Summer 2017 Vol. 30, No. 2 ∙ $4.99 worldviewmagazine.org
Published by The National Peace Corps Association
THE PROs From venture capitalists to filmmakers, Peace Corps Volunteers have come home and transformed who we are
ALSO: The boxer who replaced Sarge Shriver, NPCA’s Community Impact report, Evolution of an environmental advocate, interview with Gaddi Vasquez, PCC4Refugees at the UN, and our own Rocky Mountain high in August
Your New Adventure Starts at Johns Hopkins Be part of the change you want to see. Discover the possibilities of nursing while earning a master’s degree in five semesters.Explore the Master’s Entry into Nursing program, specifically designed for non-nursing bachelor’s degree graduates and career changers. Learn more at nursing.jhu.edu/peace17
LEADING THE WAY IN RESEARCH, EDUCATION, AND PRACTICE - LOCALLY AND GLOBALLY Advance Your Nursing Career Focus on global health, domestic health, or a specific population, and lead the way in health reform by earning a Public Health Nursing degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. Learn more about nursing at nursing.jhu.edu/peace17
Summer 2017 Volume 30, Number 2
WorldView Publisher: Glenn Blumhorst Chief Impact Officer: Juliana Essen Editor: David Arnold Contributing Editor: John Coyne
A magazine of news and comment about the Peace Corps world
RYOT
Contributors: Glenn Blumhorst, Paula Caligiuri, Joao Canziani, Charlie Clifford, Jane Constantineau, Edward Crawford, Peter Deekle, Katrina Engstrom, Juliana Essen, Jamie Fouss, Meg Garlinghouse, Sam Goldman, David Jarmul, Dennis McAdams, Danny Moloshok, Bryn Mooser, Simon George Mpata, Eduardo Munoz, Jonathan Pearson, Amy Pressman, Alan Schnur, Maxim Shematov, Dennis Sinyakov, T. Chapman Taylor, Gaddi Vasquez WorldView Advertising Scott Oser advertising@peacecorpsconnect.org WorldView (ISSN 1047-5338) is published four times per year (Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter) by the National Peace Corps Association (located at 1900 L Street, NW, Suite 610, Washington, DC 20036-5002) to provide news and comment about communities and issues of the world of serving and returned Peace Corps Volunteers. WorldView © 1978 National Peace Corps Association. Periodicals postage paid at Washington, D.C. & additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER Please send address changes to WorldView magazine National Peace Corps Association 1900 L Street NW, Suite 610 Washington, DC 20036-5002 EDITORIAL POLICY Articles published in the magazine are not intended to reflect the views of the Peace Corps, or those of the National Peace Corps Association, a nonprofit educational membership organization for those whose lives are influenced by Peace Corps. The NPCA is independent of the federal agency, the Peace Corps. EDITORIAL SUBMISSIONS Send all communications regarding WorldView magazine to worldview@peacecorpsconnect.org. We will consider article proposals and speculative submissions. We also encourage letters to the editor commenting on specific articles that have appeared in the magazine. All texts must be submitted as attached Word documents. For requirements in each of our departments, visit news and events on the web site of the National Peace Corps Association. If you need to contact the NPCA regarding your magazine subscription or other matters, call (202) 293-7554.
The Los Angeles studios of RPCV Bryn Mooser’s RYOT declared war on the neutrality of traditional news media. They were bought by AOL, which in June was bought by Verizon Communications.
F E AT U R E S :
Our Broader Brand
14
Leaving Goldman Sachs
16
Capitalizing Moscow
21
Grit & Agility
23
Creating a RYOT
23
Building the TUMI Brand
by Edward Crawford
by David Arnold
by Meg Garlinghouse
Interview with Bryn Mooser
by Charlie Clifford
30
Are you Agile?
32
A Bright Idea
36
Embrace the Unknown
37
Samoa Lesson
39
Resiliency
by Paula Caligiuri
by Sam Goldman
Interview with Amy Pressman
by Chapman Taylor
Interview with Gaddi Vasquez
COVER: Bryn Mooser, Charlie Clifford, Pat Cloherty & Amy Pressman. CREDITS: RYOT, Medallia & Joao Canziani
WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ www.PeaceCorpsConnect.org | 1
THE PUBLISHER
Summer 2017 Volume 30, Number 2
The publisher of WorldView magazine is the National Peace Corps Association, a national network of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, former staff and friends. The NPCA is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) educational and service organization which is independent of the federal agency, the Peace Corps.
ADVISORY COUNCIL
A magazine for the greater Peace Corps community
D E PA R T M E N T S
9 FROM THE NPCA PRESIDENT
ACHIEVEMENTS
5 Toward a Broader Brand
40 Teaching at a wildlife park
by Glenn Blumhorst
and other RPCV achievements by Peter V. Deekle
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
SHORTS
Joby Taylor, Chair
6 JFK in the Solomons,
Randolph (Randy) Adams, Vice Chair
Writing about Jack Hood Vaughn, More on the Smallpox war
Jayne Booker, Secretary Patrick Fine, Treasurer Glenn Blumhorst, ex officio Maricarmen SmithMartinez, Affiliate Group Network Coordinator
AROUND THE NPCA
9 Meeting our Community
Tony Barclay
40
Goals by Juliana Essen GROUP NEWS HIGHLIGHTS
8 Working for refugees and news from our affiliate groups by Jonathan Pearson
Carol Bellamy, Chair, Education for All—Fast Track Initiative Ron Boring, Former Vice President, Vodafone Japan Nicholas Craw, President, Automobile Competition Committee for the U.S. Sam Farr, Former Member, U.S. House of Representatives, California John Garamendi, Congressman, U.S. House of Representatives, California Mark Gearan, President in Residence, Harvard Graduate School of Education Bruce McNamer, President & CEO at The Community Foundation for the National Capital Region Tony Hall, Former Member of U.S. House of Representatives, Ohio; Former U.S. Ambassador to Food and Agriculture Organization Sandra Jaffee, Former Executive Vice President, Citigroup William E. “Wilber” James, Managing General Partner, RockPort Capital Partners John Y. Keffer, Chairman, Atlantic Fund Administration Virginia Kirkwood, Owner/Director, Shawnee Holdings, Inc. Richard M. Krieg, President and CEO, The Horizon Foundation Kenneth Lehman, Chairman Emeritus, Winning Workplaces C. Payne Lucas, Senior Advisor, AllAfrica Foundation Dennis Lucey, Vice President, TKC Global Gordon Radley, Former President, Lucasfilms John E. Riggan, Chairman Emeritus, TCC Group Mark Schneider, Senior Advisor, Human Rights Initiative and Americas Program, CSIS Donna Shalala, President, Clinton Global Foundation Paul Slawson, Former CEO, InterPacific Co. F. Chapman Taylor, Senior Vice President and Research Director, Capital International Research Inc. Joan Timoney, Director for Advocacy and External Relations, Women’s Refugee Commission Ronald Tschetter, President, D.A. Davidson & Co. Aaron Williams, Executive Vice President, RTI International Development Group Harris Wofford, Former U.S. Senator, Pennsylvania
BOOK LOCKER
42 Following Sarge An excerpt from Jack Hood Vaughn’s posthumous memoir, Killing the Gringo
J. Henry (Hank) Ambrose Sandra Bunch Janet Greig Corey Arnez Griffin Angela Harris Marjorie Harrison Katie Long Mary Owen Sue Senecah Linda Stingl Tai Sunnanon
STAFF Glenn Blumhorst, President Anne Baker, Vice President Juliana Essen, Chief Impact Officer Jonathan Pearson, Advocacy Director J.M. Ascienzo, Government Relations Officer Amanda Silva, Development & Partnerships Coordinator David Fields, Analyst & Special Project Coordinator
CONSULTANTS David Arnold, Editor Lollie Commodore, Finance Elizabeth (Ella) Dowell, Technology Migration
NPCA FELLOWS Elizabeth Genter, Cooper Roberts
INTERNS Aaron Boxerman, Zoe Esposito, Natalie Goffney, Katelynn Price, Samreen Singh, Krithi Vachaspati
2 | WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ National Peace Corps Association
VOLUNTEERS Peter Deekle, Harriet Lipowitz, Susan Neyer, Angene Wilson
Summer 2017 Volume 30, Number 2
WorldView Publisher: Glenn Blumhorst Communications Director: Megan Patrick Editor: David Arnold Contributing Editor: John Coyne Contributors: Tony Agnello, Pedro Armestre, Yannis Behrakis, Glenn Blumhorst, Krissy Close, Peter Deekle, Alyssa Eisenstein, Elizabeth Ferris, Lane Goodman, Asifa Kanji, Nhial Malia, Elissa Malinowski, Christie Materni, Katie Morris, Maikel Nabil, Giorgis Moutafis, Lucy Nicholson, Megan Patrick, Jonathan Pearson, Bob Schleuhuber, Alan Ruiz Terol, Kitty Thuermer, Patricia Wand & Achilleas Zavalli
you LO V E into your life's work
WorldView Advertising Scott Oser
advertising@peacecorpsconnect.org
k r o w e h t n r u t
WorldView (ISSN 1047-5338) is published four times per year (Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter) by the National Peace Corps Association (located at 1900 L Street, NW, Suite 610, Washington, DC 20036-5002) to provide news and comment about communities and issues of the world of serving and returned Peace Corps Volunteers. WorldView © 1978 National Peace Corps Association. Periodicals postage paid at Washington, D.C. & additional mailing offices.
M.A. or
Ph.D. in Applied POSTMASTER Anthropology . M.S. in Civil or Environmenta Please send address changes to l Engineering . M.A. in Global WorldView magazine Sustainability . Master’s in Pu National Peace Corps Association blic Health (MPH ) . M.S. in Publi 1900 L Street NW, Suite 610 c Health (MSPH) Washington, DC 20036-5002 ADVERTISING Questions regarding advertising should be sent to advertising@peacecorpsconnect.org.
3
At the U n
Ranked Graduate programs for #SUBSCRIPTIONS Peace Corps volunteers among
Magazine subscriptions may be purchased all colleges and universities. from the National Peace Corps Association by Per fiscal year data as of 9/30/2016 check or credit card. Prices for individuals are $25 and institutions $35 (add $10 for overseas delivery). Order forms are also available on the NPCA website at www.peacecorpsconnect.org or www.worldviewmagazine.org. EDITORIAL POLICY Articles published in the magazine are not intended to reflect the views of the Peace Corps, or those of the National Peace Corps Association, a nonprofit educationalget membership for those whose to knoworganization us lives are influenced by Peace Corps. The NPCA is independent of the federal agency, the Peace Corps. Further details at http://www.worldviewmagazine.org
@ pcUSF
EDITORIAL SUBMISSIONS Letters to write the editor are welcomed. Unsolicited a returned PC volunteer manuscripts, photographs, or other illustrations will be considered. The editors prefer written proposals before receiving original material. Send queries or manuscripts to the editor at news@ peacecorpsconnect.org or by mail to the NPCA address.
peacecorps
@ usf.edu
All inquiries can be addressed to the appropriate person at NPCA bymore fax at 202-293-7554 mail learn + start or anbyapplication to NPCA, or through the NPCA website at www. peacecorpsconnect.org or www.worldviewmagazine.org.
www.usf.edu/
peace-corps
iversity
of S o u t h
Florida,
you’ll find people who share your Peace Corps spirit, and programs shaped to help you make the most of your experience. And as a Coverdell Fellow, you’ll receive generous financial support to help you pursue your next journey on a path you love. At USF, we value your contribution to create positive societal change.
M.A. in Applied Anthropology Ph.D. in Applied Anthropology
M.S. in Civil Engineering M.S. in Environmental Engineering
Receive a stipend of $10,800 across 2 years (M.A.) or $51,000 across 3 years (Ph.D.), plus a tuition waiver and health insurance.
Receive a $2,000 Graduate Fellowship, plus eligibility for a tuition waiver, and health insurance.
M.A. in Global Sustainability Receive a Graduate Assistantship of at least
Master’s in Public Health (MPH) M.S. in Public Health (MSPH)
18,360 across 4 semesters, a tuition waiver for up to 9 credit hours per semester, and health insurance.
Receive up to $4,000 in scholarship assistance, along with a tuition waver and eligibility for health insurance.
$
PEACE CORPS FORWARD
Opportunities for
RPCVs &
INCOMING
VOLUNTEERS Paul D. Coverdell Fellows Program RPCV Scholarships
SIT and the Peace Corps ...partners since 1964
Real skills. Real world.
Learn more at: G R A D U AT E . S I T. E D U
SCHOOL OF
PUBLIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL AFFAIRS Indiana University
Lead for the greater good – wherever life takes you –
“As a volunteer, I developed real world experience and a passion for environmental management. At IU, I’m developing the skills and knowledge to become a professional.” ~ Kristi Schammel, MPA-MSES ’18
(Peace Corps Volunteer in Peru 2012-2015)
4 | WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ National Peace Corps Association
with the #1 MPA from Indiana University. For information on fellowships and benefits for RPCVs, see go.iu.edu/RPCV
LETTER FROM THE NPCA PRESIDENT
TOWARD A BROADER BRAND
Our community represents a new breed of business start-ups By Glenn Blumhorst
D
o you recognize this quote? Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. These are the words of a 1997 Apple personal computer television ad. Except for the “troublemaker” part, Steve Jobs might have been talking about Peace Corps Volunteers. RPCVs are a different breed. Some of the best of this new breed are those I’ve met in this Peace Corps community. Service in distant communities flips a switch in people. It shows us we do not need to wait around for someone else to solve a problem. People who have served in conditions of hardship with limited resources and mountains of obstacles go on to do amazing things. “No resources… no problem.” When we talk about what Peace Corps Volunteers do after service, we’re usually thinking about careers as teachers in high school and professors in college classrooms, nursing and medicine, members of Congress and the State Department’s diplomatic corps, think tanks in Washington or the hundreds who go back into the field as international development workers.
