Remembering Elizabeth “Bess” Touma

In the late 1990s, I returned home from the former Yugoslavia with an idea: to create a nonprofit organization that would use technology to provide medical and health education to people living in war zones and low-resource environments.

How to conduct programs on the ground was clear to me, and the work was off to a productive and successful start. What I did not know was how to create or run a nonprofit. I was a professor, not a businessman, and the intricacies of organizing an American NGO to work effectively in countries abroad were well beyond anything I had ever done.

WiRED International began awkwardly. I recruited a few friends to serve on a board and found a lawyer who helped navigate the formidable legal paperwork. WiRED was beginning to establish itself in the communities we served. But back home, the organization remained something of a patchwork.

Then one day, I had a conversation with Elizabeth “Bess” Touma.

I knew Bess from a mountain biking group we both belonged to in my neighborhood, but I knew little about her professional life. She asked me about WiRED, and I described our work throughout the former Yugoslavia and the administrative struggles I was having as I tried to build an organization capable of supporting that work.

God bless her, Bess listened and then asked a simple question:

“Would you like some help?”

I had no idea at the time how consequential those few words would be. They marked the beginning of a remarkable working relationship and a treasured friendship that would last for decades.

Despite all our bike rides together, I knew little then about Bess’s impressive credentials or her extensive experience with nonprofit organizations.

Bess earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social Science from Michigan State University, preparing her for early work in nonprofit and social services management before she moved into senior advancement positions.

She eventually became Vice President for Advancement at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. She also earned the Certified Fund Raising Executive credential, an internationally recognized professional certification reflecting experience, knowledge and a commitment to ethical fundraising.

During her years with the Conservatory, Bess helped guide fundraising and development through an important period of growth, including the development of its new campus facility in San Francisco’s Civic Center. She helped shape development strategies and financial planning for the Conservatory’s centennial, directed major-gift initiatives and institutional campaigns and helped secure support for academic chairs, student scholarships, capital improvements and educational programs.

Bess brought formidable skills to this work, but some of her deepest passions lay with animals and the environment.

She served on the board of an animal-welfare organization based in Kabul, Afghanistan, whose work included rescuing animals abandoned amid the country’s conflicts. She also devoted considerable time to the Marine Mammal Center outside San Francisco, where she volunteered as a fundraiser assisting its major-gifts team. The Center’s mission to rescue, rehabilitate and release sick, injured and orphaned marine mammals was a natural fit for her.

Bess’s interests also intersected in an important way with WiRED’s growing commitment to One Health, which is the recognition that human, animal and environmental health are inseparably connected. As we developed training to help community health workers understand the implications of One Health in low-resource communities, Bess became substantively involved. Among her contributions, she documented sea lion leptospirosis outbreaks to illustrate how environmental and climatic conditions can affect animal and human health.

Volunteering was simply part of who Bess was.

In addition to her work with WiRED and the Marine Mammal Center, she volunteered with the Smithsonian Institution’s Hall of Human Origins at the National Museum of Natural History and with the Washington English Center, where she tutored adult immigrants in English. She contributed her time to environmental and educational organizations, including the Tregaron Conservancy and the U.S. Botanic Garden.

Bess once explained how she managed to balance a demanding professional career with so much volunteer work:

“I love to work and to volunteer, so I found a way to fit them both into my life.”

That simple statement tells you a great deal about Bess.

Bess and WiRED

Bess joined WiRED’s governing board in the early 2000s, taking on an even greater role in shaping the organization’s strategic direction and guiding its day-to-day operations.

It would be difficult to overstate what Bess did for WiRED. As I noted earlier, she helped us navigate the administrative and organizational challenges facing a young nonprofit. She established essential operational and financial procedures, managed donor acknowledgments, reviewed monthly financial statements and helped organize our annual audits.

Her record-keeping systems helped us meet the legal and administrative requirements of a nonprofit organization. Just as important, she brought order to the records generated by projects underway in some extraordinarily difficult environments, such as Kosovo, Bosnia, Iraq and countries throughout Central America.

Even today, because of systems Bess established many years ago, I can retrieve records from WiRED’s earliest days.

Her coaching in fundraising, the bane of almost every nonprofit, was invaluable in helping us secure the resources needed to advance the work of a largely volunteer organization. The habits of economy and accountability she helped establish remain with us today. WiRED continues to direct 95 percent of its donations to program activities while spending nothing on administration or fundraising.

But describing Bess only in terms of systems, fundraising and organizational expertise misses something essential about her contribution.

She was willing to do anything that needed doing in an organization where everyone wears many hats.

Bess helped distribute programs, print brochures, prepare mailings and promotional materials, give rides to the airport and take on any of the dozens of large and small jobs required to keep a tiny international nonprofit moving forward. There was never a sense that some task was beneath her. If something needed doing, Bess helped do it.

And she gave us something equally valuable: her judgment.

Bess never pulled punches. If she thought we were heading in the wrong direction, she said so, and she did so calmly, clearly and firmly. She was never brash or unkind, but when Bess held a view, you knew it. You always knew where you stood with her, and over the years I came to value that candor enormously.

For all that Bess contributed to WiRED, however, my memories of her cannot be confined to the organization.

She was a wonderful friend.

For many years, our lives intersected through work, volunteering, shared causes, conversations and friendship. Looking back now, I return to that first conversation, when WiRED was still finding its footing and I was struggling with organizational problems I did not quite know how to solve.

Bess listened.

Then she asked, “Would you like some help?”

That was Bess. She saw something that needed doing, recognized that she could help and stepped forward.

WiRED became a stronger organization because she did. Countless people whom she would never meet benefited from the systems she helped build, the funds she helped us raise, the advice she gave and the hours she volunteered. Her influence remains embedded in the organization so many years after its founding.

But those of us fortunate enough to know her received something more.

We had Bess herself. Her intelligence, her energy, her candor, her generosity, her commitment to service and, above all, her friendship.

Of all that Bess gave us, that was the most important.

Her friendship. And for that, we will always be grateful.