Life After Chase: Chnews@chasealum.orgarlotte (Fludd) Israel
Entrepreneur, Minister, Wellness Consultant and More
When you consider all that Charlotte Fludd Israel has done since leaving Chase in 1999, you can wonder how her crowded path ever included 17 years at the bank, much less having been a music major and flute, piccolo and bari-sax player as an undergraduate at Hofstra University and later a divorced single mother of two.
She's got a ministry. She's a wellness and weight loss coach. She sells nutriceuticals, supplements, makeup and skincare products. She consults with doctors' offices. She's been honored for her work in Sierra Leone, helping start and grow an orphanage, a school and a program, through Rotary, that promotes pre- and post-natal baby health.
Israel believes her skillsets from Chase, which grew out of her innate gifts and instincts, help her juggle all her projects and manage them well. "They taught me how to manage a process and make a small group outperform larger groups by capitalizing on their strengths.," she said. "Also, while there's usually a disconnect between business and how to manage a personal life, as a single parent, I had to multitask and come up with answers when there were limited resources."
She started out with Chase when its student loan department was based on her native Long Island. When student loans migrated down to Tampa, the powers-that-be didn't think she was essential to the unit until they realized that she was the one who had been doing all the training for one of the department's groups. Once in Tampa, she moved on to card debt collection. Her Chase Bankcard accomplishments or "exploits", as she calls them, were documented in two books, Why Pride Matters More than Money by Jon Katzenbach and Smarter, Faster, Better by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Charles Duhigg. He wrote about how the group she managed in Tampa was able to collect $1 million more per month in credit card debt collections than any other group, and in such a way that both her reports and the debtors appreciated the way they were treated.
Israel was ordained as a minister of the United Pentacostal Church in 1997 but started questioning some of the things the church and its ministers did and believed in. "If the Bible says this, why aren't we doing it? I took my questions to my pastor and the board," she said, and their answers led her to resign from the Church that had trained her.
Before her mother died on June 3, 1999, she made Israel promise to "tell the people that God is in control" and go into her own ministry full-time. Israel looked at her newly received $894 bonus from Chase, which, given how much money she felt she had recovered for the bank, seemed awfully skimpy, and quit. She incorporated her Covenant Care Ministries a month later.
She describes it not as a church, but as a full service, Christ-centered outreach ministry. What makes it all the more singular, though, is that she runs it side-by-side with her Hebrew Institute of Studies, through which her small group of followers studies Torah on Saturdays, adheres to kashruth and guides their lives by laws and teachings in the Old Testament. She's even being honored by the local Hadassah chapter in Tampa.
On December 25, 2024, on which Christmas and Hanukkah coincide, she will observe the latter but not the former, because, she says, Jesus was not actually born on December 25th; rather, it is a date that was chosen by the Roman Catholic Church. For all her overwhelming faith, she still believes in facts. Asked about the two conflicting accounts of creation in Genesis, she parses language to make sense of the two versions but adds, "Look. I believe dinosaurs existed...Science is man finding out what God always knew."
In the last 25 years, Israel, who for obvious reasons decided to keep her fortuitous married name, has acquired a lot of URLs, for her entrepreneurial work that largely supports her ministerial work. There's CEI Enterprises, LLC. Her wellness center, Back to Eden Medical Fitness Center, was awarded the Tampa Bay Times Reader’s Choice Award in 2014 as one of the top three weight loss clinics in Northwest Tampa and “The 2015 Best in Tampa Bay” award for wellness and weight loss.Its URL links to a more revealing name: "Fatties Like Me", a recognition of Israel's own weight loss journey and need, well, to literally practice what she preaches.
What is especially satisfying, though, came out of one of the worst tragedies of Israel's life – the sudden death in 2020 of her 45-year-old daughter, Dorian Matthews, who had worked for Chase in customer service. While the daughter's asphyxia was probably due to Covid, Israel always wondered whether she could have saved Dorian had she known CPR.
Two years earlier, Israel had met a pastor in Minnesota who was originally from Sierra Leone. Israel had taken a 23andme test and knew some of her own ancestry was from Sierra Leone. She visited the country in 2018 and fell in love with it. She went back in 2019 for medical outreach.
Israel had been active and one-time president of the Rotary Clubs in Palm Harbor and Port Ritchie FL. After her daughter's death, she wrote a global grant through Rotary International to bring the American Academy of Pediatrics' "Helping Babies Breathe" program to Sierra Leone, to teach mothers as well as medical personnel how to resuscitate babies if needed. (The photo below shows the class graduation for the program, with Israel in dark green scrubs on the right.)
Then on her own she helped found an orphanage in Waterloo, right outside the capital of Freetown. The orphanage has some 53 children, but makes sure nobody "ages out" of it without a skill. Some are going into nursing, others into tailoring or catering. "If they can't find a job, they can start a business," she said, and boy, does she know how to mentor people to start businessesSix hundred children now attend a school she helped found with a computer learning lab in Sierra Leone. Once again, she keeps figuring out ways for a small group to do what a large group can do. "I have a young man converting our programs to put them on thumb drives, so if there's a shortage of teachers, you have a program and computer."
She sustains all these programs through her ministry. "We major in those who cannot take care of themselves, and it is everyone's responsibility to give. We receive so we have an opportunity to give," she said.
"I call it my 'miracle ministry', she said. "You never asked Chase where they're getting the money to pay you. Never ask me. God will take care of mine."
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