This historic charity was created in 1917 to help veterans get on their feet after they came home from World War I. For decades ICD did a lot of really good work helping injured veterans get back to their lives and helping unemployed veterans getting the training they needed to find work. Many U.S Presidents, corporate leaders and famous celebrities visited ICD and praised the charity for its good work.
Like many charities though, as the years went by, International Center for the Disabled lost its focus on its original mission and veterans. By the time I joined the board almost 100 years after it had been created, ICD wasn’t helping any veterans. Instead, it had branched into all kinds of different services: drug and alcohol rehab, a methadone clinic, speech therapy, school programs, pregnancy tests, etc. for all kinds of different people: teenagers, mothers, the elderly, drug addicts, alcoholics, the unemployed, etc. Technically, International Center for the Disabled was still a charity but the vast majority of its money came from contracts with the government for delivering various services to different folks.
Because of this “business model”, ICD had very few donors and raised very little money. To me it felt like more of a company that was paid by the government to provide various services to a low income population. Just when I was about to resign from the board, because I didn’t feel like I was contributing anything, New York State drastically reduced its payments to ICD. These cuts made ICD insolvent. In response, the ICD board had to close down almost all of ICD’s programs and fire almost all ICD employees. Without any programs, employees or a business plan, ICD decided to sell its one remaining asset: its building which had been ICD’s home for many decades. The ICD Board sold the building – for around $27 million — and moved into small offices with a skeleton staff. Now ICD had a lot of money in the bank but still no business plan, management team or idea for what to do next.
I proposed that ICD should get back to its roots and start helping veterans again. After the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there were now millions of veterans in America that really needed help in many ways. American veterans had a broad range of health problems and challenges and many needed vocational training too. ICD had a lot of experience and resources that could really help the veteran community. Maybe it was fate that 100 years after it was started, ICD had the opportunity to get back to its original mission. While I really loved this idea, most of my fellow board members did not. The board decided instead, to develop new programs that the government might fund. At the time, both the New York State and the Federal government were still willing to pay a lot for vocational training in low income neighborhoods so that’s what the ICD board decided to do. And they changed the name of this 100-year-old charity from ICD: International Center for the Disabled to ICD: Institute for Career Development.
