Catherine Meloy
_________________
Defining People
Everyday for the past fifteen years,
Catherine Meloy’s phone has rung at precisely 6:03
AM. With gratitude and the day’s first smile on her
face, she picks up to hear the voice of her 94-yearold father reciting the Lord’s Prayer. “Have a good
day, Catherine Anne Cecilia,” he says, and then
hangs up.
Each morning, Catherine knows her father
will call her older sister first, then Catherine, and
then her younger brother and sister in sequence.
His warmth and dedication is reminiscent of his
own mother, a lady who stood over
six feet tall with a personality to
match her height. She played the
church organ for 74 years, often
wearing a blue hat with a small veil
over her face. “She was an incredible
woman of God who made each and
every one of us 23 grandchildren feel
special and loved, always,” Catherine
recalls. “I’ll never forget the time my
father told my sister and I not to drive
on country roads on our way to our
grandmother’s house when we were
teenagers. Of course we disobeyed
and ended up sliding off the road. A farmer had to
help us get it out, and it was caked with mud by
the time we got to our grandmother’s house. We
thought we were done for, but she never breathed
a word of it to our father. She was always quietly
supporting us in whatever way she could. When I
think back through life, it’s not so much made
special by defining moments, but by defining
people.”
Now President of the Goodwill of Greater
Washington, Catherine channels her energy into
an organization that is dedicated to defining
people—or, rather, to allowing people to define or
redefine themselves. Goodwill is about enhancing
the dignity and quality of life by helping people
reach their full potential through education, skills
training, and a good day’s work, concentrating on
populations that are often discouraged from
trying. “I’ve been so blessed through my entire
career to work with incredibly bright, engaged, fun
people who are passionate about what we do,” she
says. “To me, what makes it all worthwhile are the
people I work with and the people I work for.”
Founded in 1902 by the Methodist minister
Edgar J. Helms, Goodwill is now comprised of
over 160 separate community-based 501(c)(3)
organizations across the country. As a common
household name, Goodwill is generally associated
with its over 3,000 retail stores, but its true power
lies in its role as a path to employment and
professional success for millions. In
2013 alone, over 260,000 people
landed a job with Goodwill’s help,
and 9.8 million people used the
organization’s services to advance
their careers and manage their
finances.
Each
Goodwill
franchise
pursues its own unique workforce
development strategy, and Catherine
has brought an entrepreneurial
mindset to the approach of the
Goodwill of Greater Washington. She
was drawn to the social enterprising
nature of the organization, wherein job training
and placement could be paid for chiefly through
its retail operations instead of through fundraising.
In fact, of her $40 million annual budget, $28
million is furnished by its retail stores alone. Ten
million dollars of revenue comes from the
organization’s janitorial business, which employs
people with disabilities on many contracts
including contracts with the U.S. Senate Office
Building, the Bureau of Printing and Engraving,
and Bolling Air Force Base. Only $2 million comes
from grants and cash donations.
When Catherine took the helm as
President in 2004, the organization had six retail
stores and a $23 million budget eclipsed by its
$24.5 million in expenses. Its job training program
was minimal, and Catherine saw the potential. The
organization has since grown to 15 retail stores
and 800 associates, with plans to grow to 25 stores
Catherine Meloy
by 2020. Its training programs have expanded and
evolved, now providing solid instruction in the
hospitality, retail, and security and protective
services industries. They also offer a three-week
career navigation course designed to help trainees,
particularly immigrants, with resume drafting, job
searches, and online application completion.
The organization’s reach and legacy will
be defined not only by what it has done, but also
by what it will do. In 2012, the Marriott Marquis at
the convention center in downtown DC put out a
Request for Proposals to fulfill its commitment to
partner with a nonprofit to train local residents to
fill 51 percent of its jobs. Goodwill of Greater
Washington won the $2 million contract and now
heads up the training program, an honor that
speaks to its reputation and potential. “Every
single person on our team was involved in the
success of that project,” Catherine recounts. “It
means so much that Marriott and the District of
Columbia were willing to entrust us with
something so monumental.”