Tinkering and investing We need to think differently as serving and returned Peace Corps Volunteers about the broader brand we truly possess. Some of the impressive members of our evolving community started out like Steve Jobs and Steven Wozniak, tinkering in garages… breaking things, building things, selling leather travel bags doorto-door. They followed those uncharted paths and they didn’t mind setbacks. Some came home to start businesses that grew, or invested in them. In these WorldView pages we want to tell you about RPCVs who created the intersection of these two fields. After working in small out-of-the-way Peace Corps sites learning how to cope and take risks. Medallia’s Amy Pressman and
These stories broaden the brand of our greater Peace Corps community. LinkedIn’s Meg Garlinghouse are a couple of the RPCVs who are shaking things up in Silicon Valley After Brazil, the venture capitalist Pat Cloherty gave Steve Jobs a financial nudge out of his California garage and later moved to Moscow where she backed small start-ups during Russia’s privatization heyday. Sam Goldman’s ingenious solar light inventions pushed him to learn about how to grow a manufacturing and distribution business on three continents; Bryn Mooser worked in forestry in The Gambia and founded
a revolutionary immersive media project called RYOT.com that’s now part of Verizon Communications. When I was in Boston’s John F. Kennedy Memorial Library and Museum I met Charlie Clifford, the author of one of these WorldView success stories during a May panel discussion of the Peace Corps experience. Clifford’s service in Peru inspired his legendary high-end Tumi luggage company. These stories broaden the brand of our greater Peace Corps community. I have found outstanding RPCV leaders in Scranton, Kansas City, Austin, and Los Angeles. On Capitol Hill and Wall Street. We are in the corporate boardrooms and on the city councils. Whether harvesting America’s food, funding multinational business ventures, or raising global citizens each of us is part of a growing community of great impact. The Peace Corps experience in each us is effectively fueling the next generation of American leadership. We call them innovators, ideators, and change makers. See if you find a little of yourself in some of these stories. And the next time someone calls you crazy, just say thank you. Because that’s what it takes to change the world. With great respect, Glenn Blumhorst
The author is president and CEO of the NPCA and served in Guatemala from 1988 to 1991. Write to president@peacecorpsconnect.org
WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ www.PeaceCorpsConnect.org | 5
SHORTS
Celebrating John Kennedy in the Solomons When Jack Hood Vaughn laced up his boxing gloves The last word on our role in smallpox eradication Y’ALL COME When I arrived in Gizo, the capital of western district of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate in 1974 as a rural business advisor, one of my first visits was to what people here call Kennedy Island. It’s the spot near where President John Kennedy’s PT-109 was sunk by a Japanese destroyer in WWII more than 30 years earlier. When I was transferred to Munda Township on New Georgia Island, I was close to Rendova Harbor where Lieutenant junior-grade Kennedy’s patrol torpedo boat squadron was based on Lubaria Island during World War II. I became friends with John Z. Kari (JZK), Lubaria’s major landowner and Rendova Island’s paramount chief who was a friend of JFK and a scout for the Allied forces. It was JZK who guided JFK through the lagoons in darkness when he piloted a rescue PT boat to pick up his men. I later married JZK’s daughter, Effie, thus giving me a double link to JFK through Peace Corps and his friend JZK. Effie and I have lived away from the Solomon Islands for about half of our 39 years together. In retirement, we came back and are now helping to promote the 75th anniversary event of the U.S. Marines landing here at Red Beach on Guadalcanal on August 7, 1942 and a celebration on Kennedy and Lubaria Islands of the 100th anniversary of Kennedy’s birth and his rescue from these waters. We also hope to attend the dedication of a U.S. Marine memorial first-ever national park at “Bloody Ridge” on Guadalcanal. Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps General Robert B. Neller and Admiral Scott H. Swift of the Pacific Fleet will attend as will an American naval vessel, three more Australian ships, and another from New Zealand. The U.S. Ambassador to Papua New Guinea,
daughter and the former U.S. ambassador to Japan, and Congressman Joseph Kennedy III, his grand-nephew, who served in Peace Corps, will also attend. I’m raising funds to build two fullscale wooden mock-ups of PT109, one for Lubaria for accommodation and one for Munda for a friend’s museum and tourism office. And, to you, as we say back in Ole Virginnie, y’all come. Dennis McAdams, Solomon Islands, 74-76
FILLING IN THE GAPS
The author’s late father in law, displaying custom shell money that represent the power of Rendova’s paramount chief.
the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu will also attend. U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was invited but cannot attend though he may send a representative. We hope that Caroline Kennedy, JFK’s
After almost 20 years of writing on yellow legal pads at the dining room table, my dad asked me to help him complete his memoir in 2010. Dad was an unusual guy in many ways: he was extremely tough, unfazed by disaster, and, at the age of 68, still able to flatten a mugger. But he was also humble, funny and peace-loving. The blending of these facets was key to the accuracy of Dad’s memoir, “Kill the Gringo, the Life of Jack Hood Vaughn.” (See an excerpt of his time as Peace Corps’ second director on page 42 of this issue.)
WE’RE LISTENING WorldView is about more than being a Peace Corps Volunteer. It’s also about the larger community of 220,000 Americans who’ve served in the Peace Corps and are connecting as the nonprofit National Peace Corps Association to champion the work of the federal agency and meet the development goals John F. Kennedy declared 56 years ago. In the Fall issue former Sierra Club president, Carl Pope, who served in India in the 1960s, will join others on climate resiliency.
6 | WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ National Peace Corps Association
Tell us what you think about an article you read in the current issue. Send us stories about projects and village life from Peace Corps Volunteers, recent career achievements and affiliate group news from Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, books you’ve written, stories about the places you’ve been, your opinions and proposals for compelling articles for these pages. Email it all to worldviewmagazine@ peacecorpsconnect.org.
I had grown up with him. I instinctively knew Dad’s word choices and the reactions he would have to most situations. All of this made me uniquely qualified to finish the book after his death in 2012. My biggest challenge was filling the gaps in the chronology of his career: he wrote copious amounts about the topics that interested him most—namely, the Peace Corps and Latin America—and very little about jobs later in his career. I interviewed his former colleagues, read letters he had written to my mom and found newspaper articles about him and the places where he worked. One of my best discoveries was a collection of Princeton University records from Development & Resources, where my Dad worked in Iran. The documents revealed the challenges of doing business as an American company in Iran in the late 1970’s, as well as the personal risks
…he was extremely tough, unfazed by disaster, and, at the age of 68, still able to flatten a mugger. my dad took to do his job. Dad managed a massive, rural hydroelectric program following the model of the Tennessee Valley Authority, including agricultural projects and manpower development. As the Iranian revolution of 1978 heated up, Dad faced worker strikes, massive power outages, nonpayment of bills by the government and growing hostility toward Americans. Despite Iran’s gas shortages and few airlines flying out of Tehran, Dad
FEEL GOOD ABOUT THE FUTURE 0F THE HUMAN RACE. For MPH student Elizabeth Toure, the word “community” conjures an unlikely picture: a bowl of rice with sauce. When she shared the dish with a group of women in Guinea, as a Peace Corps volunteer, she felt welcomed into their community. Establishing community trust is central to breaking down barriers to advance public health and health education globally. As a neighbor, teacher and friend in her Guinea community, Elizabeth led reproductive health and family planning classes, went doorto-door to hang mosquito nets and even founded a girls’ soccer team in the village. Elizabeth joined the Peace Corps to challenge herself and help a community. Now she’s earning an MPH from the Bloomberg School to change the world.
Join us in protecting health, saving lives—millions at a time. jhsph.edu/feel-good Scholarships and financial aid options are available.
WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ www.PeaceCorpsConnect.org | 7
managed to get his family (including a newborn me) out of the country in the fall of 1978. Dad stayed in Tehran. A memo from those Princeton papers placed him at a meeting on January 16, 1979, the day the Shah fled and long after most Americans and his company employees had left. The best part of pouring over those documents was knowing that Dad had preserved those papers almost 40 years ago, working alone in his freezing-cold office in Tehran boxing up the company’s records as chaos raged around him. Jane (Vaughn) Constantineau
LETTER TO THE EDITOR Thank you for recognizing on Page 7 in the Spring, 2017 issue of WorldView the
Develop your career in
Global Business Leadership
role Peace Corps Volunteers played in the eradication of smallpox. Peace Corps Volunteers and Returned Peace Corps Volunteers made important contributions and were indeed valued by the World Health Organization, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the countries where they worked for their resolve, cultural sensitivity and technical skills. Your readers should know, however, that they were not at the center of the global eradication program and did not lead the smallpox containment effort. Peace Corps Volunteers also had little to do with the development of the bifurcated needle or with the decision to change the eradication strategy from mass vaccination to surveillance and containment. Readers should also note
that the last endemic case of smallpox occurred in 1977, in Somalia, and not in 1971 as the article states. A full report about Peace Corps' contribution to smallpox eradication is available through an Internet search for “Peace Corps' Contributions to the Global Smallpox Eradication Program." We were presenters at the December, 2016 launch of this report at Peace Corps headquarters. Kristina Engstrom, Philippines 62-64, and Alan Schnur, Ethiopia, 71-74 EDITOR’S NOTE: We regret the use of the misleading word “led” in the title of the article and acknowledge that we also erred in publishing an incorrect date for the end of Somalia’s endemic case of smallpox.
DARL A MOORE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS
I
I N T E R N AT I O N A L M B A
Your Peace Corps service has proven you are a changemaker — Use your skills with an MBA from the Darla Moore School of Business to become a Global Business Leader – and be rewarded for having made a difference in the world. Past International MBA candidates have received up to 70% of their tuition costs
in recognition of their competitiveness and service. All qualified admitted MBA candidates are considered for the following financial awards:
Coverdell Fellows
$20,000 1 – awarded to selected top RPCV candidates based on the strength of their application
Global Leadership Fellows
$2,000 to $3,0002 – awarded automatically to all RPCV with submission of your Description of Service
Additional awards
$28,0003 – awarded automatically to all RPCV non-residents
All admitted RPCVs also eligible for general MBA awards
1 Approximate amount. Award covers up to 30% of the application program fee. 2 $2,000 award for non-residents, $3,000 for residents. 3 Approximate amount. Applied as a credit to non-resident tuition fee.
For more on our commitment to Returned Peace Corps Volunteers visit moore.sc.edu or contact our full-time MBA team, mba@moore.sc.edu or 1.803.777.3709 Mary Soike, IMBA 2018 – Spanish Track, RPCV – environmental education Volunteer, Guzman, Mexico
Moore_PC_Half_052217v3.indd 1
8 | WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ National Peace Corps Association
RANKED #1 INTERNATIONAL MBA PROGRAM BY U.S. NEWS AND WORLD REPORT
5/24/17 4:47 PM
Glenn Blumhorst (right) and NPCA staff joined advocates to lobby Congress for Peace Corps.
WHAT WE ACCOMPLISHED An NPCA report on our impact in 2016 By Juliana Essen
T
he National Peace Corps Association is a social impact organization mobilizing more than 225,000 individuals and over 165 affiliate groups to create social change. Our mission is to champion lifelong commitment to Peace Corps ideals of sustainable human development, crosscultural understanding, and peace. Excerpts from our 2016 Annual Report highlight progress on strategic goals, Juliana Essen showing without a doubt that we are a community of impact. Goal 1: Bigger, Better Peace Corps New Technology for Mass Mobilization. In the first full year using our new click-to-send advocacy tool, nearly 4,300 community members sent 13,870 messages to Congress. In May alone, we surpassed our 10K E-mail Challenge by 500, proving our capacity for mass mobilization.
Double the Days of Action on Capitol Hill. This was one of our most active years in bringing NPCA advocates to Capitol Hill, with two Days of Action in March and September: more than 350 advocates conducted nearly 450 Hill meetings, devoting well over 2,500 volunteer hours. Record Signatures on Funding Letter. A primary objective of our advocacy efforts is to convince Members of Congress to sign an annual letter supporting Peace Corps funding. We broke our record again in 2016 with 165 Representatives signing on plus 30 more Senators. New Peace Corps Legislation. Thanks to our members’ advocacy efforts, the Sam Farr Peace Corps Enhancement Act was introduced in the House in 2016, focusing on health and safety for current and returned volunteers. By the end of the year, it had a bi-partisan list of 45 cosponsors.
WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ www.PeaceCorpsConnect.org | 9
NPCA
Several hundred RPCVs at the Connect conference marched to Capitol Hill September 25 to tell Congress America needs a bigger, better Peace Corps.
organizational development as well as technical support. Community Builder Platform. Affiliate groups seek greater impact, and for this they need improved member engagement and connectivity with other groups. Enter NPCA’s new website and community builder platform. Following the 2016 rollout, the demand to join the platform has been overwhelming, with dozens of affiliate groups already in the pipeline. Peace Corps Directory Initiative. NPCA’s 2016 Peace Corps Directory initiative brought in nearly 20,000 previously unaccounted for individuals, doubling our community’s growth of previous years. Active members also jumped from just over 5,500 in 2015 to 8,100 in 2016. This growth demonstrates desire to be a part of a community of impact as well potential of greater engagement to come.
WATER CHARITY
Goal 2: A Thriving Community Affiliate Group Growth & Diversity. In 2016, 16 new groups formed, expanding the size and diversity of our affiliate network. These groups are increasingly cause oriented, focusing their efforts and expertise on society’s most pressing issues. NPCA provides these fledging groups with mentoring in
Senegalese women draw clean water from the Jigeenu Natangue school new well in Senegal. The project was directed by PCV Cecelia Madsen and funded by Water Charity.
10 | WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ National Peace Corps Association
Goal 3: Amplified Development Impact The Community Fund. In 2016, NPCA launched the Community Fund—a bold new resource-mobilizing, cause-oriented investment vehicle that
catalyzes the Peace Corps community as a movement for peace and prosperity. The Community Fund focuses resources for PCV and RPCV development initiatives in three impact areas: water and sanitation, girls’ empowerment and education, and micro-enterprise. To ensure effective use of these funds, NPCA partners with organizations led by our own community members with proven development models. All told, the Community Fund’s inaugural year resulted in significant impact: $394,746 dollars mobilized; 137 projects funded; 546,628 lives changed. Legacy Campaign: Roland Johnson Memorial Fund for Kenya. This legacy campaign honoring Roland Johnson raised nearly $5,000 for a water tank project in Kiritiri, Eastern Province, Kenya, which was implemented by RPCV Jennifer Mueller (Kenya 97-99) through NPCA’s partnership with Water Charity. The project was designed to provide not only water but also income generation and improved housing opportunities for the community. It directly benefited over 500 individuals and indirectly several thousand in Kiritiri.
The above text is excerpted from the NPCA’s 2016 annual report. The author, Juliana Essen, is NPCA’s new chief impact officer. She worked in community forestry and micro enterprise for women's groups in Kamphaeng Pat Province, Thailand from 1993 to 1995.
GROUP NEWS
MOBILIZING FOR REFUGEES
Refugee campaign expands as federal policy shifts By Jonathan Pearson
T
he UN General Assembly recently selected NPCA’s affiliate group The Peace Corps Community for the Support of Refugees (PCC4R) to participate in the six-week preparatory process of the UN’s global compact for safe, orderly and regular migration. An Iran RPCV with a strong international background will represent PCC4R at the New York meeting in June, says PCC4R chair Barbara Busch. They will join with other non-governmental organizations, civil society organizations, academic institutions, private-sector entities, diaspora communities and migrant organizations to ensure international refugee advocacy and assistance in the refugee and immigration crisis. PCC4R has been growing at a rapid pace since it was founded less than a year ago. The group’s leadership team has nearly tripled, and at least 14 members have been chosen to take on coordinating roles ranging from community engagement to social media and advocacy. Twenty-four affiliate groups are engaged in direct efforts and 14 are working within the PCC4R structure. Another 15 have expressed support for the movement and the list of individual RPCV supporters is running in the hundreds. They have boosted their presence in the Peace Corps community with a core of volunteer researchers. Writers are creating a steady flow of content on their group’s blog and in other social media. They are among nearly two dozen NPCA affiliates expanding and enhancing their audience reach through the NPCA’s new Community Builder website and database platform. PCC4R is now working with eight of the nine U.S. organizations recognized by the State Department for refugee
RPCVs marched in Washington, D.C. to support refugees seeking political asylum in the United States.
resettlement about how the Peace Corps community can serve refugee needs around the nation. They plan to increase support for asylum seekers, detained women and children, and unaccompanied minors; identify more opportunities to
serve in overseas refugee camps; and build advocacy and public awareness within the Peace Corps community and among elected officials. Search "affiliated groups" under "community" at peacecorpsconnect. org.
