Christine John-Fuller: 2013 Woman of the Year

Listen to this article

Christine John-Fuller cannot just go to a wedding.

She has spent so much of her life organizing events that she can’t help herself. She squirms in her seat as she watches people walking down the aisle. She wants to rearrange things, to make it all work more efficiently.

To make things better.

That is why Christine John-Fuller, president and CEO of the Lupus Foundation of America, North Carolina Chapter, is The Mecklenburg Times’ Woman of the Year.

Her squirming at the wedding is based on a simple idea, really: As the leader of the state chapter, she has control, she can arrange or rearrange many things in her daily warfare against disease. But not everything.

For instance, the weather.

The 2013 Walk To End Lupus Now was on Sunday, April 28. A spring Sunday in Charlotte is usually a festival of green leaves and warm breezes; instead, it was a gray, rainy day and the expected 1,200 walkers winnowed to about 800.

When people called to ask if the event was still on, John-Fuller had the perfect response: “Lupus doesn’t take a day off.”

If only it would. A mysterious, chronic autoimmune disease, lupus is defined this way on the Lupus Foundation of America website:

In lupus, something goes wrong with your immune system, which is the part of the body that fights off viruses, bacteria, and germs (“foreign invaders,” like the flu). Normally our immune system produces proteins called antibodies that protect the body from these invaders. Autoimmune means your immune system cannot tell the difference between these foreign invaders and your body’s healthy tissues (“auto” means “self”) and creates autoantibodies that attack and destroy healthy tissue. These autoantibodies cause inflammation, pain, and damage in various parts of the body.

Control. John-Fuller can arrange many things, but not a cure for the disease. Not yet. No one has.

She knows firsthand what that means: “We lost four patients the first year I was here. There are many we say goodbye to every year.”

The work could become depressing, but John-Fuller refuses to let that happen. Outgoing and upbeat even in the rain, she uses laughter as a defense against the darkness.

“I didn’t have a storybook childhood,” she says, mentioning her parents’ divorce and the death of her stepbrother. “Humor developed into a coping mechanism.”

She pauses, then says, “There is a lot of pain we see in this role.”

Her course into nonprofit community service was set early. She recalls that from her middle-school days, she always was joining clubs and groups that helped people. “That experience,” she says, “gave me this global view” of the importance of making a difference.

In 1999, John-Fuller earned a Bachelor of Arts in journalism from the University of Georgia, and her first job was assistant press secretary in the Atlanta office of U.S. Sen. Paul D. Coverdell, R-Georgia.

“That was a great introduction into the working world,” she says, although it also helped her decide what she didn’t want to do with her life.

“I had no interest in a long-term career in politics,” she says. She was turned off by watching what she called “power struggles” within Coverdell’s staff.

When Coverdell died of a cerebral hemorrhage in July 2000, John-Fuller got a taste of being in charge: “I helped design the funeral program.”

After walking away from politics, she tiptoed into the business world, working as a marketing recruiter for an employment agency in the Atlanta area for less than a year, but her heart was in nonprofits.

In July 2001, she joined the State YMCA of Georgia Inc. as a district director, and within two years, she was promoted to the largest district in the state.

“I thought I would retire as district director for the YMCA in Georgia,” she says.

But other opportunities beckoned. In February 2005, she joined the Georgia Chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. She became director of special events there, a job she left in December 2007 to move to Charlotte to take over the Lupus Foundation of America, Piedmont Chapter.

Over the last two years, she oversaw the consolidation of the state’s two Lupus Foundation chapters into one statewide chapter. She lists that consolidation as her most significant professional accomplishment.

John-Fuller manages five staff members and about 500 volunteers.

An estimated 45,000 North Carolinians suffer from lupus.

“You have the weight of all those people on your shoulders,” she says, calling the burden “an adrenaline rush.”

She is amused by the view some people have of the world of nonprofits.

“The question a lot of people ask is: ‘Oh, you

work for a nonprofit; is that a full-time job?’ I usually answer, ‘Yes, it’s probably three full-time jobs.’”

She hears people say they’re tired of the pressure of private industry, and they’re looking to escape the so-called rat race.

“Nonprofits are not the place for them,” she says, explaining that while private industry has whole departments to tackle some tasks, “In nonprofits, you have one person doing the work of an entire department.

“There’s no way people work as hard as this unless they love it.”

In fact, the work sometimes overshadows everything else, another area in which she surrenders

control. When she takes time for herself or her husband or her stepson, she suffers. The woman who has arranged a thousand fundraising walks, golf tournaments, cycling tours, annual campaigns, annual banquets and galas, even (mentally, at least) every wedding she has ever attended, cannot arrive at a comfortable mix of work and downtime.

“It’s a role in which I feel guilty when I’m here (at work), and guilty when I’m not here,” she says.

Fortunately, her husband, John, formerly worked in nonprofits, so he understands the pull. In fact, as a graphics and web designer, he often pitches in to help the Lupus Foundation.

But she has learned that she must take breaks.

“Without downtime,” John-Fuller says, “I’m not the leader they need for me to be.”

She doesn’t have to define the pronoun “they” in that sentence. It’s clear she is talking about not only her staff members, not only the volunteers, not only the victims of lupus, but really, everyone. For it is the white-hot devotion of such people as Christine John-Fuller that makes all of Charlotte glow.

– Jim Stasiowski