In fielding 3,000 applications to fill the
training program’s 700 slots, Catherine was
shocked to discover that 1,846 of those individuals
could not pass a reading and math test beyond
eighth grade, and most of them could not even test
at a fourth grade level. As the scope of the problem
unfolded, Catherine happened to visit the
Goodwill
of
Indianapolis
to
observe
transformational best practices for e-commerce,
but far more valuable was her exposure to their
adult charter schools. Designed for high school
dropouts over the age of 18, the model eliminates
two common barriers to education and
employment training by providing childcare and
transportation. “The District of Columbia is charter
school-friendly, and 63,000 of its adult residents
are high school dropouts,” Catherine explains. “If
people are going to hold a job or create a career,
they need more than a GED—they need an
experience that teaches them how to think. And
beyond that, they need a support structure where
their children observe their commitment in
working toward an education. We wanted to
provide a holistic experience that breaks
generational poverty in several key places along
the chain.”
In May of 2015, the D.C. Public Charter
School Board conditionally approved the Goodwill
Excel Center, a 20,000 square-foot project serving
350 students annually. With the hard work, vision,
and enterprising spirit that have come to be the
hallmark of the organization’s ethos, it will be the
first of multiple such schools throughout the
District, providing case studies in success that
might then be used to expand into Maryland and
Virginia and change even more lives for the better.
Catherine may seem destined for the work
she’s doing now, but it took a tremendous leap of
faith from her comfortable decades-long career in
the broadcasting business to get her here.
Thankfully, she was raised on leaps. Born in Camp
Lejeune in North Carolina to a father who served
in the Marines for 25 years, Catherine and her
family spent her childhood moving to a new place
every two years. All in all, she attended seven
different schools growing up, but it taught her to
embrace the thrill of change. “My parents were
incredibly good at making those moves fun and
exciting, each one like a new adventure,” she
remembers. “To this day, change doesn’t bother
me at all. Sometimes you fail and sometimes you
win, but if you’re afraid of change, you miss out on
so many great experiences. It created in me a
willingness to embrace change in my own life and
not be afraid of what the outcome might be,
opening myself to God and possibility.”
Catherine’s mother, a quiet and loving
woman who was a good balance to her father’s
disciplinarian nature, navigated through life with
an understated courage. At four years old,
Catherine could sense a sadness permeating the
home when her mother had two miscarriages, and
then the joy that replaced it when her brother, Joe,
was born. In the years that ensued, they moved
from DC, to Georgia, to North Carolina, yet every
summer they returned to their grandparents’ home
in Teutoplois, Illinois, to reconnect with all the
aunts, uncles, and cousins on their father’s side.
Catherine was the second of four siblings,
and one of three girls, but always felt as though
her home environment was pervaded by a sense of
equality and fairness. “Our parents never treated
the girls differently from our brother,” she reflects.
“We all cut grass and did the dishes. Gender just
wasn’t a thing in our household, and our parents
recognized that all four of us are very different
people. They really supported those differences
and accepted all of us for who we are, and as a
result, the four of us are very close. I have so much
respect and appreciation for my parents for raising
four children who are all very successful in their
own right but never competed amongst each other.
Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area
It’s a really wonderful thing.”
Growing up, Catherine always had a job,
whether it was babysitting, working in retail, or
ushering at the baseball stadium in college. Unlike
her siblings, who dreamed of becoming doctors or
professional golfers, she never really had a clear
idea of what she wanted to be when she grew up.
“When I look back at my career path, I’m amazed
at how things evolved without a clear urge to do
one thing,” she says. “I had a lot of freedom to
explore.”