JOIN AN NPCA AFFILIATE With its focus on helping our community thrive, NPCA offers individualized support both to form and to strengthen affiliate groups. In each issue, we highlight some of our more than 167 affiliates and how you can expand your impact by working with them. Support their work and our work. Join. You’ll find a list of all on the NPCA website at www.peacecorpsconnect.org. Want to form a new group? Email us at groups@peacecorpsconnect.org.
The newest affiliates are Friends of Peace Corps Senegal, Partnering for Peace - Friends of Peace Corps and Rotary, Peace Corps Alliance for Intercultural Understanding, Peace Corps Community for the Support of Refugees, Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Association of Utah, RPCVs and Friends @ Labor, Share Your Service - A Story-Based Approach to Social Justice, and Women of Peace Corps Legacy.
WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ www.PeaceCorpsConnect.org | 11
MARCH IN HAWAII Twenty members of Hawai’i RPCVs joined thousands for a three-mile walk in the 28th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Parade and Unity Rally. It was their first time to join the celebration. They were joined along the route by parade watchers who responded when they saw the group’s Peace Corps logo. Members of the affiliate also staffed an information table about Peace Corps that was well attended.
NUTRITION IN THE ANDES Friends of Ecuador partnered with the Association of Producers of Seeds and Nutritional Andean Foods to fund a yearlong pilot project in the Andes Mountains to combat malnutrition and promote the nutritional value of traditional foods. Through the Healthy Children, Healthy Futures program the affiliate supported 400 children at three schools on the Canar region. The children receive a school breakfast, identify good nutritional eating habits, learn to plant seeds in a demonstration plot, and prepare and serve the foods.
HONORING THE FALLEN On a late April afternoon, more than 50 members of the Peace Corps community gathered at FHI360 offices to honor the 304 women and men who sacrificed their lives while pursuing the Peace Corps mission. Helena Gray, the political counsellor for the Namibian embassy, said, “We are immeasurably grateful for the work of the Peace Corps.” Gray was
one of four speakers form embassies in Washington to express gratitude and condolences. The annual gathering was organized by the RPCVs of Washington D.C. It Included music and tributes by family members and representatives of the Peace Corps, the affiliate and NPCA and RPCV/W and there was a reading of the names of those who died in service.
MURALS IN SOUTH LOS ANGELES On a Spring day in May, the RPCVs of Los Angeles painted a mural based on Dr. Seuss’s book, The Lorax, on the walls of the 75th Street Elementary School in South Los Angeles. The mural featured the author’s iconic Truffula trees. The affiliate’s mural was part of a day-long beautification project at the school that included cleaning the school grounds, gardening and the painting of a dozen murals by 1200 students and families and other volunteers.
TRACKING HOURS More than 400 service hours were contributed by members of the NPCA affiliate group, the Northern Virginia RPCVs. In 2016, they cleaned up Old Trail Drive and Natural Falls Trail and staffed an information booth at the annual Multicultural Festival in Reston. The four-year-old affiliate also provided volunteer support at NPCA’s Peace Corps Connect, the 55th anniversary conference in Washington, D.C. Jonathan Pearson served in Micronesia from 1987 to 1989 and is the NPCA’s advocacy director. RPCVS OF LOS ANGELES
HAWAI’I RPCVS
MORE GROUP NEWS
SPOKANE’S ART WALK At the First Friday Art Walk in Spokane, Washington, members of the Inland Northwest Peace Corps Association sponsored a display of silk saris from Nepal, samples of a Colombian farmer’s carreil, and a Thai spirit house. Affiliate members talked with visitors about the arts and other items on display. The Art Walk kicked off a month-long display of artifacts that received lots of publicity from local media.
DEEP POCKETS Friends of India announced they donated $44,595 last year to support
12 | WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ National Peace Corps Association
PEACE CORPS
RPCVS in Honolulu discovered lots of supporting cheers for Peace Corps when they marched in the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade.
five charities. Donations support a girls’ boarding school, medical assistance through a community trust and the home installation of thousands of low-cost bio-sand water filters to provide clean, safe drinking water in Karnataka, a state in southwest India. A project in Tamil Nadu provides education assistance to impoverished students. A project in Odisha assists three leper colonies to become self-reliant. In the last 21 years the members of this affiliate have given an estimated $375,000 to their former country of service.
In Los Angeles, RPCVs decorated a local school.
A BROADER BRAND
Many Americans come home from Peace Corps service and turn their experience as volunteers into professions in the school classroom, public health services, serving in the public sector and in a multitude of non-profit programs in the United States and around the world. We’re doing a little rebranding in this issue to tell you about some outstanding Peace Corps Volunteers who applied those lessons to financial investing, venture capital, and the corporate world where good ideas became good business. The people you will meet in these pages served in the Gambia, rural Brazil, Benin, Dominican Republic, Niger or on a little Samoa island. Charlie Clifford went to Peru as part of a Peace Corps experiment to send a handful of freshly minted MBA graduates to Stanford for training. A few years later Clifford created Tumi, the line of luxury luggage. Pat Cloherty spent her Peace Corps years in Brazil where she taught children how to castrate pigs and farmers to rotate crops. Cloherty then pioneered venture capital markets here and, at the invitation of President Bill Clinton, waged a capitalist revolution in socialist Russia. Amy Pressman founded Medallia, a Silicon Valley start-up that’s now global. Bryn Mooser produces provocative documentaries and RYOT.com news. RYOT became part of AOL, which is now part of Verizon Communications. There’s more. Read on.
Peace Corps Volunteer Russell Lyon taught English and science in a Liberian school in 2009, after serving two years in Bolivia. WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ www.PeaceCorpsConnect.org | 13
REBRANDING
LEAVING GOLDMAN SACHS
Following your heart to Dominican Republic, Afghanistan and Dallas, Texas By Edward Crawford At Goldman Sachs I was taught to build a business. I worked with business leaders and corporate executives from Cuba, Dominican Republic, Lebanon, India, New York, Florida, and even Oklahoma. I made tough decisions involving major financial risk and large investment decisions. But after seven years in the corporate world I faced a major business decision: I could stay the course as a vice president in their Miami office with an established business in a job that I liked where I was making good money. Or, I could be bold and take a risk on an up-and-coming organization that was not yet fully established, a business that was changing the world and where I could have an impact. Whenever I had to make tough choices, I remembered what I learned in Peace Corps about serving others, doing what is right, using data to make informed decisions and leveraging your team. I remembered those Peace Corps days and I followed my heart. I left Goldman Sachs and took a risk with a mission-focused group acquiring multi-family apartments in Florida and Texas. The model is to create more community in the world. We are a young, hungry, and focused team that wants to create more community in the world through serving our residents in the middle-income space. We strive to treat all of our residents with dignity and respect and provide them with home and community. With this sustainable, long-term mindset we are able generate sustainable top-quartile returns to our investors. We focus on living our virtues every day and delivering our mission to “Live Abundantly” through our virtues of love, faith, hope, humility, integrity, servant leadership, stewardship, forthrightness, smart work, and hard work. We huddle with our team every day of the week at
8 a.m. for 10 minutes to go over one of these virtues. The group was started by some Harvard Law students who wanted to build a great business and create better communities by treating residents with dignity and respect and enlisting them in helping improve their own communities. I became a managing director of Avesta Communities in 2016 to help grow this business. We now have over 250 employees, $100 million in revenues and over 30,000 residence in our communities. I’m making a living for my family and changing the world at the same time. I took a risk and it paid off in spades. Just like my work in Peace Corps. A coffee cooperative In 2004 I was working with a group of Dominican and Haitian farmers in Los Blancos, Dominican Republic. But the group was not interested in making much-needed changes. The farmers had given up on growing coffee for the more
profitable yucca and maise in the short term. They had to borrow loans at high rates and were forced to sell their coffee to intermediaries at discounts far below fair market prices. After a while the went for the shortterm solution of growing monoculture crops of yucca and Mais. Due to this monoculture and lack of land ownership the top soil was eroding and Sierra de Bahoruco mountains were threatened with deforestation. Additionally, when prices for these products fell the farmers were left with nothing and even owed money to many of the predatory lenders in the area. I interviewed over 100 families in Los Blancos to understand the farming and business problems they faced. I knew coffee cooperatives in other countries had succeeded and we could do the same. We could pool coffee harvests – a sustainable crop that can produce for 40 years - from many community members and sell for a better price.
In the Peace Corps I learned to troubleshoot and figure out how to use technology to change people’s lives, create value and to teach. You learn to truly innovate.
Edward Crawford (far left in sunglasses) advised struggling farmers to form the Los Blancos coffee co-op.
14 | WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ National Peace Corps Association
I found a small group of farmers who liked the idea. Then I got on Quixote, my government-issued horse, and rode through the mountains handing out flyers calling for a meeting. The first three meetings were rained out. I started to get nervous. But I pushed forward and 30 people came to the fourth meeting. We formed a cooperative at that meeting. We planted over 400,000 coffee trees in the mountains, acquired organic certification, two wet mills to process the coffee beans, a rotating micro-finance program offering loans at one percent and - most important – they elected a 20-person board that governed 200 members. The farmers got better prices for their harvests, the mountainside was covered with coffee and the farmers were began growing mangos, avocados, cacao, and macadamia between the rows of coffee. They were members of a successful co-op that inspired a community of people who were proud of what they were doing. Learning leadership I grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana and when I returned home I married my college sweetheart, Mary. We spent 8 weeks living in our Peace Corps community. That’s when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. I knew I had to return home to help rebuild the city of New Orleans. While taking graduate courses in Latin American Studies, Business and public service at Tulane University, I volunteered at the Samuel J. Green Charter School, which was flooded during Katrina. We rebuilt their library and literacy program and delivered hope to a community in much need of it. I’m an entrepreneur and problem solver at heart and always looking for ways to serve. When I finished at Tulane, I felt called to serve again, but this time I joined the Navy. They trained me as a Naval Reserve Intelligence Officer and assigned me to a unit in Miami to cover Latin America. In 2011, when two close friends from Shreveport were killed when their Chinook helicopter was shot down over Wardak Province, I again felt the call and requested duty in Afghanistan. Although I was not a Navy SEAL, I
I remembered those Peace Corps days and I followed my heart. I left Goldman Sachs and took a risk with a mission-focused group acquiring multi-family apartments in Florida and Texas. served as the intelligence officer for a SEALs unit in Uruzgan, the home of a notorious Taliban commander, Mullah Mohammed Omar. We worked on a village stability mission to clear, hold and build 17 communities. We recruited military-age males to form an Afghan Local Police program and return these communities to governance by local tribal leaders. Through Peace Corps and through my later military service I learned to lead and to be led in almost any environment. You are tested in a sink-or-swim way and can apply those skills in any job. In the Peace Corps I learned to troubleshoot and figure out how to use technology to change people’s lives, create value and to teach. You learn to truly innovate. I learned how to manage real risk when people’s lives and their livelihoods were at stake. In many cases, a Peace Corps project can change someone else’s life from being short and impoverished to being long and meaningful. To accomplish that you must take risk. Making those tough decisions also helps in the business world.
My advice is to follow your heart, be bold and take risks. Fortune favors the bold. If you are serving in DR, Mongolia, Ethiopia or Indonesia make sure you have truly given everything for your community. Peace Corps is not a two-year commitment to service, it is a lifetime commitment to service. Try to build lasting relationships and have a goal of staying in touch with your community for many years. Thirteen years after I left, Mary and I still go back to help with the cooperative. And one of its valued customers is my brother Andrew Crawford who has a coffee shop in Shreveport, Louisiana.
Edward Crawford worked as a Peace Corps Volunteer with coffee farmers in Los Blancos, Dominican Republic from 2004 to 2006. He is now a managing director of Avesta Communities in Dallas, Texas and previously worked as a Goldman Sachs vice president in Miami.
While serving in Afghanistan, Crawford (in helmet in center) and some Navy SEALs registered defecting Taliban fighters for service in a local police force.
WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ www.PeaceCorpsConnect.org | 15
REBRANDING
CAPITALIZING MOSCOW Pat Cloherty imported venture capital to socialist Russia
S
he was a loggers’ daughter, salutatorian of her graduating class at El Dorado County High School in Placerville, California, and a mean downhill skier on the Sierra Nevada slopes. In 1963, after college in San Francisco, Pat Cloherty was sent to Brazil to form 4-S clubs, the Portuguese version of 4-H. Peace Corps first sent her to the little city of Uba in central Brazil to show the farmers how to rotate their crops and teach children how to castrate pigs. “I now know more about the conversion ratio of feed to meat and swine than anybody else in the world,” she says from her New York apartment. Cloherty’s two-year experience in Brazilian agricultural extension led to graduate study in economic development at Columbia University in New York, followed by a 45-year career in another newly-emerging business, venture capital. The business is now well-known, but at the time it was a financial curiosity. In 1969, she and two partners formed a small, $2.5-million fund, capitalized by wealthy individuals, to invest in startup or early-stage companies showing promise of high growth. The theory of the business was, and still is, that small amounts of capital can be deployed at high risk to secure high returns on capital over time. No question that it is risky. Money is generally invested at the equity level for ownership: it is not debt. There are no interim interest or dividend payments. Liquidity, that is, cash return to investors, comes only when the investments are sold, hopefully at
substantially appreciated values, either through an initial public offering on public securities markets, or to a third party, generally a corporate buyer. Risks are substantial, and time frames for a young company can be long. So overall returns on a portfolio of companies must be higher than those available from other asset classes, such as Treasury bills, oil and gas or public
‘My social life in my early years in Russia was going to IKEA on a Saturday night to watch the Russians for the first time be able to buy little refrigerators and sofas and towels. Stuff was flying off the shelves.’ securities, to offset the risks, mainly that of illiquidity. Her firm’s investment in Apple in 1977 is an example. Cloherty worked with Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs to expand their brand and that of AOL, then called Quantum Computer, in the early 1980s. Both took long times to mature and went through many ups and downs before investors were rewarded.
16 | WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ National Peace Corps Association
As in joining the Peace Corps, Cloherty again had entered the “high risk-high return” world. She describes herself as a “Peace Corps Volunteer turned capitalist pig. “The ‘good’ thing about venture capital, just as the Peace Corps has its ‘good’, is that when a company succeeds, all parties to the transaction win— customers, employees, entrepreneurial managers and investors.” Likewise, she says, when a company fails or goes sideways, all parties bear the brunt, generally a loss. “But you can only lose 100 cents on the dollar, while on the upside, you can make a multiple of an investment to offset losses in a broad portfolio of companies.” She thinks back to Brazil, “Were the farm kids better off when we left Brazil? Could their families live better off the crops?” Cloherty’s firm, now called Apax Partners, prospered. Through multiple successive funds, it entered the United Kingdom and France in 1974, then Germany and Israel in the 1980s, all with local partners and additional funds. By then, the funds were larger, capitalized not by individuals but by institutions— pension funds, insurance companies, and university endowments, among others. Cloherty specialized over time in intellectual property-based companies having robust patent portfolios, mainly in science and technology. Fifteen years after the US-Russia Investment Fund entered the former Soviet Union’s failing socialist economy, Moscow shoppers flock to a newly opened Hennes & Mauritz fashion store owned by a Swedish company.
