO announced his retirement in 2006, both sides started talking about a merger.
Aside from a shared mission, the two organizations did not have a lot in common. Points of Light was reliant on federal funding, had a top-down structure and was stocked with well-connected politicos. HandsOn was more grassroots based.
Nunn's salary jumped from $120,000 at HandsOn to $250,000 as she took over the much larger combined organization. Her political foes have seized upon the fact that Nunn took more money while cutting jobs. She points out that she was paid less than Points of Light's previous CEO and requested a smaller salary, given the struggles. Her pay dropped just under $200,000 before later rising to more than $300,000.
Another inherited venture from Points of Light was a service called MissionFish. It allowed eBay users to donate to their preferred charities, while generating revenue for Points of Light. The organization certified that the 20,000-plus charities were approved by the Internal Revenue Service and not on a terrorist watch list.
Nunn's campaign produced an internal memo in December that, in part, sought to anticipate where Republicans would attack Nunn. Among the areas was grants to "terrorists."
In reality, the link was tenuous at best. One of the charities on the list was Islamic Relief USA. Its sister organization, Islamic Relief Worldwide, has been accused by Israeli authorities of working with Hamas — allegations the worldwide affiliate denies.
Perdue produced a television advertisement raising the terrorist link. It was roundly denounced. Points of Light chairman Neil Bush, George H.W. Bush's son, called it "shameful."
Also on the MissionFish list was an environmental organization that has been accused of piracy in its attempts to stop whaling ships.
Nunn sold MissionFish to eBay in 2011. "It was decided that it was something that made sense, but not within the context of our organization," Nunn said, pointing out that the aim was for donors to pick the charities, not for Points of Light to "make a judgment."
The internal memo, which was made public in July, also mentions two Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaints made against Points of Light. The EEOC did not take legal action, and the agency keeps complaints confidential unless it acts on them.
Nunn repeatedly refused to discuss any details of the complaints. She pointed to Dollar General, where a group of women sued the company for pay discrimination while Perdue was CEO in a case that was settled after he left, and where the EEOC found "reasonable cause to believe" the women's claims. Nunn said any comparisonto Points of Light is specious.
“Points of Light has never been found by the EEOC or any other federal investigator or any other investigator to have had any discrimination in the workplace. Period. End of story. None,” Nunn said.
Nunn took a leave of absence last year from the place she has spent her entire professional career to run for Senate. She left behind an organization that its backers say is more stable after the at times choppy merger and now resides in a $3.9 million headquarters in midtown Atlanta.
“It’s an incredible trajectory, when you think about it,” Eplan said.
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