Her father retired when Catherine was 17,
and the family moved to St. Louis. There, she
finished high school and enrolled at Fontbonne
University on scholarship. “I absolutely hate
owing money to anyone, and by the end of my first
two years there, I had racked up $10,000 in loans,”
she recalls. “I decided to take a break from school
to pay them down, but I ended up not returning.
There was too much to do and learn in the real
world, so it seemed silly to break myself off from
that at any point.”
Through college, Catherine had worked as
an usherette for the St. Louis Cardinals. When she
decided not to return to school, she was offered the
opportunity to work for Joe Torre and the team.
“He was incredibly disciplined, motivational, and
kind, and he thought I could do anything,” she
reminisces. “He was great to have as my first
boss.”
Two years later, she took a job as an
assistant to a Sheraton Hotels general manager,
who gave her the transformational piece of advice
to get into sales. Before long, she had become the
General Manager of a Sheraton hotel in Kansas
City. Five years into her career in the hotel
business, she attended a conference and met David
Meloy, the most accepting and supportive human
being she would ever encounter. She fell in love,
and despite her parents’ skepticism, she picked up
her life and moved to Boston to be with him.
In her new town, Catherine had no job and
no contacts, but she certainly had spunk. She felt
she and David couldn’t both be in the hotel
business, so she decided to start an adventure in a
different field. With that, she went out for a walk
one day and wandered into the Prudential
Building, where WEEI radio was housed. She
walked into the offices and announced that she
didn’t have an appointment, but she was in sales
and looking for an opportunity. The General
Manager happened to hear her as he came back
from lunch and offered her a job, jumpstarting her
decades-long career in broadcasting. Fortunately,
Catherine entered broadcasting at time when the
industry was looking for women to succeed, and
she remembers a number of male mentors who
helped elevate her along the way.
The profession proved stimulating and
incredibly versatile. When David was transferred
to New York, CBS was able to transfer Catherine as
well. When they moved to Denver, she was
welcomed into a General Sales Manager position
with open arms. When David transferred to
Washington in 1984, she landed a job with WMAL.
In 1990, she went to work as General Manager of
WGMS. Steven and Mitchell Rales of Danaher
Corporation had purchased the station, along with
John VerStandig, when she was General Manager,
giving her the golden opportunity to work with
them in transitioning WGMS-AM to WTEM Sports
Talk 980. “It was the best business education I
could have gotten,” she remarks. “They bought the
radio stations for $30 million, acquired a couple of
other stations, and sold them in the late 90’s for
over $250 million. It was truly remarkable.” Two
Washington stations (WGMS-FM and WBIG-FM)
also won the prestigious Marconi Radio Award
during her tenure as General Manager, and she’ll
never forget the look of excitement on the faces of
her team members when those announcements
were made.
Catherine loved every moment of her 20
years in broadcasting. By 2004, she was serving as
the General Manager for two Clear Channel radio
stations. The sales departments of an additional 23
stations in the region reported to her. She loved the
visibility and empowerment of the work, which
compelled her involvement in boards and around
the community. She had no plans to leave when
she got a call from an old friend who worked as a
headhunter for the McCormick Group, asking if
she knew anyone who would be a good fit for the
President of Goodwill of Greater Washington.
They tossed around a couple of names and hung
up, but he called back two minutes later to ask if
Catherine herself would be interested. “I found
myself saying yes,” she recalls. “When I hung up, I
said, Dear Lord, where are you taking me?”
Catherine had already planned to leave for
a two-week trip to Europe, but the board decided
to hold the position open until they could meet
her. While she was away, she reviewed the
organization’s financials to find it was not on
Catherine Meloy
strong financial footing. But where many would
have seen fear, Catherine saw challenge and
opportunity.
She returned to the U.S. on a Friday, and at
7:00 AM the following morning, she came in for an
interview. By the following Friday, the Goodwill
Board had offered her the job, and she gave her
resignation to Clear Channel. “If you had told me
twelve years ago I’d end up at Goodwill, I would
have thought you were crazy,” she laughs. “I
didn’t know anything about Goodwill and had
never been to one of their stores. But it was the
best move I ever made.”
