Reprinted from THE PUBLICK ENTERPRISE,
Annapolis, Maryland, October 1994

A LITTLE BIT ABOUT THE PERSONAL SIDE OF ALICE:



The Achiever

ALICE J. NEILY MUTCH

AGE: 51
HOME: Annapolis
PROFESSION: Principal, Capital Consultants
HOBBIES: Sailing, fundraising/charity work, tennis
LATEST ACHIEVEMENT: Recently nominated to step into the position of Master (Commodore) of The Corinthians, a 600-member sailing group headquartered in New York with chapters the length of the East Coast
MOST MEMORABLE BOOK Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
QUOTE: From Theodore Roosevelt: "In the battle of life, it is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; ... his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who have tast-ed neither victory nor defeat."
SUMMARY:
Although born in Detroit, she considers herself a Nova Scotian, daughter of parents hailing from that staunch Scots-Irish rocky coast ... her one-time cab-driver father went on to co-found the Checker Cab Company, and she believes she has inherited more from him than stubborn Scots genes, including his example as an energetic post-Depression entrepreneurial type ... growing up moving from Detroit to Florida to Nova Scotia and back, her early schooling was in Florida before she returned to Detroit for secondary school.

After high school graduation, she went on to earn B.S. and M.S. degrees in nursing, then practicing for two years in the Sunshine State before settling in Washington, D.C. to develop her career.

While nursing in Washington, she worked as a consultant for the -Center for Suicide Prevention under the National Institute of Mental Health, and started and directed the first inpatient program in the relatively new field of "suicidology" under a Johns Hopkins/NIMH grant, then started Georgetown University Hospital's first inpatient psychiatric program while holding adjunct faculty positions at Georgetown University Medical School and School of Nursing.

Venturing into publishing in the field of suicidology, she also did three years of post-graduate work at Georgetown in family therapy, and was appointed by President Carter to the White House Conference on Families

Becoming increasingly politically active through serving as chairman of the District of Columbia's Nurses' Political Action Committee, she found she was better able to effect changes in the field through government than from within.

A pivotal moment came in 1981, when she was offered a long-awaited position as family therapist at Children's National Medical Center at the same time an offer came from the Maryland Nurses' Association to serve as its lobbyist. She says her instincts brought her to Annapolis to take the lobbyist position after a day trip here during which she was impressed with the friendliness of an Eastport shopkeeper.

She bought a 35-foot powerboat and, two years later, when she resigned from the Nurses' Association to start her own independent lobbying firm, she moved aboard, spending the next five years slowly developing her business while enjoying the life of a liveaboard.

Today she has brought her business to new levels of success while being as selective in choosing clients as they are in choosing the right lobbyist. She says she works to find clients whose cause or mission she believes in, while avoiding all conflicts of interest (by way of contrast, she jokingly points to a sign in her office which reads "Don't tell my mother I'm a lobbyist; she thinks I'm a piano player in a whorehouse").

Through her longstanding interest in hospice care and her involvement in sailing, she became a key player in the nation's largest charity regatta, the Hospice Cup Regatta, over the course of several years, and this year served as its presi-dent, sharing her energy, infectious enthusiasm, and commitment to help produce a banner year in fundrais-ing to benefit seven area hospices..... "The neat thing about Hospice Cup is that you can take the pain people have felt from their losses and transform it into some-thing joyous - something that can bring peace and comfort to someone; it's really a celebration of living"

She and husband Andy Mutch believe in the celebratory nature of the event and the importance of its cause so strongly that when the two Annapolis Yacht Club members married on the club's deck in June of ''93, they requested donations to Hospice Cup in lieu of wedding gifts.

Having faced personal tragedy and loss in her own life, she nevertheless continues to live by an optimist's code, using strength of character, a sense of humor, generosity of spirit, dedication to principles and goals, and the gritty determination of her heritage, to share a celebration of life even in the face of adversity.