DENIS SINYAKOV/REUTERS
By David Arnold
WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ www.PeaceCorpsConnect.org | 17
Examples include San Diego’s Agouron Pharmaceuticals, which was based on the intellectual property of two leading Cal Tech scientists. Cloherty’s firm invested some $10 million. Much was raised from other partners—corporations and public shareholders—over the years, at higher valuations. The company became the world leader in HIV protease inhibitors and was sold to Warner-Lambert in the 1990s for $2.2 billion. Another example is Tessera Technologies, also in California, formed by two IBM scientists who had developed the patents for controlling the thermal properties on the head of semiconductor chips. These chips are found in the ubiquitous electronic devices—phones, computers and so on—that have captivated the world’s citizens. As chips and devices shrink in size, and as speeds increase, heat across the conducting pins on the chip increases, causing crashes. This innovation solved the problem. Cloherty’s firm invested $10 million for about 24 percent of the company. Following some eight years of development, plus many management disputes and changes, serious patent litigation and more investment rounds,
Cloned Lamb” at PPL Therapeutics in Scotland. They were making high-value pharmaceutical proteins in the milk of genetically-altered sheep at 1/1000th of the cost of conventional therapeutics, “a win for disease sufferers,” she says. Plus, “Great science.” At her retirement in 2000, Cloherty’s firm’s assets under management worldwide had increased to some $20 billion and its investment range had expanded to include buy-outs and other, larger deals. And it was that model that Cloherty and her colleagues in business and finance were asked in 1995 by the Clinton White House to transfer, pro bono on their parts, to Russia. The country had none of the financial and legal underpinnings for the business, nor even the Russian vocabulary to support it.
The Russian joint ventures When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, all the Soviet Socialist Republics, including Russia, were broke. Eighty-plus years of centralized socialist planning had left them with no economic engine that could employ and support their citizens, much less their governments. Private entrepreneurship was illegal. To spur the conversion to a private economy and to help avert disaster, the U.S. Department of State hastily put together a statute, the 1991 Support for Eastern European Democracy Act, authorizing assistance in the form of “Enterprise Funds” to provide capital resources for private sector development. Started initially in the Eastern Bloc countries such as Patricia Cloherty (left) and Delta Private Equity funded dozens of Russian Poland, Hungary, start-ups including Nord Systems, run by Mikhail Kupriyanov (right). Czech Republic—the program was extended to Russia four the company went public at a value of years later and the U.S. Russia Investment $1.8 billion, with Cloherty’s firm still Fund was born. owning some 24 percent. The Clinton White House reached out As onel last example, she and her to Cloherty and her colleagues in finance British partners backed “Dolly the
18 | WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ National Peace Corps Association
and business to get the program going, to hire and train local staff, to introduce novel legal and financial practice, and basically to see what could be done to create productive enterprise. In small measure, privatization of formerly government-owned enterprise was part of the program. Cloherty was bemused at the call from the White House Personnel Office in 1994. “Russia?” she replied. “You’ve got to be kidding. I’ve never been there, and I don’t speak the language.” But she and others agreed to join Mr. Clinton in his visit with Boris Yeltsin, then president of the new Russian Federation, to announce the debut of this capitalist oddity, delivered complete with $440 million funding and a seasoned but unpaid board of directors to oversee the operation. At the time, she was fully employed and spoke only Spanish and Portuguese, so she expected to disappear from the scene after the ballyhoo of the program announcement, the “deliverables” in political speak. But, while in Russia, she visited several Russian companies—a plywood manufacturer on the Finnish border, a beer maker south of Moscow, and others. The businesses were a mess, not really businesses in Western terms. It was a true and enormous challenge for Russia, for the world, as well as for the U.S. Russia Investment Fund board. So Cloherty stuck around. After her retirement in 2000 from Apax and at the request of the U.S. Russia Investment Fund fund’s board, she moved to Russia for six months, but she stayed 12 years. She Russianized the staff, replaced some expats and formed a follow-on private fund, Delta Private Equity (Delta), which was led by the pension fund of the General Electric Company, and included key Russia investors. A Cloherty rule she told me: “If locals won’t invest in their own country, neither should you.” Delta’s private capital took over from that of the U.S. government. It was a lifesaver or, better put, a portfolio saver. Washington had reneged on its capital commitment to the U.S. Russia Investment Fund at a time when the companies in the portfolio were growing
rapidly and required more capital to stay afloat. “Russia at that time was a venture investor’s dream,” says Cloherty, “There had never been a consumer market to speak of. Get this: in 1995, there were two shopping malls in Moscow, GUM and TSUM. Ten years later, there were 44. In 1995, there were 89 cell phones in use. Ten years later, there were 125 million in a nation of 142 million. “In the early ‘90s, there were no gas stations; by 2005 there were 20,000. On and on.” Cloherty watched Russia’s economic revolution take off. “My social life in my early years in Russia was going to IKEA on a Saturday night to watch the Russians for the first time be able to buy little refrigerators and sofas and towels. Stuff was flying off the shelves.” However, in the absence of legal patent protections in Russia, she could not pursue her specialty, intellectual property-based businesses. This was unfortunate, in Cloherty’s view, in such a scientifically educated society. So consumer-oriented businesses dominated her investing. Delta’s portfolio, inherited from the U.S. Russia Investment Fund, reflected that dynamic. Dave Jones, the American chief executive prior to Cloherty, had the foresight to venture into mortgage lending, credit card finance and leveraged leasing of commercial equipment, all “firsts” in Russia. Those companies, by definition, required capital to grow. Delta provided them with the capital to pave the way with great outcomes for all. Societe Generale of France bought the mortgage bank, GE Capital bought the credit card issuing bank, and Siemens of Germany bought the leasing company, all at superior prices and all for cash.
Other companies in the U.S. Russia Investment Fund/Delta’s portfolio fared well also, as were all investors including the U.S. government. Cloherty claims that is possibly a first for all U.S. government assistance to any country. Her team gambled and succeeded with struggling government-controlled companies and promising start-ups: the troubled Lomonosov Porcelain, a company established by Peter the Great
company; the systems integration giant USP Compulink that was sold to a Russian investor; Sun Brewing whose beer labels were bought by beer giant Interbrew (now InBrew) of Belgium; the first supermarkets, SPAR, which became the nation’s second-largest retail food chain and was bought by Russian financial group and became the largest retail chain in the country; and Saint Springs Water Company, whose non-sparkling
Moscow’s young ice hockey team, the Sharks, flew to Toronto and won second place in the world competition. Their trip was paid for by Cloherty’s Delta Private Equity Fund.
to produce hand-painted ceramics for royalty; two Delta Leasing companies – one leasing autos and large farm and construction, logging and refrigeration equipment in Vladiovostok and another leasing Ford, Volvo and Daimler-Benz cars and trucks in Moscow; independent CTC media network that introduced private commercial television advertising. Their entrepreneurial spirit also fostered the first cable television
Her firm’s investment in Apple in 1977 is an example, as is its investment in AOL, then called Quantum Computer, in the early 1980s. Both took long times to mature and went through many ups and downs before investors were rewarded.
waters rise from underground springs on properties of the Russian Orthodox Church and became the first bottled water company in Russia. It was later sold to Nestlé. Everybody profits One of Cloherty’s proudest accomplishments in developing the venture business in Russia was sharing the fruits of success with all parties. Investors profited, for sure. They were at total capital risk. But so did the young Russian entrepreneurs. And so did the investment managers who had worked to develop opportunities. All U.S. Russia Investment Fund/Delta employees participated in success through profitsharing, a uniquely American concept it seems. “The first time we sold a company and made a distribution of gains, the office
WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ www.PeaceCorpsConnect.org | 19
MAXIM SHEMETOV/REUTERS
The usual Christmas crowds flock to the icon of Russia’s old economy, the GUM store in central Moscow, to celebrate like good consumers.
cleaner, Anastasia, came running into my office, did an elaborate curtsy and said ‘I was able to repair my roof.’ My assistant, Svetlana, bought a Ford Focus and took me on the first ride on an icy day in Moscow. We were contributing to the car explosion in Moscow, I guess.” Her team’s work attracted much attention in the Russian business world. The City of Moscow honored her for her commitment to entrepreneurship, Forbes magazine called her a Technology Top Dealmaker, the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia named her Businessperson of the Year, President
Vladimir Putin honored her with the Order of Friendship, the highest award that a non-citizen of Russia can receive and one, incidentally, that Rex Tillerson, the current U.S. Secretary of State, received some years after Cloherty. Cloherty has served on many boards over the years, those of non-profits, such as Columbia University, Rockefeller University, and Columbia University’s International House, and 40 companies as a result of her venture capital career. But among them, she is proudest of the young Russian companies her group found, backed, and stewarded to a new
20 | WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ National Peace Corps Association
and promising future.
Patricia Cloherty served as an agricultural extension volunteer in several communities in remote Central Brazil from 1963 to 1965. Prior to her pioneering role in the venture capital industry she held several positions in the U.S. Small Business Administration, and has served on multiple boards of directors of corporate and non-profit institutions. She is chair and chief executive emeritus of Delta Private Equity Partners, LLC.
REBRANDING
GRIT & AGILITY
Skills that took me from Peace Corps to Silicon Valley By Meg Garlinghouse
W
to persevere. Gritty people don’t believe Agility. These were important 25 years hen I served in the failure is a permanent condition. And this ago but today they’re quickly becoming Peace Corps in the is one of the reasons Silicon Valley has some of the most critical skills that pre-Internet days, the recently fallen in love with them despite employers are looking for. Throughout only medical guide its obsession with magic bullets and hyper my career, I’ve been thrown I received scale. into situations with little before heading out to my village It certainly takes some level of grit information on how to solve 500 miles away was called to make it through the two-year Peace a problem. Not only have I “Where There’s No Doctor.” This Corps experience. In the beginning, persevered but I have set myself book is a self-diagnostic tool simply making it through the day requires apart from my colleagues. And to help you figure out whether grit and therefore leaves you with an I credit this to my experience in your illness was something enormous sense of self-accomplishment the Peace Corps. you could treat by yourself or every night at sunset. And the cumulative whether it required a trip to the Meg Garlinghouse effective of this daily dose of confidence is Exercising grit local health center or a 10-hour bush taxi what creates a great deal of resilience. As What is grit? Grit is persevering to ride back to the capital. you conquered these smaller challenges achieve long-term goals, especially in the One of the sickest days of my life you developed a sense that you could face of strong headwinds. It is basically happened in my village in Niger within conquer anything. You were thrown into a sticking it out and working hard to make the first several months. I went to bed situation where doing what used to seem stuff happen. with terrible stomach pains and woke up pedestrian seems challenging. Why does grit matter? Angela vomiting the most beautiful bright blue Perhaps the grittiest work I did was Duckworth and other social scientists liquid and burning from a fever of 104. trying to get 10 neighboring villages to now believe grit may be more important As I mentioned, this was pre-Internet so participate in a tree planting contest. Yes. than natural talent as a key predictor of I certainly could not Google “blue vomit” I know, very western-valued of me. I even success. She maintains that grit is not or post a picture of it on Instagram. synonymous with Fortunately, I was able to find “Where hard work or even There’s No Doctor” and I looked up “blue correlated with vomit” in the index to quickly discover talent. Instead, it that it is the result of iodine mixed with involves a certain carbohydrates that turns liquid blue (We single-mindedness. treated the water from the well with It is also the subject iodine.) But what I remember is not about of one of my favorite being sick, but how I felt the next day. Hausa proverbs Indestructible. I had fully recovered and “Sannu sannu, ba felt better than ever. I had persevered at ta hana zua” which the very bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy translates as “Going when all you really want is your mom – slowly doesn’t this is grit. And I had figured it out on my prevent you from own – this is agility. getting there.” My decision to go into the Peace Grit also matters Corps was the best decision of my life, because it signals personally but especially professionally. During the annual Wodaabe Fulani celebration, Meg Garlinghouse, Jennifer someone’s ability It honed two specific attributes: Grit and Burt, Alix Barstow and Denise Lewis joined their Nigerian neighbors.
WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ www.PeaceCorpsConnect.org | 21
had t-shirts made and sent from home. I certainly wasn’t going to see the fruits of our collective labor but the reality was neither were most of the villagers. This made the value proposition of why they should take time away from tending their millet fields even more challenging. In the end, I was able to convince people to participate but it required months of individual conversations. I’m guessing there is a selection bias that draws grittier people into Peace Corps but I am certain that whatever grit was in me at the beginning of my Peace Corps experience developed 10 times during the two years. And this attribute has helped me enormously in my professional career. Career agility What is agility? This seems to be one of the most in-demand skills and a natural bedfellow to grit. Those who are learning agile know what to do when they don’t know what to do. They know the questions to ask, and the people to work with in order to find the answers they need.
Gritty people don’t believe failure is a permanent condition. And this is one of the reasons Silicon Valley has recently fallen in love with them – despite its obsession with magic bullets and hyper scale. Why does agility matter? It matters because if you are a student, the skills required to succeed in a future job may not be currently known. Whereas most of our parents were more likely to hold jobs at the same company for 20-plus years, experts predict that recent graduates will have on average 11 different jobs in their
On the morning of the tragedy, I went to work and my colleagues were contacting me asking what Yahoo should do. With the help of colleagues … Within a few days, we put “donate now” buttons on our home page and in two weeks raised over $30 million. lifetimes. You have to be learning agile to survive. Another reason agility matters is that companies are starting to hire on it. Several years ago, former Google’s Chief of People, Laszlo Bock, disclosed that there is no correlation between GPA and their high performers. And he even goes on to say that the academic institutions are artificial places where people are trained to succeed in a very specific environment. In other words, it’s easy to get the A in chemistry when you know and understand the rules of engagement. According to Bock, Google is much more interested in finding people to solve problems where there isn’t an obvious answer. If you join the Peace Corps, you will be faced with challenges where answers are not obvious. And whether you walk into it with a predisposition to learning agility, you will certainly leave it with that ability. And this will give you an absolutely invaluable tool in your career. My professional career is a testament to this. It has been a series of “figuring out things where there are no obvious answers.” Starting things from scratch with no manual or set up directions on how to get it done – and many times in cultures that felt as foreign to me as the day I stepped into my village. My agile mindset has both helped me find the right jobs and succeed when I finally found it. But let me be clear. My path has not been linear. When I returned from the Peace Corps, I was cynical about development work. I worked briefly at a law firm, went back to graduate school, spent a year at the World Bank, and eventually made my way out West and jumped into the internet frenzy where I eventually got a role at Yahoo leading their community relations work.
