LEADERS

ONLINE


Editors’ Note

Kathleen Behrens began her career in politics, serving in the administration of former New York Governor Mario Cuomo. In 1995, she joined New York Cares where, for six years, she served as Executive Director. In 2001, Behrens joined the NBA as Vice President, Community Relations, overseeing all of the NBA’s global philanthropic and public service initiatives. She was appointed to her current position in April 2005.

Company Brief

Founded in 1946, the National Basketball Association (www.nba.com) is the world’s premier basketball league. Headquartered in New York City, the NBA has 30 teams divided into the Eastern and Western conferences.

What are the primary philanthropic areas of focus for NBA Cares?

We focus on three areas: education, with a real emphasis on literacy; youth and family development; and health-related causes. When we launched the NBA Cares program almost two years ago, we said we would raise and donate $100 million to charity, provide one million hours of hands-on service to communities around the world, and build 100 places where kids and families could live, learn, and play. We surpassed our expectations on the last one in the first year. So we’re now committed to building 250 places where kids and families can live, learn, and play. And we’re making great progress on the first two as well.

Have there been any areas that have needed improvement?

Increasingly, we’ve tried to involve not only our players, but our employees as well. And now, our employee volunteer program is stronger than it has ever been. In addition, this year, for the first time, we became involved in a big service project. We had our annual sales and marketing meetings in New Orleans, and a couple hundred league and team employees worked on a project with Habitat for Humanity, and a project with KaBOOM!, which builds playgrounds.

How important are partnerships in this work?

We try to find organizations that are doing good work, and which meet our high standards. But we would not be able to do what we do without our partnerships. We’re going to be traveling this summer with Basketball Without Borders, and we’ve already been in touch with a lot of the NGOs in local communities, to research which ones we want to support.

How important has solid leadership been to the success of these programs?

David [Stern] is the perfect CEO for this kind of work. He really believes in it, and so it’s never too difficult to get his attention. I’ve worked with a lot of companies in my career and David cares about social responsibility as much, if not more, than anybody I’ve ever seen.

Do you think NBA players receive too much unfair criticism?

People tend to focus more on the negative things players occasionally do than all of the incredibly good things players are doing every day. But I feel that it’s largely our responsibility to help get the good messages out, and help the public understand that, overall, the NBA is an organization that cares very much about our communities.