COMMUNITY PROFILES
11th STREET — John Pacheco’s career is a disaster waiting to happen.
He’s spent half of his life responding to tragedies throughout the world — earthquakes, hurricanes, fires, floods, the LA riots and most recently, the July 16, 2003, Farmers’ Market crash in Santa Monica. Pacheco worked his way from a part-time blood mobile driver to a top administrator at the American Red Cross Los Angeles chapter and has seen the international organization change dramatically. He became the executive director of the Santa Monica chapter last summer after he had spent a few months here “on loan.”
It was when he was on loan from the LA chapter that Pacheco learned about the strength of the Santa Monica community. It left him with a strong enough impression that when the job as executive director came up, Pacheco took it — and a $20,000 pay cut.
And responding to one of the city’s most historic tragedies wasn’t his only challenge as a newcomer. Pacheco had taken a post that been occupied with two previous leaders — one who had a questionable background and another who had questionable management practices.
Pacheco’s predecessor, Tom Miskimen, resigned due to health reasons. But when board members and Red Cross staff started to learn that Miskimen had been accused of financial misappropriations at his former job at an Iowa nonprofit, pressure started to mount. Even before Miskimen, many people close to the Santa Monica chapter had questioned the direction the organization was headed when it was led by longtime executive director Ray Corvan, who Miskimen replaced.
The morale seems to have turned around since Pacheco dug his heels into reshaping the organization, which recently has been able to balance its budget. Boasting 550 volunteers and 300 youth volunteers, the Santa Monica Red Cross appears to be moving past its previous challenges and reconnecting with the community.
Pacheco literally chose his career at random. Although he’s an administrator now, Pacheco, 51, got his bachelor’s degree in psychology and his master’s degree in community clinical psychology. He applied what he learned to helping others cope with experiences of disastrous proportions.
He commutes from Sylmar, which has led him to a new pastime — books on tape. He is currently reading/listening to a Sherlock Holmes series. With a teenag-er at home, Pacheco also has mastered video games and likes to play guitar with Andrew, his 14-year-old son.
Here, the Daily Press caught up with Pacheco at his office on 11th Street.
How did you end up in Santa Monica? “At the Red Cross, the structure is such that when they have an exec out for whatever reason, they loan execs from other chapters to fill in. I was the associate manager for the Los Angeles chapter, and I was kind of the guy who they sent out when chapters around Southern California lost their execs for one reason or another.
There were a number of assignments I took in different chapters around the country. I moved into the administration from the program service area, so it was really logical and it was a matter of timing in selecting the right chapter that I had the best skill set for and could benefit from my experience. And Santa Monica — I wasn’t expecting the vacancy to come up — I came here only because I was asked to be here for a couple of weeks until Tom got back.
I had been out on a number of other assignments. Frankly, I said to myself that the next time I go out I am just going to stay. When you put that much time and effort into a place, you want to stay. It seemed like a good match.”
What’s the last disaster you personally went to?
“The Farmers’ Market. Going back to the Santa Monica chapter, one of the things that I was attracted to was it had a core competency in its service delivery. They have a good staff. I think that was illustrated in the Farmers’ Market. I think they had the ability to respond to a fairly significant and odd disaster. It wasn’t our usual disaster.
I don’t want to compare it to Sept. 11, but it was very similar in many ways. Up until that time, we didn’t even talk about ‘non-disaster’ events that really are disasters. In the last four or five years, the definition has been broadened substantially. Now we are training people. We are helping to train people around the United States with what it is you do in the event of a mass casualty incident like the Farmers’ Market.
What were the challenges of the Farmers’ Market incident?
“The chapter did its job and responded. The first challenge that was presented is when the old fire chief said, ‘Call the Red Cross,’ if you need anything. The chapter wasn’t set up for it. But within a few hours, not only had we installed lines and set up a hotline operation here, but we had used resources from the Los Angeles chapter. I was still affiliated with them so we could use their hotline for a few hours.
We had a good disaster nursing team. I supplemented it with some folks from LA who worked for me and got them set up because they had some experience in this kind of casualty incident. We contacted the hospitals and were trying to find where everybody was.
Within 24 or 48 hours, we had a good basic mental health team here. We started to increase the number of mental health counselors here. Within 48 hours, we were working with county mental health and working toward debriefings. It became more of a mental health operation. I think we spent about $7,000 or $8,000, which isn’t a lot for a disaster. There wasn’t things like people losing their homes.
We worked with the Chamber of Commerce in getting money for the victims.
We also got about 500 units of blood. The community really came together. We mobilized our volunteers, and they got in there early.”
What do you like about the Santa Monica chapter and being here?
Besides the weather? It’s smaller and in many ways, it’s actually more like the norm of the Red Cross chapters. There are more small and mid-size chapters than larger chapters. Red Cross works much better in identifiable communities. If I need to do business with the city, or I need to talk to the fire chief, I can go talk to the fire chief. In Los Angeles, No. 1, there are 33 cities and No. 2, you would never get in to talk to the fire chief. It’s much more direct here, it’s more accessible.
It’s much easier to demonstrate to the community what it is that you are doing, and I think there is more accountability. There is no place to hide in a small community, and I think that’s good. Our life blood is based on what the community thinks of us.
I also like the sense of community. It may sound odd, but after LA? The Red Cross works really well in a defined community. You see it work. You see partnerships develop and grow.”
There were some issues surrounding previous Santa Monica Red Cross executive directors. What challenges did you face when you got here?
“I think morale was low for the staff and the volunteers. It always is when leadership changes. There is a level of guilt that permeates within an organization — that they thought they should have done this, or done that — and generally a lack of leadership and the board had not been in power. Some of the best people left. I don’t blame them.