22 | WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ National Peace Corps Association
“Where there’s no playbook” I joined Yahoo in August, 2001, three weeks before 9/11, to run its community and philanthropy program. On the morning of the tragedy, my colleagues were contacting me asking what Yahoo should do. With the help of colleagues we realized the most important role we could play initially was in information sharing on a macro level as well as one on one. For many people, cell phones did not work but the Internet did. Within a few days, we put “donate now” buttons on our home page and in two weeks raised over $30 million. It was the first time most people had ever made an “online donation.” I am now at LinkedIn where I think I have one of the greatest jobs in the world. LinkedIn connects talent with opportunity at massive scales. This allows us to leverage what we do best as a business to make a great social impact. We connect underserved communities such as youth, veterans and refugees to economic opportunity. When I took on this role as head of LinkedIn for Good, nobody told me how to do it or what the program should look like but I knew the questions to ask and the people to work with. I figured it out and I thank the Peace Corps for helping me to develop my own agility and resourcefulness. As you look for your next job in the world, emphasize these attributes because employers are looking for them. And These skills are not yet replaceable by robots or artificial intelligence. Meg Garlinghouse served as an agriculturual volunteer in Niger and is head of Social Impact at LinkedIn, the 500-million member social networking service in Mountain View, California.
RYOT.COM
Bryn Mooser’s RYOT news production studio in Los Angeles hires more than 100 writers and creates immersive media he believes will ignite a millennial audience to do good and change the world. Smiley Stevens in the white hat is RYOT’s art director.
CREATING A RYOT
Bryn Mooser’s documentaries challenge his Internet audiences
F
ollowing the deadly 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Bryn Mooser and his friend, David Darg, were working as humanitarians in Haiti and produced their first documentary, “Sun City Picture House.” It’s a 27-minute film about Raphael, a young man whose job was to haul dead children from a hospital to a morgue for cremation. Raphael wanted something better for 1.5 million destitute people living in tents called Cite Soleil. He wanted a movie theater, so Mooser and Darg and a few hundred
friends in the community built one out of plywood in four days and filmed the project. Mooser grew up in Hollywood and served as a Peace Corps forestry volunteer in the Gambia. Many Mooser and Darg films focus attention on the infectious joy or intense courage of a single human surviving from overwhelming community tragedy. Raphael in Haiti’s poverty, the Ebola worker in Monrovia, a surfer after the hurricane at Sandy Point, a Kenyan ranger tracking poachers in Tsavo National Park. The latest film tells the
story of El Pugil, a young Puerto Rican boxer from the slums of Barrio Obrero. Six years after their first documentary, the company he and Darg created, RYOT, is a thriving media experiment in Hollywood working for global good. Mooser has produced two Oscarnominated films and was named American of the Year by Esquire magazine. He says, “Millennials demand more from the world,” and argues that they deserve better. Their news should inform them and activate them, not depress them. We asked Mooser to talk about
WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ www.PeaceCorpsConnect.org | 23
Victims of the Haiti earthquake were crowded into Sun City, a slum on the edge of Port-au-Prince. Mooser (left) and Darg (right) gathered some friends and built this Sun City theater, and filmed the 2010 construction and celebration.
what he’s done and where RYOT is going. WV: Your company is described as immersive media. You want your audience to act out, change the news, and change the world. RYOT works out of a Los Angeles studio, has an active web presence, and employs more than a hundred writers using virtual reality technology and even iPhones to tell stories. Volunteers blogging now in Nepal or Mozambique may have the same media motives. What do they need to know? MOOSER: All of the work I have done with RYOT is a direct response to my time in the Peace Corps. I believe in the three principles of the Peace Corps: To help a community, to help teach about the United States, and most importantly, to bring the story of the world back home. This third tenant which President John F. Kennedy believed was the most important has been my mission. I have been fortunate enough to grow up overseas and am grateful to have been born in America. It was this patriotism that drove me to the Peace Corps in the early days
after 9/11. When we founded RYOT, we wanted to tell the positive stories of what was happening in the world to our friends and family at home. To not only tell what was happening in the world but what YOU could do about it. WV: Compared to what you do, traditional U.S. media appear polarizing and at the same time paralyzing their audiences. In the cacophony of modern media – from network and cable TV to Facebook likes and White House tweets and “Alternative facts” - can RYOT repair communities, help people? Is it working the way you wanted it to? MOOSER: We are all connected as never before. People in the Gambia can film their own lives to distribute over social media. This means the power is shifting from the traditional media giants to the people. It’s a thrilling time but also more important than ever to use media for good rather than let it further divide us. WV: You’ve had considerable success
24 | WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ National Peace Corps Association
in documentary film. Your works appear at dozens of film festivals. Where did you learn these skills? Growing up in Los Angeles, at school at Bennington, in Peace Corps, or Haiti? MOOSER: I studied film at Bennington but really, it was honed in Haiti. Cameras are smaller and cheaper and better than ever now. You can make an Oscar-nominated film on a Go Pro and phone like we did for Body Team 12 in Liberia. If you want to be a filmmaker it’s never been a better time. Anyone can do it. You just need to work hard and have a great story to tell. WV: Your innovative reporting about the world’s tragedies attracted early investors such as the Canadians Gareth Seltzer and Martha Rogers, and the actress, Olivia Wilde. When you know what you want to do but there is no audience or market for it, how do you get that kind of backing? MOOSER: We were lucky to have such amazing support early on. These were
DANNY MOLOSHOK/REUTERS
EDUARDO MUNOZ/REUTERS
Mooser and his RYOT.com partner, David Darg, stood with Oscar on the evening their production of the documentary short, “Body Team 12,” which was among the nominees at the 88th Academy Awards.
first who were driven by the same mission as we were and wanted to make the world better through media. I think they also saw how passionate David and I were and they knew we would stop at nothing for success. We couldn’t have done it without their amazing support. WV: RYOT is now part of Verizon’s collection of media companies, alongside Yahoo and AOL. Where do you think this growth will lead you personally and how will this change RYOT? MOOSER: It’s really exciting. We now have scale and can reach over a billion people a month. Plus, Verizon Mobile’s phone mission of arming everybody with a camera in their pockets aligns with RYOT perfectly. WV: As an entrepreneur, how do you manage the risks of continued growth? MOOSER: You have to maintain the culture. It’s hard but integral to keeping a company intact, and maintaining whatever it was that led to our success in
the first place. WV: Have you had failures along the way, aesthetic or financial? MOOSER: We have failed more times than I can count. But I learned how to fail while I was in the Peace Corps. My first Peace Corps project was a community garden that failed. It was heartbreaking and I almost gave up. But I didn’t and worked hard until it succeeded. I bring that to my work at RYOT every day. Growing that garden and maintaining its roots.
joined our RYOT. WV: After “Sun City,” you filmed rapper Wyclef Jean’s run for the presidency, “The Light in the Darkness,” and a documentary about a boy’s devotion to baseball during a cholera epidemic. What will happen to Haiti? Did RYOT help? Has the world drawn you away from Haiti’s enduring struggle?
WV: The premise for RYOT should appeal to many of our readers, both in the States and the more than 100 countries where Peace Corps Volunteer careers have taken them. Can Peace Corps Volunteers and many more now working for NGOs around the globe join your RYOT?
MOOSER: Haiti is one of the most enduring and beautiful countries I’ve ever visited. I have no doubt that its beauty will sustain it through all of this horrible turmoil. RYOT can help, sure, but by our nature, we’re only helping if we’re inspiring others to help. So in that way, I like to think we have. There will always be strife in the world to distract us from this or that, but special places like Haiti will, for me at least, always be a subject of fascination and love.
MOOSER: If you have a camera in your pocket, and you see something that your friend or mother or brother would also like to see, and you capture it and share it because it inspires you to, you’ve
Bryn Mooser was a forestry extension volunteer in Gambia from 2001 to 2004. He produces award-winning film documentaries and is co-founder of RYOT.com’s new forms of interactive video reporting available on AOL.
WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ www.PeaceCorpsConnect.org | 25
REBRANDING
BUILDING TUMI
How service in Peru led to starting my luggage company By Charlie Clifford Business, where Dr. Frank Shallenberger taught courses in entrepreneurship and small business. He had spent a year in Peru helping to build the country’s first graduate business school before convincing the Peace Corps to establish a small business program. In Peru’s coastal desert My wife, Cricket, and I spent almost two years working in the Department of Lambayeque in Peru's arid north. We lived in Pimentel, a small village about 20 to 30 minutes by colectivo - a group taxi - from Chiclayo, a lively regional commercial trading center with a population of close to 100,000. There were half a dozen or so very large haciendas with efficient irrigation systems where sugar cane was refined into sugar, and rum and various other by-products were produced, but there was no land with appropriate infrastructure and services set aside for industry. Another volunteer from our group, Jerry Papantonio, and I helped organize a group of local businessmen to lobby the government to pass a law with special incentives to create an industrial park to stimulate economic growth. This was a terrific experience which gave me the opportunity to develop skills in selling a concept and motivating people with different interests to come together for a common cause. The Peace Corps itself was quite entrepreneurial in nature. There was a lot of “learning by doing.” We operated without a rule book and there was no one telling us what to do every day, so we had
26 | WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ National Peace Corps Association
to set our own goals and evaluate progress without the benefit of a traditional support structure.
‘We operated without a rule book and there was no one telling us what to do every day, so we had to set our own goals and evaluate progress without the benefit of a traditional support structure.’ Most of all, my Peace Corps experience gave me a sense of confidence that I could land in a new environment, completely outside of my comfort zone, and somehow figure it out. It taught me about the importance of combining persistence with the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances. There is nothing more challenging than figuring out how to discover ways to get things done in a foreign culture: My Spanish was rudimentary and Peruvian social etiquette places more emphasis on being simpatico rather than simply accomplishing goals.
JOAO CANZIANI
Y
ou can imagine how cocky our group of around 50 “hotshot” MBAs were when we entered Peace Corps training in 1967 as part of an experimental small business initiative. The fact that we were all men reflected the times, however a number of us were married which meant that our wives were assigned to other programs based on local needs. We were more than a little “full of ourselves” and eager to share our North American management theories with our Peruvian counterparts, even though we did not have a full appreciation of what the real business world was all about. And most of us had no idea of the kinds of challenges we would face in adapting to a new culture with different values and a more laid-back attitude toward life and work. During our two years in Peru, we learned that like most Latin cultures, relationships were all important, and we had to establish personal connections with people to get anything done. We also learned that time was measured differently, as everything ran on hora Peruana. Meetings and appointments almost always began late and mañana merely meant sometime in the future rather than “tomorrow.” Since business schools relied heavily on the use of case studies to supplement text books, we already had some exposure to solving problems, but we had to figure out how to operate in a very different environment. Fortunately, our excellent Peace Corps training took place at Stanford Graduate School of
Several years after he and his wife closed their Peace Corps service in Peru, Charlie Clifford founded the premium luggage brand, Tumi. The company was named∙ Summer after an2017 iconic symbol of Peru. WorldView ∙ www.PeaceCorpsConnect.org | 27
Early business instincts I grew up in Midland Park, a quiet New Jersey town of about 5,000. It’s only an hour from Manhattan, but was a world apart in terms of sophistication. My first experience as an entrepreneur was going door-to-door selling magazine subscriptions as part of a contest to raise funds for our school. I came in second because another classmate was able to convince his father, the town doctor, to order a bunch of subscriptions for his office waiting room. Cold-calling is never easy, but I learned to deal with rejection and enjoyed the sense of accomplishment derived from making a sale. Later, at Indiana University, I ran
several years in industrial marketing but became restless and decided to leave the corporate world for something more entrepreneurial. I chose to get involved with importing handcrafts to rekindle my connection with South America.
The road to Tumi My path to Tumi included a couple of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers. I first joined a small importer of South American handcrafted products called Llama Line. The company had been founded by George Millard, a former Peace Corps country director in Uruguay and Peru, and Dana Danielson, a returned volunteer who had served in Chile. After about a year, I realized that it would be difficult to scale a business based solely on handcrafted products, so in 1975 I decided to strike out on my own to produce leather bags in a couple of small factories in Colombia. I brought in a partner to Clifford encouraged Chiclayo businessmen to lobby local government to pass a handle the law to enable funding of an industrial park. The presentation taught him how to back-end of the motivate a group with common cause. business, and we invested $10,000 and were off and a campus business that took photos at running. fraternity and sorority parties. Since The name Tumi comes from a preI knew nothing about photography, Colombian ceremonial knife with a handle I learned to delegate by recruiting a which depicted a mythical god figure and friend to develop a network of skilled a curved blade at the base. Tumi knives photographers, and focused my efforts on were used for brain surgery and also for booking events. sacrifices. It is also the symbol of the I was interviewing with a number of Department where we lived. Naming the packaged goods companies for product company Tumi allowed me to maintain a management positions during my second connection with the country which helped year at Indiana’s School of Business, shape my view of the world and provided which is now called the Kelley School, my wife and me with so many warm when a good friend told me the Peace memories. Corps was recruiting MBAs and industrial After a few years, I convinced Jeff engineers to go to Peru. I was intrigued Bertelsen, another Returned Peace Corps by the idea of becoming a volunteer, and Volunteer I had met through Llama Line, Cricket was all for it. to come on board. Jeff moved to Bogotá After the Peace Corps, I spent
28 | WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ National Peace Corps Association
to oversee our production and product development, and two years later he came back to the States and took charge of design. It was Jeff’s creative genius that produced the iconic Tumi look with upside down u-shaped zippers which make it easier to pack and unpack and to organize for a trip. Gary Moses, my friend from Indiana who told me about the small business program and was also part of our Stanford group, joined Tumi and helped build our international business by providing operational support. When I started the company, I confess that we didn’t have a written business plan, which is not exactly what is taught in MBA programs. Our early products were a rustic collection of “naked” leather bags with a natural finish, a soft hand and a rather pungent odor. The best seller was an unlined 20-inch duffle bag which retailed for $59. Our rugged bags were considered to be a great value and were popular with Mom and Pop leather specialty stores where the owner often made belts and sandals in the backroom. Over the years, we became very product oriented and developed a culture based on kaizen, a Japanese term for “constant improvement.” We were never completely satisfied and kept refining our products, as we learned what worked for the frequent business travelers who were our target customers. Most importantly, they wanted durable, user-friendly luggage that allowed them to organize their belongings and still looked good after hundreds of trips. We spent hours and hours fiercely debating the details of each design and the merits of one bag over another. We had a lot of strong personalities and emotions sometimes ran high, but our goal was to make the best possible products for our customers. We always managed to set aside bruised feelings and do what was best for the brand. Building a brand I benefited tremendously from the cultural exposure gained during my Peace Corps years. When Tumi entered international markets in Europe and Asia in the 90’s, I already knew that the American point of view is not
brand. In the late 90’s, we began opening Tumi stores, first in partnership with luggage retailers and then on our own, as the specialty store channel began consolidating. Operating our own stores allowed us to increase the range of our offering and having direct contact with consumers provided a steady flow of valuable feedback, which we used to keep improving our products. After a decade of rapid growth, we were in the process of bringing in additional capital to expand internationally and to do more marketing when the 9/11 terrorist attacks caused a severe slowdown in the travel industry. Sales dropped by almost 40 percent from one day to the next, and we were forced to hunker down and cut costs to survive. When we closed a deal with a private equity firm in 2002, the new investors took a controlling interest in the company. My role then shifted to our
international business and a couple of years later, the board of directors decided to sell the company to another financial investor and I retired.
Charlie Clifford was a small business volunteer on the desert coast of Peru from 1967 to 1969 and was the founder and longtime chief executive officer of Tumi luggage Inc., a premium luggage and accessories brand. He retired in 2004 when the company was being sold to a private equity group. The company went public in 2012, and Samsonite bought Tumi last year.
