With his retirement on the horizon six months away, Charles Stokes, the CDC Foundation’s president and CEO from its inception in 1995, is focusing his attention on supporting a global response to the continued threats of the Ebola virus.
During an interview in his office downtown with Global Atlanta, Mr. Stokes quickly dismissed any sense of relief with the widely broadcast announcement that Ebola had been snuffed out in Liberia.
Ebola cases are still cropping up in Guinea and Sierra Leone, and the continent generally continues to deal with a large number of infectious diseases.
The creation of an African Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the African CDC, couldn’t come soon enough, he said, especially in view that the African continent has the weakest health infrastructure in the world.
Because of the African CDC, he said, that “the continent will be in better shape, will be a safe place and the world will be a much safer place.”
While the problems laid bare by the Ebola crisis are at the forefront of his concerns, his tenure at the foundation has faced many global health crises.
When he started its operations 20 years ago he had a single employee. Now he leads a staff of more than 150 in the U.S. and around the world occupied with 250 programs of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention organized with the help of private and public partners in the U.S. and 73 countries.
Since the foundation was charged by the U.S. Congress to support the CDC’s work to save lives and protect people from health and safety threats, it has had to find funding outside of government, which only partially covers the required costs.
“We’re a bridge between business, individual philanthropists, and major philanthropies like the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation and the Bloomberg Philanthropies, and we make it possible for these people to connect with this world renowned agency, and together do some things that would otherwise never happen,” he said.
For example, he cited the $50 million the foundation raised for the CDC’s emergency response to the Ebola outbreak from a large number of individuals and foundations, including the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, which provided emergency operations centers in the three West African countries suffering from the crisis.
Liberia had only 51 doctors for a population of 4.5 million when the Ebola endemic exploded last year. The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation quickly responded because Mr. Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft Corp., was aware of the threat poised by Ebola because of prior research of the disease in primates.
Others such as the William and Melinda Gates Foundation and Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan also donated large amounts to the foundation’s Ebola response.
Mr. Stokes told Global Atlanta that he had decided to retire at age 66 to spend more time with his three sons and two granddaughters and wants to be remembered as a key person among others who built a strong foundation to the CDC’s lifesaving programs.
The foundation has formed a search committee to look for his successor. To learn more about the foundation, click here.
To listen to the audio of Mr. Stokes’ view of the African CDC, click here. To listen to his overview of the CDC Foundation and his future plans, click here.
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