Direct Relief Orange Is the New Black:
Amy Weaver Takes the Helm of
Santa Barbara Nonprofit
New CEO Discusses Unusual Route to C-Suite,
Catching James Taylor at the Bowl, and
Navigating Nonprofit Through ‘Whatever Is Coming’
By Jean Yamamura | June 5, 2025

Amy Weaver had been CEO of Direct Relief for a bare month when we sat down to discuss how the president and chief financial officer of the major cloud-computing company Salesforce came to lead the Number-One Charity Everyone’s Heard Of, which is what Charity Navigator called Direct Relief in 2022. With a four-star rating for more than the past decade, Weaver’s new bailiwick oversees the provision of emergency medical supplies — much of it donated from major corporations — to desperate locations around the globe like the Atlantic and Caribbean regions facing hurricanes.
Weaver, who was wearing a Direct Relief–orange dress that her staff joked could substitute for the safety vests that are mandatory on the warehouse floor, showed us photographs from the nonprofit’s history and exploded views of its current medical packs. She stopped to chat with a visiting firefighter, exclaiming that one of her sons had a new job working in Tahoe as an environmental scientist with the Forest Service.
Friendly, confident, and an intent listener, Weaver has a perspective — and law degree from Harvard — that has placed her in the executive suites of Fortune 500 companies such as Expedia, Univar Solutions, and Salesforce, as well as among the attorneys of white-shoe firms like Perkins Coie and Cravath, Swaine & Moore. Since arriving on May 4, she said her every minute has been involved with Direct Relief, so we asked what she did for fun.

Amy Weaver: During the interview process, I remember the headhunter said, “Now, you’ll have to spend a lot of time in Santa Barbara. Is that okay?” And I thought, is that a trick question?
The one thing that my husband and I did that kind of got us out of the office was we went to Santa Barbara Bowl, and we saw James Taylor. Oh, I thought it was magical. It was like this warm summer night, a light breeze. I got the tickets the last minute, and I actually didn’t know anything about the Santa Barbara Bowl. My husband kept turning to me and saying, “I just have to pinch myself.” You could see down to the beach, the palm trees. I mean, if that doesn’t make you fall in love with Santa Barbara, nothing is ever going to because it was fantastic.

Coming to S.B. to run a nonprofit like Direct Relief seems like a seismic career shift. You’ve been in-house counsel, vice president for companies, and then there was the time at Salesforce when you became the chief financial officer. So, I have well over 20 lawyers in my extended family on my father’s side, and they have all worked for law firms, been prosecutors, judges. I was the only one who ever actually went and worked for a corporation. There were a lot of raised eyebrows, and the CFO thing was extremely confusing for everyone.
Initially I said no. I was a lawyer, and going over to CFO, I knew it was going to be incredibly public. You make a mistake as a lawyer — that’s painful and people around you know about it. You make a mistake as CFO, and you’re on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. So, the two months before I started officially, I was getting up at 4 a.m. and working my way through a Harvard Business School accounting program because I wanted the language, I wanted the basics before I started.
But one of the conversations I had was with Bret Taylor, my co-CEO. I said, “I’m not qualified to do what my predecessor did.” And he said, “You know what? You’re right. But I’m looking for a new type of CFO, a strategic partner to guide the company.” It was such a wonderful gift to me, for him to say that, because it took all the pressure off. I was stepping into my own role and something I was going to create.
You go back 20 years ago, and the person would have a CPA, invariably a man, and it was a very traditional role. Today, it’s still usually a man, but it’s much more helping to set out the long-term vision of the company, looking at how you use finance and the bets that you’re placing around the company to drive where the company is going to go.
The other thing, the wake-up-at-2 a.m. moment, is that I’ve mentored people who are younger in their profession, usually women, and I always tell them the same thing: They need to lean in, they need to take risks, they need to do things that scare them. And I realized, how do I keep advising people if I was offered the biggest opportunity in my career and I turned it down because I was scared? So, I jumped. I’ll tell you, my first year as CFO, I felt such pressure that I would let them down. I really had to prove that you could make a huge change and you could do it. I worked so hard.
There have been major changes for USAID, FEMA, and other federal programs. Is Direct Relief getting calls to fill the vacuum? As we look at kind of the impacts of USAID and the budget, I think we’ll see that more over the next six months. Without making it overtly political, I would say that my entire life has really been focused on a sense of justice, which can sound very lofty, but it’s really basic fairness. When we were down in the warehouse, we’re looking at a [very expensive] medicine for a child. You can put two kindergarteners in the room, tell them they both are sick and say only Bobby gets the medicine. Sally doesn’t. They understand that’s not fair. It’s this drive to want to make things more fair that has gone throughout my life. My parents were constant volunteers.
After law school, I moved to Hong Kong to work for the legislature during the year leading up to the handover, seeing what we could do to cement the rule of law. It didn’t cement as long as we were hoping. Part of what drove my decision to work for Salesforce, is the one-one-one, where one percent of the equity, one percent of employee time, and one percent of our product always went to nonprofits. And that gave me a voice to use about issues I really cared about. I became deeply involved with Habitat for Humanity and traveled around the world with their international board. It felt like a very natural move last summer to finally make the break from the corporate world, and start looking for something, whether that was in the public sector or nonprofit, that was truly mission driven.A lot of things have just become more, I’d say, chaotic on the geopolitical front over the last few months. One of the reasons I wanted to be at Direct Relief is the fact that they have never accepted government aid. It makes us truly independent. But the other part is this 76-year history. Think of how many administrations that is, think of how many wars around the world, or a pandemic, a tsunami. Direct Relief knows what it’s doing. So, I feel very good about Direct Relief’s ability to navigate whatever is coming.
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