JOAO CANZIANI
always universally appreciated and how important it is to respect other perspectives. I also became a better listener and learned the value of getting to know people and building relationships rather than only focusing on achieving my own goals. By the late 80s and early 90s, Tumi had become a market leader in the highend segment of the U.S. luggage sector, and our unstructured business briefcases had emerged as the bag of choice for many successful businessmen. We had a strong management team in place, so I began developing the European and Asian markets where I discovered we needed to improve our “fit and finish” to meet quality standards in markets like Germany and Japan. Our international experience strengthened the company significantly, as we had to up our game in every aspect in order to gain credibility as a
As he opened a Tumi store in Tokyo, the terrorist attack on New York’s Twin Towers sent the travel industry into a tailspin.
WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ www.PeaceCorpsConnect.org | 29
REBRANDING
ARE YOU AGILE?
If you succeed in your village, corporations want you By Paula Caligiuri
O
ne of the largest health insurance companies in the United States, Cigna, was planning a major shift three years ago to overseas markets, but its managers were used to only dealing with people here in the States who were pretty much like them. Suddenly they were conducting conference calls from their Connecticut offices to teams spread across multiple time zones and dozens of economies and cultures that were new to them. They needed to be more effective leaders of Cigna’s international programs in a larger and more diverse world. “Most of them didn’t even have a current passport,” John Staines of their IT division told me in 2014. So Cigna chose to improve the leadership skills of its IT people by offering them companysupported volunteer experience overseas of a month or so through a project I developed at Northeastern University and in collaboration with the National Peace Corps Association. Agility counts In today’s interconnected and dynamic world, corporate leaders need more than passports and plane tickets to succeed. They need to be able to quickly, comfortably, and effectively work in different countries with people from different cultures. They need cultural agility. They will gain this cultural agility when they have significant opportunities to collaborate with colleagues from different cultures, receive feedback on their effectiveness in diverse cultures, and understand the importance of the cultural context in being successful. They need to learn how to source credible information about critical
business issues in diverse countries. A working knowledge of business issues in each country would be time-prohibitive for most business leaders. Truly developmental corporate assignments need to be immersive experiences that occur outside of expatriate neighborhoods and far from expatriate clubs. Our school’s Cultural Ability Leadership Lab oversees Cigna employees who work as volunteers for a month or more with NGOs overseas. Returned Peace Corps Volunteers who have worked in the non-profit sector in those countries serve as cultural coaches to the Cigna volunteers. As the Cigna volunteers work on NGO projects with host-country nationals, the RPCVs guide the Cigna volunteers through the nuances of the local language and culture. The culture coaches from the NPCA are central to our program’s success. As the global economy continues to expand, U.S. corporations need what you have learned while serving in the Peace Corps. These are cross-cultural skills you learne by being successful Peace Corps Volunteers. Diving deep I’ve conducted research for 25 years on how many U.S. professionals achieve cross-cultural competencies through working in other countries. I’ve interviewed hundreds of corporate executives who need to hire people who know the skills you have achieved as Peace Corps Volunteers. When the level of cross-cultural competencies is higher, leaders can dive into the deep end with an immersive international assignment. If cross-cultural competencies are lower, you start with a more manageable experience but one that
30 | WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ National Peace Corps Association
is still a cultural stretch. Through my experience running the Cultural Agility Leadership Lab, I’ve developed a test of six skills of crosscultural competency. As Americans who have learned the ways of many countries and cultures, RPCVs are likely to get the highest scores? Tolerance for Ambiguity Individuals who possess a tolerance for ambiguity are able to suppress anxiety or stress that accompanies perceived uncertainty of instructions not well defined or situations with unclear expectations. Are you comfortable in settings when full clarity is not present or possible? Do you thrive on that ambiguity? Do you have a passion for work settings with great complexity, novelty, or ambiguity? Do you remain calm and confident when others become unnerved? Do you seek out novel situations for their developmental properties? Cultural Humility Do you express cultural humility? Do you display the proper degree of confidence in your skills and abilities to be successful? Do you show that humility by not overestimating how effective you can be cross-culturally? Do you appreciate the limits of your hosts’ knowledge and understand how to help them develop additional skills? In spite of your own different experience, can you inspire confidence without displaying arrogance? Are you able to identify the powerful lessons your counterpart has learned? Can you recall times when you were able to balance self-efficacy and humility in an international or multicultural context? Cultural Curiosity If you have cultural curiosity and desire to learn you will have a greater understanding of other cultures. You ask questions, search on your own for information and read
deeply about other cultures. How deeply do you search for cultural understanding, even when it takes great time and effort? Do you show your enthusiasm when recalling those opportunities to learn about cultures? Do you have different methods of gathering that information and verifying its accuracy? Resiliance Individuals respond differently when faced with adversities and challenges. When working crossculturally, resilience enables culturally agile professionals to cope with problems, laugh off minor missteps and keep challenges in perspective without feeling overwhelmed. Do you have examples of situations involving different platforms? Are you thrilled to encounter unfamiliar situations and people? How many strategies do you have to adapt to those new situations? Are they fun to experience? Do you find that your own missteps can result in even more learning? Building Relationships Individuals who are able to build relationships express a genuine interest in connecting with others on a personal level. They form trusting, professional relationships, are naturally sociable and seek opportunities to have meaningful interactions. Do you enjoy meeting people and getting to know them? Do you build rapport and connect well with others? Do you deeply believe that these relationships are important? Do you draw others in? Speak in a warm manner that invited conversation? Perspective Taking Individuals who take the perspective of others can see situations from many viewpoints and better understand the behavior of others. Can you suspend judgment until you can understand others? Can you cite examples of that experience? Are you proud of the ability to see other sides? Do you have impressive examples of times when you have appreciated that other perspective? Three cultural orientations Cultural Agility People who are culturally agile develop skills of cultural minimization, cultural adaptation and cultural integration. The most culturallyagile individuals leverage each of these orientations, as needed, depending on the contextual situation in which they are operating.
WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ www.PeaceCorpsConnect.org | 31
Contrary to what is often believed, cultural agility is not solely cultural adaptation; however, there are times when adaptation is critical. Cultural agility does not mean we should pretend cultural differences are nonexistent; however, there are times when a higher-order professional demand will supersede cultural expectations (cultural minimization). Cultural agility is not merging multiple cultures to create a new set of behavioral norms – but there are times when cultural integration is necessary. Cultural Minimization Cultural minimization is a tendency or orientation global professionals have to reduce the perceived influence of cultural differences and focus on similarities. Global professionals who appropriately minimize culture are able to standardize and control the cultural differences that exist in the environment and respond in a way that will create greater consistency, irrespective of culture. Cultural Adaptation Cultural adaptation is an orientation or tendency that global professionals have to be sensitive to cultural differences. Individuals who are culturally adaptive are able to adjust their behaviors to the norms of a cross-cultural environment and behave in a manner that is akin to what is expected in a host culture. Individuals who can demonstrate evidence of cultural integration are able to create a new set of norms and respond with collaboration to find solutions acceptable to all cultures involved without favoring any one culture over another. They are able to effectively and fairly create new norms and behaviors when needed.
The author is a distinguished professor of international business and strategy in the D’Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University in Boston. She founded and directs the Cultural Agility Leadership Lab in collaboration with the National Peace Corps Association.
A BRIGHT IDEA
Replacing the kerosene lantern with solar is harder than it looks By Sam Goldman
I
will never forget my 12-year-old neighbor in my village in Benin, W. Africa, who was burned from head to toe in a kerosene accident. Fortunately, he survived, but more than two billion people rely on kerosene lanterns; one of the most dangerous, expensive and unhealthy sources of light in the world. When I left Benin in 2005, I was determined to offer cheaper, better, safer light to my neighbors in Guinagourou and 90 percent of the world. I co-founded d.light as a for-profit social enterprise two years later and today the company has provided solar light and power products to more than 71 million people who don’t have access to electricity. Over 19 million are young students like my neighbor in Benin. d.light plans to reach over 100 million people in less than three years. I also see a bigger opportunity now. I’m excited about how d.light can be a model for new capitalism, creating better environmental and social outcomes, and inspiring jobs, in addition to changing individual customers’ lives daily. It’s been incredibly fun to think of d.light as an amazing career opportunity in addition to a tool for social change. But the biggest lesson for me in the past decade is that it’s not about product or distribution but about the team. In the beginning, I was too focused on the social impact of the business and being an earlystage entrepreneur. I didn’t put enough emphasis on becoming a better leader, manager, boss, and founder myself. My biggest growth area is how to hire, retain, recruit, and inspire staff and how to ensure that our employees, customers, and partners participate in creating d.light 2.0. It’s way harder than I thought it would be and I have a long way to go. It’s not something you can learn in an MBA program. One of our biggest challenges is building a collaborative team when the
32 | WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ National Peace Corps Association
vast majority of our people work in areas with unstable Internet and separated by time zones and cultural, linguistic, and other barriers. Imagine thousands of front-line sales staff who are traveling most of each month, hub offices in China, India, Kenya and San Francisco time zones, and field offices scattered in-between those four time zones. We struggle with the complexity of a Fortune 50 company – without the fortune. Yet. Related to this is a newer and larger challenge around building scalable systems and processes. We need to remain nimble and start-up oriented, and act like a 100-person company, when we have more than 500 employees, 15,000 retail outlets, and thousands of solar energy promoters in villages across the world, teaching families about solar and making a healthy living selling solar solutions. These are some of the new challenges. Getting started When I came home from my Peace Corps service, I had the advantage of learning about design and entrepreneurship at Stanford University’s’s d.school. I learned that we need to pinpoint a clear and pressing human need upfront and we by conducting and synthesizing detailed user research on just a handful of people, prototyping various products and solutions with those users, and then focusing all our efforts on executing on the chosen solutions. Our initial target was off-grid families earning between 1 to 5 dollars a day living with school-aged kids in a two-bedroom house with a non-cement floor, using kerosene daily and having no access to a smart phone. I discovered that we could focus design and development through detailed research with a dozen people and gain even deeper insights that enabled us to move more quickly
Sam Goldman (right) partnered with Ned Tozun to turn Goldman’s d.light inventions into a company that – with help from venture capitalists - sells and distributes solar-powered devices in Africa, India and China.
WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ www.PeaceCorpsConnect.org | 33
and less expensively. And we found that thousands of others beyond our target adopted our product anyway.As graduate students, we learned to tap alumni and the greater university community. When you are a student, people are more inclined to open their doors to you. We were lucky to get research grants from various school departments, familes, churches, and friends to build out prototypes and test them in overseas markets. By knocking on many doors with prototypes and gathering promising field results we showed our commitment and won a prestigious $250,000 winnertake-all Draper Fisher Jurveson Venture Challenge. We also applied for early-stage seed money from commercial and social venture capitalists (both commercial and social funds) with our compelling, large-market opportunity – the billions of energy poor households. One of our professors told us the hardest part would be to get to the first $250,000 and after that the rest would come. I’ve found that to be true. Marketing We made the early mistake of thinking that once we saw the obvious need and had a great design solution that it would be adopted instantly. It is true that millions of people use dirty, dangerous, unhealthy, and extremely expensive kerosene which burns their children, affects the families eyes and throats, and costs up to 15 percent of their family income. We thought they would instantly adopt a product that had a three-week payback, produces no fumes, is three times brighter, very portable, and carries an iron-clad warranty. That’s not normally the case. Our customers are some of the poorest but most aspirational people on the planet. However, they can be slow to adopt new technologies for financial and cultural reasons unless we provide appropriate products and business models. We needed to build awareness, trust, and confidence in their eyes about the benefits of solar technology and LED lighting; the reliability of d.light as a new brand; and the health, financial and educational benefits of the product.
We totally underestimated the time, money, and resources needed to build this awareness and trust, especially with a market of people who are not in the habit of buying things. They live in rural areas and have huge competing priorities such as education for their children, serious health concerns, and back-breaking responsibilities as farmers and providers. We decided to offer different products that targeted a wider range of customers in different countries. We built some of our own marketing and distribution systems and partnered with others in order to expand our market in East Africa, West Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and the United States. More challenges Our challenges today are similar to when we started d.light. However, the scope is different. In the beginning, the primary challenge was raising capital – but 100 percent equity capital in which venture capitalists and angel investors provide us with the cash in return for a percentage ownership in our business. Equity is still our primary means to invest in new products to reach new customers in new markets. However, now we increasingly manage the business on earnings and importantly on debt and working capital to finance the energy loans we create in our consumer finance business. This is because d.light now sells solar systems to low-income families on a small deposit and daily, weekly, or monthly payments over a one-year period. Think of us as a smaller- scale ‘Solarcity,’ the company now called Tesla. Therefore, raising capital never ends and in most of the startups I’ve worked with, the CEO or founders have at least one person actively fund-raising always. Expect it! Also, the saying that “you can succeed to death” is true. Get a good financial planning and analysis person in your business: I learned when I was a young entrepreneur how fast cash is consumed with rapid growth. I also learned how important accurate cashflow modeling was critical for deciding on business models or the terms of business deals. Sometimes you even have to turn down a lucrative deal to make sure you
34 | WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ National Peace Corps Association
have the cash cushion you need for your core business, or to reach a crucial milestone that will enable your next fundraising. The social enterprise space is a highly competitive world. In a for-profit model, we compete head-to-head with everyone else. A lot of counterfeits and imitations of our products are flooding our markets. We also have lots of new social and non-social businesses offering partners, markets, and customers new innovations and solutions. It’s a challenge to stay on top of innovation when we don’t have the deep pockets of large corporations to sustain large R&D teams or take big risks. We are getting better however at managing for this and baking it into our planning. Peace Corps was the hardest job I ever loved, until d.light came along. And I think that’s the key - loving what you do because you believe in it so deeply. d.light is my baby and many of our staff are equally dedicated. They‘ve chosen to make a positive dent in history and provide a model of a new way of working for themselves, their families, their countries, and the world. We can overcome the challenges of today to ensure universal access to energy in the coming decade and the corresponding gains in education, health, and economic opportunities.
Sam Goldman worked on reforestation, economic development, nutrition, and water projects in Guinagourou, Benin from 2001 to 2005 and is co-founder and president of d.light. For his achievements, he has been named an Ashoka Fellow, a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and a Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur of the Year. Goldman received the NPCA’s Sargent Shriver Award for Distinguished Humanitarian Assistance in 2001 and the Charles Bronfman Prize in 2014. See to d.light.com.
A
my Pressman is president and co-founder with Borge Hald of Medallia, a 2001 Silicon Valley tech start-up whose cloudbased customer experience management software allows companies to better understand customer opinions in order to improve their products and services in more than 40 languages. The company employs more than 1,000 people and has offices in London, Paris, Tel Aviv, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, Sydney and Melbourne. A recent study ranked Medallia best in the customer experience management industry. The U.S. Veterans Administration recently contracted with Medallia to provide Medallia software to its 300,000 employees in 150 hospitals, 300 veterans’ centers and more than 800 clinics to better serve more than 10 million military veterans. Medallia product sales to Della Air Lines, Sherwin-Williams, Nordstroms, La Quinta hotels and
‘The biggest risk is to try to avoid change. The Peace Corps taught me to embrace the unknown, create something where nothing exists, and trust in myself to learn as I go rather than needing a fully-baked road map up front. Essentially, the Peace Corps taught me how to take risks in a smart way.’