You rebuild the confidence. You have to demonstrate that you are worthy of their support, and you don’t get that overnight. You treat your fiscal responsibilities just as serious as your services responsibilities. This was always one of the best chapters for service delivery. But that isn’t enough.
There are some who took responsibility for what happened, and there were others who pointed the finger... rightfully so or not... there was plenty of blame to go around. It wasn’t just them. While the board has the authority to approve an executive director, they only do that after the region has approved the candidate. Part of the process was the region let them down. There was some angst to get a new person in when the old director left. They felt leaving that position open for a long period of time was bad, but I think they could have taken more time and done much more due diligence.”
How did your career start at the Red Cross?
“There was a fire in downtown LA, and there were a number of deaths. At that time, Red Cross really didn’t have a mental health program like it does today. I had been doing bereavement counseling at the VA, as well. The social worker in charge of their disaster response realized she was beyond her skill level and she asked me to come on in the summer months and oversee the disaster response on that job. That was it. I just got hooked. I spent half of my career overseeing disasters.
Los Angeles is probably the second busiest next to New York. I had the southern territory, which included the Watts neighborhood and most of the downtown areas. And that’s where most of the fires are. You’d average 350 a year, almost a fire a day. Plus the national disasters.”
How did you get into the military? “I was in the last draft call of the war. I never thought I would have to go in. The war was winding down. I had asthma as a kid so I had a doctor’s note. It didn’t matter at all. It was June 1972. It actually was-n’t a bad experience at the beginning. But then I got sick. They make you run the rifle ranges — you get up at 5 a.m. and you would run five or 10 miles and by the time you finished, with the breeze, you’d be freezing. I ended up in the hospital and stayed there for about three weeks. I got recycled into a different company because I missed too much. They put me in a company that was an all-volunteer company, one of the first all-volunteer companies. They were going to send me to radio school. Because my dates were shifted, I had the option of doing something else, and there was a little French Canadian drill sergeant. His name was ‘Pepe Le Pew.’ He called me into his office one day and said, ‘Here college boy, you don’t want to be a radio man, that’s the second guy they shoot after the guy with the red cross on his helmet.’ He said, ‘C’mon you’ve already got your basic training, you can extend for a few months and go to school.’ He had this big book out, and I opened it up and honest to God, it said ‘mental health, social work psychology specialist.’ I said, ‘Can I get in to this?’
That’s how you started you’re career? “Yes. Completely random. I never ever thought I would do that. I think I got a ‘C’ in psychology in college.”
Describe your career ascent from the Army.
“They sent me to Houston. I went through basic medic training because everyone did that. I went through three or four months of training to be a psychologist, essentially. It was kind of new in the military. I got to Georgia which was Evac for the first year and a half for psychiatric casualties coming out of the Republic of Vietnam and direct casualties out of Germany. I worked in a mental health clinic and had a small psychiatric ward that I worked on. I was there for about a year, and the psychiatrist there had got discharged. They were having a hard time keeping doctors. I was the last one there.
There was some pretty significant psychiatric problems there and so it was really a new arena. I ran the clinic for about a year. They gave me the Army commendation medal for it. I thought that was kind of neat because you often don’t get medals and it said it was for my warm and compassionate nature, which I thought getting a warm and compassionate medal in the Army was pretty good.”
What was the worst disaster for you? “There isn’t a name for it. But it was right before or after Hurricane Andrew. It was October 1985, and it was Puerto Rico. It was just incredible. It didn’t get a lot of press. It wasn’t rated as a hurricane, it was a tropical storm. It went through the south side of the island, and the deluge of water just literally flooded out entire villages. Whole villages just disappeared. It was not uncommon for them to find bodies every other day. It was tough in a lot of ways. The power was out. It was hot, humid, 100 degrees. It was a tough population to work with. I spoke a little Spanish because I had run some East LA disaster operations. If you had a fire or a disaster I could talk to ya, but nothing beyond that.
We used a lot of local volunteers who weren’t trained in disasters and there is some basic training needed to be efficient at it. It was a tough place to be. The living accommodations were atrocious, as they were often, but probably more so in this case. We ended up in some kind of resort that had had mud come through. It went on for a long time.
The tragedy was in your face. We were using volunteers that had lost family members. And, that’s a tough little island. In the southwest portion of it, it’s run by these little local ‘alcaldes’ and each one of them has their own militias. So we were opening service centers in these little towns, and every time you went to one of them, you had to make a deal with the local alcalde. Sometimes I suspected that the local alcalde was also the local drug runner. You didn’t get a place opened up if you didn’t work out a deal with them.”
Was it difficult going into communities you knew nothing about?
“The politics were interesting. One of the things about the Red Cross is that you get to walk into a city unlike you would if you were just visiting or going to a meeting. You walk in at a time when the doors are all open. You are interacting at a level that would normally take years. That Red Cross symbol, because of what people assumes it stands for, and rightfully so in its neutrality, often lets you in places that you wouldn’t get in. It brings a certain moral authority in a non-relgious way. You see things you wouldn’t see.”
How political is the Red Cross? I think you need to be savvy to the politics of the city, particularly in a small community. The Red Cross has a neutrality, and you need to maintain that neutrality, but that doesn’t mean you don’t build friendships out there. With previous executive directors, the staff were told not to do that, but to stay in the office. I came here and told them to go out in the community, that’s what we do. I am meeting with many people in the community and building neat collaborations with them.”
John Pacheco, MA Executive director, American Red Cross, Santa Monica chapter Salary: $72,000 a year Residence: Sylmar, Calif. Family: Wife, Sandy, who is an accountant. Daughter, Heather, 24, who attends San Diego State University. Son, Andrew, 13. Two beagles.
Hobbies: Listening to books on tapes, playing guitar and recreating in the eastern Sierra Mountains.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 19, 2004. Read the original PDF.