Dr. Emma Belcher’s Values-Based Leadership

On a sunny, 60º day in San Francisco, Dr. Emma Belcher and I met at the California Academy of Science’s cafe for a coffee following a short but packed week of meetings with the Board of Directors and our annual gala, Chain Reaction. We had just concluded a private group tour of the museum which sits in Golden Gate Park, nestled between green fields and well-cleaned concrete sidewalks as we dodged withdrawn chairs and cold silver table edges to find a clean place to sit with our drinks: decaf latte for her, mango lemonade for me. Emma took the time to find napkins and wipe off both her and my side of the table before we settled in and began discussing life in and outside of DC, life with and without kids, and our shared work at Ploughshares.

Having an hour-long chat with a coworker after a week full of cross-city meetings and activities in a different time zone that you live in can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, but meeting with Emma left me feeling rejuvenated, inspired, cared for, and valued. As cheesy as it sounds, that’s how I feel leaving every interaction I have with Emma who is not just my coworker, but my boss-the President of Ploughshares, which is the largest foundation singularly focused on reducing the threat of nuclear weapons.

As President of Ploughshares, Emma is a leading voice in the nuclear threat reduction field. More than that, though, she’s a mother, an American-based Australian, a cellist, a rock climber, and an artist. She first learned of nuclear weapons and their testing in middle school, when France conducted atmospheric testing in Mururoa Atoll. She immediately knew that the weapons are not only an existential threat to all of us, but are already a physical threat to the health and wellbeing of many who suffer from the effects of radiation poisoning and other ill-effects of nuclear weapons’ production and testing. When asked if she thinks about that day in class often she says, “I do still think about that day. I’m sure my daughter will have a similar moment in her lifetime, too-she’s very curious and asks a lot of questions, so I imagine I’ll begin to field her questions on this specific topic sometime soon. Though I hope when I do, I can provide her with more stories of hope and progress than I had when I first learned about these weapons of mass destruction. That’s the type of future I’m working toward, anyway.”

Since learning of nuclear weapons in 8th grade, Emma has dedicated her education and career to the mission of peace and security. She attended the University of Melbourne to study political science, cold war history, Russian, and Arabic; while in undergrad, she studied abroad at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, a city she returned to while working for the Australian Embassy as a Public Affairs Officer, where she was working on 9/11. Interested in a career in international policy, she moved to Boston to attend the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. She earned a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy and a Doctorate in international relations, focusing on international security Studies, conflict resolution and negotiation, and Southwest Asia and Islamic civilization.

While working on her  PhD, she returned to Australia to serve as a national security and international affairs advisor in Australia’s Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. She tells me she thought she could do both at the same time, but quickly realized that wasn’t going to work. Following this stint in the Australian government, Emma returned to the US, determined to finish her PhD or she feared she never would.

Her first forays into the US-based nonprofit and academic worlds of nuclear threat reduction came in the form of prestigious fellowships at the Council of Foreign Relations and Harvard University’s Belfer Center, both of which focused on nuclear security.

In 2011, Emma began her philanthropic career when she joined the MacArthur Foundation as a Program Officer, allowing her to apply her nuclear weapons expertise and previous experience to the world of funding. Most of her work in this position focused on nuclear security and, unsurprisingly, her path at MacArthur remained in the nuclear portfolio as she moved through stations: from Program Officer to Director of International Peace and Security to finally Director of the Nuclear Challenges Program, where she developed and built the Nuclear Challenges Big Bet from ideation to overseeing a team and managing $20 million in grant and administrative budgets.

Ploughshares welcomed Emma as President in 2020 during the height of the pandemic, where she began her tenure from her family home in Australia. Once able, Emma moved herself from Australia, her things from Chicago, and settled into Washington, DC. The transition, as you can imagine, was not simple. It was made even more hectic by the birth of her daughter, who we at Ploughshares adoringly refer to as “C.” Emma reflected on this transition during a recent Board and Staff Dinner honoring outgoing Board Chair Terry Gamble Boyer; Emma told the room: “I was invited for an interview in San Francisco during the weeks right before the pandemic began in early March 2020. Despite my interest in the position, I struggled with the idea of leaving my newborn daughter to travel across the country. I wondered how I could run an organization if I couldn’t make it to one interview, and I withdrew from consideration. In her persistent and generous style, Terry called me to encourage me to continue,” Emma tells us, her eyes beginning to sparkle, “Terry told me: ‘We”ll do what we can to make this process easy for you. We have a Women’s Initiative at Ploughshares, and if we can’t support a new mom at this point in her life, then what are we doing?’ That’s when I knew that Ploughshares was the place for me. It’s because of that support that I’m in this position.”

These values of inclusivity, accommodation and support are the hallmark of Ploughshares under Emma’s leadership-not just internally, but infused throughout all limbs of the organization and its approach to the mission and collaboration in the field. This is why it was possible and sensical for Ploughshares to become a Field Builder and catalyst for collaboration, inclusion and adaptability in the nuclear threat reduction field.

Since 2023, Ploughshares has refreshed and updated its image, its name, and the way it shows up in the nuclear threat reduction field as well as the philanthropy field as a whole-all while remaining true to its mission of reducing and eventually eliminating nuclear weapons and to Emma’s contributions of integrity and compassion.

What was Emma doing at Ploughshares before this shift? Collaborating, brainstorming, connecting with Ploughshares colleagues and external colleagues, traveling to meet with members of other advocacy fields-and planning for this shift. “Decreased funding in the field has caused problems for our work, but these problems are compounded by a lack of collaboration in our field-not only between organizations, but also between different communities,” Emma tells me, continuing, “This is why we stepped into being a Field Builder: not only do we want to invest money into our grantees and partners, but we want to invest our effort, time, and skills into helping the field to become healthier so that it can be more impactful.”

This work is only beginning. “We’ve really just begun,” Emma says, “I’m so proud of our community and am excited to see what we achieve working together. I know that, together, we can succeed.”

To learn more about Ploughshares’ Field Building work, click here.