MEDALLIA
EMBRACE THE UNKNOWN dozens of other companies topped $125 million in 2016 in a specialized software industry whose sales are expected to reach $10 billion in three years. As a Peace Corps Volunteer in Honduras, Pressman changed her mind about the role corporations can play in society. “It was in Tela, the former Honduran headquarters of United Fruit, that I changed my perspective on business. Though United Fruit was part of the sordid history of so-called Banana Republics – the U.S. commercial exploitation of developing countries Honduras had passed laws ending those egregious abuses. “People who worked for United Fruit when I lived in Tela had clean water, healthcare, and good housing. I learned that greed was bad, but wealth creation was good. It was from that experience that I decided to start a company.” Pressman offers her thoughts about the role her Peace Corps experience in Honduras played in the creation of Medallia.
‘In today’s world, no one has all the answers. Leaders who engage a broader set of people gain access to different perspectives and are positioned to make far better decisions.’
‘I look for mentorship everywhere, in the people I meet, the books I read, the experiences I have. The idea of a single mentor who took me under his/her wing didn’t apply to me. I have found mentorship wherever I could. In some ways, the Peace Corps was a mentor.’
WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ www.PeaceCorpsConnect.org | 35
REBRANDING
SAMOA LESSONS
A manager of portfolios in emerging markets By F. Chapman Taylor What a teacher can learn As a classroom teacher, I learned to manage a disparate, often large, and frequently unruly group of individuals toward a common goal. I needed to develop a plan of attack with my lesson plan, which inevitably needed adjusting three minutes in. I had to develop a constantly evolving array of behavior management techniques to focus my students on the objective. No doubt many of these strategies sound familiar to you, no matter where and when you served or what your assignment was. It turns out that these skill sets are all vitally important in what I do now, and have done for more than two decades. As an investor working across a broad range of emerging markets, my job is to identify good investment opportunities for our clients. That means investing in companies listed on domestic and overseas stock markets that will, over long periods of time, provide “superior returns” as stock prices rise, dividends are paid, and currencies change. The process involves working with a range of source material. Some of the financial reports, market information and news articles are supposedly very objective. However, you learn very quickly
The deciding factor But, you create the real “secret sauce” in the investment business when you’re making decisions using objective and subjective information, your own experience and your instincts to decide what and when to buy and sell. It usually turns out that the best investment decisions are the loneliest—made when JAMIE FOUSS
I
served in the Peace Corps from 1982 to 1984, as a math teacher in a rural village on Savai’I, the largest of Samoa’s islands. Ten years later, I joined Capital Group that currently manages more than $1 trillion on behalf of our clients—both individual mutual fund investors under the American Funds brand and large institutional investors. I joined Capital as an investment analyst, initially working to identify investment opportunities in the Indonesian stock market. I now comanage a range of funds focused on emerging markets and Asia-Pacific on behalf of our clients, and direct research activities for our Asian analyst team. A pathway between those two jobs is not obvious, but I assure you that my Peace Corps service has been fundamental to my success as an investment manager, as a manager of people and equally important, in many other areas of my life. Many will be familiar with the skills we learned as Peace Corps volunteers: initially the ability to learn and integrate into new cultures and to learn new languages, both verbal and non-verbal. For example, Samoans can have an entire conversation with eye movements alone. Our skills also included the ability to identify risks, adapt, make decisions on imperfect information, and take the inevitable next steps to admit mistakes, learn and move on. In addition, we learned how to look at a complex situation, often without a guide, and come to conclusions about the best path forward, frequently discovering a path that others hadn’t seen before. But, perhaps most importantly, we learned to build relationships with our fellow volunteers and Peace Corps staff, to help us through those inevitable challenging times—both professional and personal.
that numbers often tell you only what some people want you to know—not the real, objective truth. And, you’ll find that, in some emerging markets, numbers don’t exist. I’m reminded of a frequent Samoan approach to answering questions: Avoid disappointment at all costs. I’d prefer not to “label” this as lying. Corruption remains a problem in many developing countries. I have a oneword response to those who think this is principally an emerging-markets problem: Enron. Regrettably, we have so many more examples of corruption these days as a result of the global financial crisis. Some information gathering is clearly very subjective. Peace Corps Volunteer skills are really helpful when conducting management interviews, triangulating information from other source interviews, and networking to build information flows to develop better insights. Investment managers need to read people, pick up non-verbal clues, try to develop a strategy to find out what’s really important through a series of questions, and adjust those on the fly. I found my Peace Corps experience vital in developing all these skills.
Behavior techniques for managing the ranks of Samoan boys in this Savai’I island boarding school proved helpful as Chapman Taylor later learned to accept financial risks at the Capital Group.
36 | WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ National Peace Corps Association
only you see something that the market doesn’t see. Often you’re wrong…or at least it can look that way for a while. Sometimes, you really are just plain wrong, and you need to change your approach. At other times, the market tells you you’re wrong, but you just need to be patient and wait for it to catch up to what you’ve already figured out. When each of my three children was in sixth grade, I went into their classrooms to talk to their classmates about what their parents did for a living. My opening line was, “If you got a 60 percent grade on a test, how would you feel?” My answer: “Obviously bad. In my world, the average grade is 50 percent, because the average investment manager gets things wrong as often as they get them right. If I get a 60 percent, I’m a genius.” At this point, each of the kids is really interested in what I do. My point here is that, as volunteers, we’re so familiar with trial and error, failure, learning new lessons, picking ourselves back up and trying again, that it’s natural for us not to be paralyzed by the risk of being wrong a lot. We’ve thrived in uncertainty, and that’s a rare and valuable skillset. Too many people I’ve run across are all waiting for the “sure thing,” always wanting to know more before coming to a decision. In the investment business, dealing with uncertainty, being able to live with and through being wrong, and picking yourself up after the latest mistake is as important as the good analytical and quantitative skills I developed in business school. Your opportunity set may be much broader than you think.
Advance your career. Pursue your passion.
Begin your studies Fall Semester 2017. NUTRITION.TUFTS.EDU/ONLINE
ONLINE GRADUATE PROGRAMS AND COURSES IN FOOD AND NUTRITION
SOLVE PROBLEMS CHANGE POLICY IMPROVE HEALTH
Columbia’s MPH program focuses on vulnerable populations, forced migration, sexual and reproductive health, humanitarian assistance, and much more. Learn more at mailman.columbia.edu/peace-corps
Chapman Taylor taught school on an island in Samoa from 1982 to 1984. He received an MBA from the Wharton School and served as a strategy advisor to businesses and governments in the ASEAN region. He now manages global emerging market equity investment portfolios at Capital International Investors for Capital Group, and is based in Washington, D.C.
WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ www.PeaceCorpsConnect.org | 37
RESILIENCY ON THE JOB
RPCVs work for one of the nation’s largest purchasers of renewable energy Interview with Gaddi Vasquez
A
and meaningful way. handful of Southern WV: What kind of work do they do? California Edison VASQUEZ: They work in the employees were invited regulatory space, the business resiliency to lunch with a senior area, customer service. Their work spans vice president of Edison a number of organizations. International, one of the So it runs across different largest utilities in the nation. organizations. All of them had come to work WV: What about business for Edison after having served resiliency? What does that as Peace Corps Volunteers. mean? Vasquez is a former director of VASQUEZ: Business the Peace Corps and a former resiliency is preparing and U.S. ambassador to the UN planning for unforeseen Agencies in Rome. He later events that occur such told NPCA President Glenn as major disruptions or Blumhorst about his meeting situations that require with the Returned Peace Corps deployment of different Volunteers. WorldView called Southern California organizations to respond to Vasquez to ask about the Edison’s senior vice company and their RPCVs. president, Gaddi Vasquez conditions and circumstances that could be disruptive to our WV: How does two years business. working on a sanitation project or WV: That sounds a little bit like Crisis teaching school in a village in West Africa Corps. qualify someone for a career at Edison? VASQUEZ: Well, yes, but it’s a VASQUEZ: Some of the transferrable different environment because this is a skills are centered on their ability be corporate environment and we cover all thinkers, innovators, self-starters who are of southern California. If you served in able to tackle issues they confront in their the Crisis Corps it at least would give you duties as employees. Returned volunteers a sense of dealing with unforeseen and bring with them that ability and trait of unexpected events. taking on a challenging assignment not WV: What’s the scope of the service always in ideal circumstances and being Edison provides? able to see things through in a productive
38 | WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ National Peace Corps Association
VASQUEZ: For over 130 wears Southern California Edison has provided electricity to millions of residents within a 50,000-square-mile area which stretches from Palm Springs and Rancho Mirage north to Santa Barbara up through Visalia to the eastern borders of the State of California. It’s a vast wide diverse area. We’re one of the nation’s largest utilities and one of the largest purchasers of renewable energy in the country. WV: Technology has become a major focus for Peace Corps Volunteers. How about Edison and its workforce? VASQUEZ: Edison is a leader in advancing new technology and adopting new and innovative ways to provide safe, reliable and clean energy to our customers. WV: What’s the future of renewable energy at South California Edison? VASQUEZ: We are a leader in advancing new technology such as renewable energy, transportation electrification and distributed energy resources. We procure a significant percentage of our energy as we work to support the state’s energy goals and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and other clean air standards. These are new technologies and policies that will shape California’s energy future.
ACHIEVEMENTS
FLEXIBLE VOLUNTEER Evolution of an environmental advocate By Peter V. Deekle
T
he Lindsay Wildlife Experience – one of the oldest wildlife rehabilitation centers in the nation and a popular family destination in San Francisco’s East Bay area - named James Madden director of education a couple of months ago. Madden’s route to the job was a circuitous one that began nine years ago when Peace Corps sent the trained conservation biologist and former AmeriCorps teacher to Ecuador’s Manabi province on the Pacific Coast. His site was the town of Don Juan in the canton of Jama on a stretch of some of Latin America’s most beautiful and pristine beaches. His job was to work with a fishing cooperative. “But the plan didn’t work out,” Madden says. The co-op dissolved in disorganization. “So, I struck out on my own, and became an environmental advocate.” He convinced the town to stop open-air fires at the local dump and start
a solid waste management program. “I also helped change an abandoned tourism office into a children’s library and an ecological center.” His year of good works ended when a massive raid on nearby property for suspected drug activity raised major security concerns in the region. “Suddenly, Peace Corps removed me from Don Juan and I was granted what the agency calls Interrupted Service.” Madden returned home to New York. In August 2010, the Ceiba Foundation sent him back to Jama to work on forest conservation and environmental education programs. While he was there he continued to help the Don Juan library and met his future wife, Lila Sheira, also a former Peace Corps Volunteer. They bought a small plot in Don Juan where they built a simple house with brick, cement, and a tin roof. The couple returned to the U.S. for graduate study and to teach. Madden trained museum volunteers for the
California Academy of Sciences and Lila earned a degree in public health. When a major earthquake struck Ecuador last year, Jama canton was devastated by death and destruction. Madden returned to host community meetings, organizing delivery of emergency relief supplies. “Our house and the children’s library had been destroyed.” Madden donated the couple’s land for a bigger, better library and cultural center and he joined two retired literature professors from Ecuador to create a non-profit called A Mano Manaba to raise funds for the center. “Construction will begin soon,” Madden says from his new job in Walnut Creek, California. “Maybe it’s already begun. I have to check with them.” See amanomanaba.org and lindsaywildlife.org
ANTIGUA Clifford Clark (05-09) returned to St. Johns, Antigua as a computer advisor to the National Library of Antigua and Barbuda, cultivating book writing, editing, and publishing skills with local authors. The library was severely damaged in an earthquake and has been rebuilt. Clark has collected about 40,000 books and other items for Antigua. In 2013, he sent 35,000 books and toys to the newly built library that once held an estimated 10,000 volumes.
ECUADOR
A female loggerhead turtle was depositing her eggs on the Florida shores of Cape Canaveral as James Madden conducted summer sea turtle research in 2001.
Page Publishing has released a book written by Philip R. Mitchell (64-66) about the author’s determination to serve his country, “Everything Happens for the Best: A Cross-Cultural Romance during the Early Years of the Peace Corps.” The memoir includes what he describes as his fateful encounter with Beatriz, the woman he married while teaching in Ecuador. Mitchell is a teacher, counselor, marathon runner, and cyclist.
WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ www.PeaceCorpsConnect.org | 39
ACHIEVEMENTS
GUATEMALA
GUINEA
Mark Brazaitis (90-96) was elected to the Morgantown West Virginia City Council. Brazaitis is a professor of English literature at West Virginia University in Morgantown and a published poet and author. He was a recipient of a 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award and author of “The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala.” He began his campaign after the recent U.S. presidential campaign, promising responsible community development programs and free Internet access in public locations. His campaign was supported by an organization called Mountaineers for Progress that advocates for improved assistance for the needy. Florence G. Phillips (88-89) founded the ESL In-Home Program of Northern Nevada. Phillips served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Jamaica (92-95) and Kenya (9597). She learned how important languagelearning is in a new country and when she returned home she began tutoring in English and soon recruited others to help her create the ESL In-Home Program of Northern Nevada. The program has served over 5,000 families from Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. More than 200 tutors are now teaching 462 students in five Nevada counties. More than 900 more are on a waiting list. The Dream Volunteers, an international organization allowing teenagers to volunteer for one or two weeks in Costa Rica, Ghana, Guatemala, India and Vietnam, celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. The organization was founded by Brian Buntz (95-96) in Redwood City, California.
Sabra Moore (64-66) has written a memoir, “Openings,” derived from her involvement in New York City’s women’s art movement. She has been a key organizer and creator of several large-scale women’s exhibitions in New York City, Brazil, Canada, and New Mexico. Her artistic and political involvement was showcased in the 2011 feature-length film, “The Heretics.”
MONGOLIA The Alan Cheuse International Writers Center at George Mason University in Washington, D.C. awarded its first travel grants to writers who will spend the summer in the south of France and in Poland. The center opened a year ago under director Matthew Davis (0002). Davis is the author of When Things Get Dark: A Mongolian Winter’s Tale, which won the 2010 Peace Corps Experience Award. He holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa and a Masters in International Relations from The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and previously received Fulbright fellowships for study in Syria and Jordan.
NEPAL An organization championing biodiversity, KTK-BELT, received the 2017 Social Economic Environmental Design award for sustainable design as a “great concept for teaching, learning, and preserving biodiversity.” A co-founder of the organization is Rajeev Goyal (01-03). KTK-BELT provides a platform for farmers, teachers, designers and environmentalists working together to build community-based biodiversity conservation strategies for the eastern region of Nepal. The organization seeks
40 | WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ National Peace Corps Association
to safeguard the 6,700 flowering plants, 800 bird species and 185 mammal species currently under threat due to habitat loss and fragmentation.
SURINAME Evan Delahanty (1113), founder of Peaceful Fruits acai-infused fruit strips, pitched his business model to a panel of wealthy venture capitalists on the hit ABC show “Shark Tank” in February. Delahanty started the fruit snacks business to help the Saramaccan villagers who harvest the main ingredient of antioxidant-rich acai berries in the Amazon rainforest. The fruit strips are made, packaged, and shipped by workers at Hattie’s Food Hub and the Blick Center in Akron, Ohio which employs people with autism or other developmental disabilities. See peacefulfruits.com.
