New UNA President Sees Opportunities Amid Financial Crunch
By Barbara Crossette
April 15 -- Thomas J. Miller, who becomes president of UNA-USA on May 11, has a strong sense of what his priorities will be in leading the organization. A number of them fall under the heading of outreach: to association chapters across the country, to other UNA organizations around the world and to a global public, especially the young, through an enthusiastic embrace of new media and the power of the Internet.
Miller – who wants everyone to call him Tom – takes over from William H. Luers, president for the last 11 years, at a time when all nongovernmental organizations are facing severe reductions in funds and donations. That would make money his most urgent and underlying problem.
“It’s the worst economic crisis since the Depression and no organization is left untouched,” he said in an interview on April 8, just after his appointment was announced. But hard times can lead to useful rethinking, he added.
“The reverse side of challenges are opportunities, and I see this on two fronts,” Miller said. After eight demoralizing years of an indifferent to hostile administration in Washington, “you’ve got a new administration that is quite positive about the value of the UN and associated bodies, and has made all the right noises,” he said. “So I think that’s a great opportunity.”
“On the economic side, it gives us an opportunity to look at the way we’ve been doing business and see if there’s other things we could be doing, different business models we could be looking at. It provides an opportunity for some real introspection that sometimes you don’t do when times are very robust.”
Miller, whose international experience in the field is broad, comes to UNA from a long career in the foreign service, capped by ambassadorial assignments in Bosnia, Greece and as a negotiator on Cyprus; followed by four years as executive director and CEO of a large global NGO, Plan International. Born in Chicago in 1948, he holds a BA, MA (in Asian studies) and PhD in political science from the University of Michigan, and has taught international affairs, including about the UN, at George Mason University.
While at the State Department, and later as ambassador in Bosnia, he was instrumental in setting up Model UN programs. “I’m totally passionate about Model UN,” he says.
Based in London at Plan International, the world’s largest nongovernmental children’s aid and community development organization (formerly called the Foster Parents Plan) and traveling extensively for the agency, Miller learned a lot about the NGO world, he said. He was nonplussed when UNA chapters approached him even before his new appointment was announced to say that they had lost touch with headquarters and were out of the loop on policy decisions.
“I get their message loud and clear,” he said. “As CEO of Plan, I had a very similar type of situation where the national organizations – essentially chapters – just felt that they weren’t involved, that headquarters was dictating and stuff like that. I was brought in to try to heal the rifts, and that’s what I did and so I’m very sensitive to this dimension.” Miller hopes to visit as many UNA chapters as he can, and will have a chance to meet members from around the country in June at the association’s national conference in Washington, DC.
To reach young people, and Internet-savvy people of all ages, new communications strategies will be needed, he said. With the young “it is not just looking at issues differently, and perhaps different issues, but it’s also how you communicate. My kids (32 and 30 years old) don’t get newspapers. They get all their news online. Facebook, YouTube, all of that – we’ve got to use that as much as possible. When I got to Plan, we stopped doing press announcements because we found if we posted our content on YouTube we got a lot better exposure.
“Clearly UNA can be a really valuable bridge in several different ways – not just with young people, but with the business community [and] UNA organizations around the world,” Miller said. He wants to explore those links.
“I’ve got a lot of energy and a lot of willingness to be open,” Miller said “I’ve got a very open mind for the kinds of things we should take on. I also know that we can’t do everything.” But he added that he has little tolerance for those who, faced with change, say, “We’ve always done it this way.”
“The UNA job, to me, is extremely exciting,” Miller told a conference call of UNA staff, board members and chapter representatives before the interview, during which he said that he plans to keep a foothold in the Washington area, where he has a home, and commute to UNA headquarters in New York.
“I have always believed that the UN and its associated agencies are indispensable. If there are problems, you fix them, you don’t get rid of them,” he said. “I also look at the UN as not just what goes on in New York. That’s extremely important – in the General Assembly and the Security Council – but I’ve seen the UN very much first hand from all of the wonderful things it does in the field.”
Barbara Crossette is a former New York Times bureau chief at the United Nations.
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