Executive changes at major regional humane societies
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2006:
Longtime Massachusetts SPCA vice president Carter Luke has
been promoted to president, succeeding Larry Hawk. Luke has served
the MSPCA in various capacities under every MSPCA president since
Eric H. Hansen, the fourth president of the 138-year-old
organization, who was hired in 1942. Recruited from the American
SPCA in 2003, Hawk resigned in March 2006.
“Hawk increased revenue and took a more businesslike approach
to running the organization,” laying off 20 employees and
eliminating 32 vacant jobs, reported Sacha Pfeiffer of the Boston
Globe. Among Hawk’s first major actions was killing the
award-winning but money-losing Animals magazine, begun as Our Dumb
Animals by MSPCA founder George Angell.
However, Pfeiffer wrote, “several former MSPCA employees
said Hawk left after persistent concerns that his brusque management
style damaged morale without doing enough to improve the MSPCA
finances. Hawk also hired his wife and two children to do paid
consulting,” at total cost of $37,000, about 10.5% of Hawk’s own
salary, “and outsourced fundraising activities that resulted in
donations not being acknowledged. The MSPCA endowment has lost
nearly a third of its value since the late 1990s,” although Hawk
doubled direct mail expense, “and for years,” Pfeiffer wrote, “the
MSPCA has been violating its own spending policy by bypassing limits
on the percentage of endowment gains that may be used to pay
operating costs.”