To keep the organization afloat, the Board
had sold its headquarters building two years prior
to Catherine’s arrival, and by the time she took the
helm, the situation was dire. She knew she could
turn the ship around, but she’d need to learn
quickly. “The one thing I’ve always been good at is
finding the best person to provide guidance on a
given matter and then seeking their advice,” she
says. “Unlike major companies like CBS and Clear
Channel, where all the infrastructure and
administrative decisions are ingrained and
streamlined, we were faced with all the obstacles
of a typical small business. How would we do our
health care benefits and payroll system? What
were the financial ramifications of cutting
paychecks every two weeks versus once a month?
There were all these minor considerations that
added up to major challenges.”
Catherine hired the best CFO she could
find—someone with a for-profit partner who could
really become a partner. They dismantled and
rebuilt their balance sheets, committing to run
Goodwill as a business instead of a mission to
make it sustainable. First, Catherine studied other
Goodwill organizations and discovered that there
was tremendous opportunity to improve in their
back-of-house processes, ensuring that the product
was brought fresh on the floor and rotated
constantly. Together, she and her team turned the
organization around in three years, and have since
evolved it into the vibrant, dynamic, promising
entity it is today.
While Catherine will give her all in the
office everyday, she and her husband have a longlived understanding that work stays at work.
When they spend time together, they remain fully
present in the activity at hand, whether it’s sailing,
skiing, or sitting down to dinner together every
night. “I grew up doing that, and I think it’s an
important way to show what’s really important in
life, which is family,” she explains. “We have both
feet firmly planted in the marriage at all times, and
that’s made such a difference. What’s more, David
actually accepts everyone for who they are, which
is an incredibly rare and invaluable trait. I’m
blessed to live with a man who has never wanted
me to change in any way, shape, or form, and
never expected me to be anything I wasn’t. He’s
supported me endlessly.”
Catherine and David have one child
together and two children from his previous
marriage. All three have grown up together thick
as thieves, and the Meloys celebrated 35 wonderful
years together in April of 2015. They’ll never forget
the night in 1988 when their home in Old Town
Alexandria caught fire, leaving them with only a
suitcase of picture frames that a fireman had
managed to save. “Like many people, we had
amassed things in life—beautiful furniture,
paintings, and some antiques,” she reflects. “When
it all goes up in smoke, you can be the person
who’s life has crumbled, or you can be the person
who realized what’s really important. Watching it
all burn, I realized that my husband was fine, and
our one-year-old son was safe, and that’s what
mattered.”
In advising young people entering the
working world today, Catherine emphasizes the
importance of being open to what we don’t know
yet, and to what we can learn from others. “You
can learn every single day of your life,” she says.
“If you’re humble and you have a thirst to learn,
you’ll do well no matter where you are. The more
success you have, the more you’ll realize how
much you have to learn, and how much we all rely
on other people. That’s what makes the differences
in people so great. We can shine a light on each
others’ blind spots and fill each others’ weaknesses
with strength.
“I always stand in awe of how life
happens,” she affirms. “It’s all about defining
people who expand our point of view, advance our
thoughts and beliefs, and transform our
understanding of what’s possible.”
© July 2015 Gordon J. Bernhardt. All rights
reserved. Reprinted by permission.
 By Gordon J. Bernhardt, CPA, PFS, CFP®, AIF®
About Gordon J. Bernhardt
Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area
President and founder of Bernhardt Wealth
Management and author of Profiles in Success:
Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the
Washington D.C. Area, Gordon provides financial
planning and wealth management services to affluent
individuals, families and business-owners throughout
the Washington, DC area. Since establishing his firm
in 1994, he and his team have been focused on
providing high-quality service and independent
financial advice to help clients make informed decisions
about their money. For more information, visit
www.BernhardtWealth.com and Gordon’s Blog.
________________________
Catherine Meloy
Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area