THAILAND The new president and chief executive of Keep America Beautiful is Helen Lowman (88-91). Keep America Beautiful is a national organization with more than 620 community-based affiliates and partner organizations engaging an estimated 5 million volunteers to end littering, improve recycling, and make American communities beautiful. Previously, President Barack Obama appointed Lowman to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) where she oversaw programs to increase citizen and community preparedness while encouraging disaster and crisis resilience. Lowman also served as Peace Corps associate director for recruitment and as regional director for the Europe, Middle East, and Asia region.
Peter V. Deekle is coordinator of NPCA Achievements. He served in Iran from 1968 to 1970.
BOOKS
SHRIVER’S SUCCESSOR
When Jack Hood Vaughn laced up his boxing gloves By Jack Hood Vaughn, with Jane Constantineau
I
f the rough-and-tumble volunteer interactions were the joy of my job, the annual hostility of congressional budget hearings was the pain. I could not duplicate the political performance of Sargent Shriver, who could sway even the biggest ignoramus without seeming argumentative and bear any insult with a smile. I angered quickly, was offended easily, and generally lacked patience for the legislative process. Regular sessions with Congress, usually dealing with budget approval, almost always became contentious due to one or another strongly biased or misinformed politician. Many of the members of Congress at that time had little knowledge of the Third World. They didn’t travel there and didn’t understand the cultures, the living conditions, or the mentality. One of my dust-ups with Congress came as a result of a 1967 New York Times article about husband and wife volunteers assisting doctors at an Indian vasectomy clinic. They were helping to reduce the clinic’s infection rate by ensuring standard aseptic practices. The article stated that the wife had assisted in more than 400 vasectomies, alarming many members of Congress who felt that the US government should have no involvement with family planning, and certainly not sterilization. My refusal to recall the volunteers, as many had demanded, enraged Rep. Clement Zablocki of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In one budget hearing he ranted, “I am afraid if you do bring them home you will promote them!” The family planning incident reminded us at the Peace Corps, an organization only seven years old by then, how little some members of Congress still understood or agreed with our mission and philosophy. As I wrote to Rep. Zablocki at the time, “India’s great
problems are too little food and too many people. The Peace Corps has always taken pride in being the one United States government overseas agency that is responsive to the maximum extent possible to host countries’ requests for assistance. The Indian government’s request for help in family planning was genuine and persistent, and I think the Peace Corps was right in responding to it.” Reproductive rights The program in India had begun under Sargent Shriver. A devout Catholic, he had agreed to help the family planning operation because the Indian government had made such a compelling case for it. Within the Peace Corps, however, Shriver prohibited the distribution of contraception to volunteers. Most of the Peace Corps doctors discreetly provided it anyway. When I became director, I allowed contraception for volunteers, and, if an abortion was indicated, it was provided. Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Sargent Shriver’s wife and President Kennedy’s sister, strongly objected to our work in the vasectomy clinic in India. After the Times article came out, Eunice began a campaign with her brother, Senator Robert Kennedy, to remove me from the Peace Corps. They made a good team; Bobby and I had an acrimonious history, and Eunice had never warmed to me. At a party the Shrivers gave for me when I became director, Eunice had described me to her children as “the man who is going to undo all the good your father has done at the Peace Corps.” Shriver, as usual, saved the day by talking his relatives down from their fury over the India program. Though the Peace Corps never admitted wrongdoing, the volunteers were reassigned from clinic work to training and education. Family planning battles with
Congress provided me with a wonderful opportunity to have a little fun with Representative Otto Passman of Louisiana. Ever since we met in 1966, he had addressed me as “Shriber.” When Passman asked about any ongoing volunteer projects involving birth control, I told him that we were distributing a breakthrough new contraceptive pill, a sulfur derivative called “sulfa denial.” The joke got some chuckles from the room but went right over Passman’s head. A standard complaint from Congress was that the Peace Corps robbed America of fine young teachers at a time when our inner cities needed them badly. The fact is that the Peace Corps returned to our country four or five teachers for everyone it took. The typical volunteer with a bachelor of arts from an outstanding school had at the beginning of service a pretty low opinion of teaching secondary school, believing the career path had no future, no money, no excitement. After teaching children in the slums of Bogotá, that volunteer returned inspired to earn a certificate to teach in the US. Producing America’s teachers There was no greater favor we could do our country than to bring these bright, experienced, high-thyroid young adults back from the Peace Corps to teach in secondary schools at home. While I was director, 50 percent of returned volunteers went back to school for an advanced degree, and 40 percent went on to serve their country in education, the nonprofit world, or the foreign service. Seeing the need to build support and understanding for the Peace Corps in high places, including Congress, Sargent Shriver had created an outside body of informal advisors and advocates called the Peace Corps National Advisory Council. The council was first chaired by Vice
WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ www.PeaceCorpsConnect.org | 41
President Johnson and later by Hubert Humphrey. Both men were adept at keeping the diverse and prestigious group engaged and proud. One early board member was the famous IBM president Thomas Watson, Jr. The council convened at the Peace Corps headquarters once or twice a year for a sweeping update on volunteer heroics and a glimpse of political celebrities who dropped in for photo ops. After five years of standard beltway fare, and after losing Shriver, some council members grew restless. Eager to get them out of Washington and closer to the volunteers, we organized a trip to the Peace Corps’s Puerto Rican Outward Bound training camp. Two full days of intensive exposure to the staff, trainees, and mosquitoes gave the council a taste of the real thing. One of the trainees present for a Q&A with council members was the future senator from Connecticut, Chris Dodd, bound for the Dominican Republic. Even then a confident and opinionated orator, Dodd launched into a tirade that I sensed he’d been preparing for days. He criticized in the most brutal way every aspect of Peace Corps training: the skills training, the quality of staff, and the language instruction. Despite his deficient training, Dodd excelled in his post at Benito Moncion as a community development volunteer. His first project was organizing the prostitutes in his province. Legend has it Dodd’s project slogans included, “You don’t have to take it lying down anymore! Better prices and better beds equal greater dignity.” The idealism, indignation, and ingenuity displayed by Dodd and other volunteers really turned me on—this was how the world would be changed. For all those fervent protesters of war who greeted me on college campuses, I could think of no greater outlet than the Peace Corps. Here was an opportunity to do something important and difficult, to put their skills and talents where their rhetoric was.
42 | WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ National Peace Corps Association
CAPITOL HILL UPDATE
Working for an agency of peace during one of the most turbulent and hostile periods in our history seemed, in a way, perfect for a lover and fighter like me. From my youth as a muskrat trapper in Michigan to my discovery of French in high school and my devotion to the sport of boxing, my life’s path has pulled me between the violent and the romantic. From fighting in the Pacific as a Marine in World War II to touring the world’s remotest corners with the Peace Corps, I came from war to peace. In Mexico as a professional boxer, I learned Spanish and became a lifelong lover of everything Latin—not to be confused with a Latin lover—which led to a lively career with the Foreign Service in Central and South America. In my later years, I stumbled into one last battle of greater proportions than any before it --environmental conservation. Turning green took me back to Latin America and also to my Midwestern farming roots. Never planned or calculated, my career’s trajectory does owe something to my talent for getting fired. Its length I attribute to daily shadowboxing and good luck surviving assassination attempts. Though seemingly indiscriminate, my jobs—more than twenty-five of them— have always kept me close to the fight, which is right where I like to be.
Lend your unique skills as a volunteer for Farmer-to-Farmer!
Learn more and apply to be a volunteer at www.farmer-to-farmer.org
Want to change the world? Expand your worldview
Jack Hood Vaughn served as second director of the Peace Corps, from 1966 to 1969. A former regional director for Latin America, he later became assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, U.S. ambassador to Panama and Colombia, president of Planned Parenthood, the National Urban Coalition, Conservation International and founded EcoTrust. He also led the Children’s Television Workshop’s international programming and was dean of international studies at Florida International University. He died in 2012. This article is excerpted from his biography, Kill the Gringo, published by Rare Bird Books in April.
Fletcher students are global citizens in and out of the classroom, and make their mark on the world in a meaningful way. Join the ranks of Fletcher influencers making a difference. Watch this 360 view to find out how. fletcher.tufts.edu/360View Contact The Office of Admissions & Financial Aid +1 617-627-3040 fletcheradmissions@tufts.edu
WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ www.PeaceCorpsConnect.org | 43
COMMUNITY NEWS
IN MEMORIAM
W
e remember those within the Peace Corps community who passed away in the last several months, and are thankful for their service to our nation. We welcome you to send information on additional members of the Peace Corps community by sending a message to obituary@peacecorpsconnect.org.
STAFF
Mel Tolbert, 4/2/17
ETHIOPIA
MALAYSIA
PANAMA
SWAZILAND
Dr. Ronald Bigelow, 3/26/17
Maurice Williamson, 3/28/17
Everett A. Cantrell (1964-67), 4/13/17
Eric James Foell, 4/6/17
Steven Edwin Kocsis, 1/8/17
James Michael Howell, 2/18/17
David H. Elliott, 4/16/17
CAMEROON
GUINEA
Raymond Gieri (1963-65), 2/6/17
Cody Oser, 4/8/17
John L. Harrison Jr., 3/22/17
Gladys Bannister (1960-62), 4/14/17
Carol Zeitz, 3/14/17
PARAGUAY
Carol Ann Leonard Kaiser, 3/8/17
Michael Clark (196466), 4/26/17
GUYANA
Arthur Linscott “Art” Porter (1971-73), 3/25/17
Donald Malinovsky (1965-68), 4/21/17
MAURITANIA
Roger Pugh, 4/12/17
Dr. Gerald “Jerry” Osterweil, 2/17/17
Dale Hammermeister, 2/11/17
Gregory L. Poe, 3/11/17
HONDURAS
PERU
Peggy Wilkinson, 4/15/17
Jessica Dawn Daniel El Bechir, 3/26/17
Henry J. Friedman, 3/6/17
MICRONESIA
MULTIPLE COUNTRIES OF SERVICE
CHILE
HUNGARY
Jill Jordan (1970-72), 4/10/17
Mina P. Costin, 3/11/17
Ray Downie Stewart, 3/29/17
INDIA
MONGOLIA
Ray H. “Butch” Verhasselt, 4/27/17
Evan Wright Mickle, 12/26/16
IRAN
MOROCCO
Christopher G. “Chico” Stephen (1971-73), 1/9/17
David Jenkins McCaa (1999-01), 3/24/17
Thomas Frank Fondell, Central African Republic/ Malawi (1982-90), 4/16/17 Allan Graeff Jr., Peru; Costa Rica; El Salvador, 1/11/17 Charles “Chuck” Hayes, Gambia/Togo (1985-89); Tonga (2000-02), 4/1/17 Harriet Woodside, Antigua; Philippines, Kenya, 12/4/16
AFGHANISTAN Robert William Matthews (1967-69), posted 5/5/17
BELIZE Paul Clinton Sipe Jr., 2/10/17
BOLIVIA
Regina Ann Tague, 4/23/17
COLOMBIA Marc Jeffrey Gould (1973-75), 3/10/17
COSTA RICA Eric Dean Mahan, 3/19/17
CYPRUS Robert L. Major (1962-64), 4/10/17
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC Sue Celadilla (197678), 3/5/17 Debra Sage, 3/4/17
EASTERN CARIBBEAN Charlotte Grap (198183), 5/5/17
ECUADOR
JAMAICA Paula Lanigan Diiorio Grady (2004-06), 3/23/17
KENYA James Bradley, 4/13/17
KIRIBATI Eileen Coe, 4/14/17
KOREA
NAMIBIA Peggy Nolan, 3/13/17
NEPAL Suzanne Weibel (1965-67), 5/7/17
NIGER
LESOTHO
Mark A. MacKay, posted 4/2/17
Carol A. Govek, 2/24/17
Charles J. “Chuck” McKenney Jr., 4/2/17
Wendy Wallin (196769), 11/11/16
BRAZIL Krystal Leah Hall (1974-75), 3/17/17 Jaralene Spring (1967-69), 2/22/17
Frank Krumenaker III, 3/20/17
NIGERIA
MALAWI
Leslie Holt, 3/9/17
James Joseph Pidgeon, 3/30/17
Barbara Franceen Hornady (1963-65), 3/12/17
44 | WorldView ∙ Summer 2017 ∙ National Peace Corps Association
TUNISIA Glen Dale Evans, 5/4/17 Melvin J. Wilson, 4/20/17
TURKEY Sandra Lee “Sandy” Anderson (1966-68), 3/4/17
Rosanne Crichton Freeburg (1989), 2/9/17
David G. Bringedahl (1963-65), 2/20/17
Carol Scribner, 3/21/17
POLAND John Ellison Moore III (1994-96), 3/22/17
SAMOA Robert L. Clark, 2/15/17
SENEGAL Jeremy Ronald Freimund (1985-88), 5/5/17
SIERRA LEONE
BOTSWANA
William “Bill” Helz (1969-72), 3/21/17
Anna Gass (196668), 3/30/17
Deborah Jane Lowe (1979-81), 2/23/17
Megan Dickie (200507), 3/10/17
James Michael Herrington (1964-66), 3/6/17
PHILIPPINES
Bette Peterson (198284), 4/18/17
Joseph W. Pawlosky, 4/8/17
Leah Allert, 2/19/17
Tommy McConnell (1962-63), 3/21/17
Dean Robert Lockwood (1964-66), 2/16/17
James Madison Phillips (1967-69), 10/5/16
Dorine Mae Arvidson, 3/5/17
Juliette McClendon (1980-82), 3/30/17
THAILAND
Calvin Hashimoto, 2/3/17 Rex Jarrell Jr. (196163), 3/10/17 James Michael Leatherwood, 3/2/17 David A. Paige, 2/16/17
SRI LANKA Barbara Bergen, 3/1/17
Dale H. Hultengren, 2/14/17 Dr. Richard Stacey, 3/12/17 Karen Gernenz Youngman (1968-70), 4/16/17
UGANDA Kathryn Mary Quinones (1966-68), 3/31/17
VENEZUELA Jane McLean Glazer (1973-75), 5/2/17 Basha Hicks, 2/23/17 Melinda Holland (1964-66), 2/25/17
COUNTRY OF SERVICE NOT SPECIFIED Judy Fricker Coakley, 2/17/17 Julia Duddleston Comin, 4/5/17 Bellisandro Mares, 4/24/17 Capt. Raye R. Payne, 3/2/17 Gerald Sikora, 3/24/17
Ready for What’s Next. For Good. At Colorado State’s Global Social and Sustainable Enterprise MBA, students develop businesses that solve global challenges. We’re working toward a better future and want you to join us. Get started at TheGoodMBA.com/PCV
Turn your field experience into a
GLOBAL CAREER. Put your Peace Corps service to work with a global graduate degree.
PEACE CORPS COVERDELL FELLOWS PROGRAM Arizona State University Graduate College
Thunderbird School of Global Management
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences W. P. Carey School of Business
Master of Global Management Master of Arts in Global Affairs and Management
graduate.asu.edu/coverdell-fellowship
thunderbird.asu.edu/peace-corps-lp