Journalist. Advocate. Diplomat. USAID Administrator.
By: Nic Corbett
Tags: Usaid, Public Service, Humanitarian, International Development, Us Government

Journalist. Advocate. Diplomat. USAID Administrator.

Samantha Power on a visit to Kyiv, Ukraine in 2015, while serving as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under the Obama Administration. / U.S. Embassy in Ukraine

Samantha Power has been a war correspondent, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a Harvard University professor, a human rights advocate, and the youngest-ever U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. And today she’s started her newest job as USAID’s administrator.

Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., introduced Power to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in March by explaining Power’s last name derives from “de Paor,” which means “of the poor” in Irish.

“Fittingly, she has dedicated her entire life in the service of others using her razor-sharp intelligence and fierce advocacy as a journalist, activist, and diplomat to stand with the world’s voiceless masses, all while simultaneously advancing United States’ interests by building bonds in every corner of our world,” Markey said.

At the confirmation hearing, Power emphasized the four interconnected global challenges she’d prioritize as head of the Agency: the COVID-19 pandemic and the development gains it has imperiled, climate change, conflicts and the root causes that fuel humanitarian crises, and democratic backsliding.

Storytelling is a constant thread through Power’s life. “We make sense of our lives through stories,” Power wrote in her memoir The Education of an Idealist. “Regardless of our different backgrounds and perspectives, stories have the power to bind us.”

In that spirit, here are four stories to get you acquainted with USAID’s newest administrator:

She is an immigrant who embraced sports to fit into American culture.

Power spent her early childhood in Ireland, and immigrated to the United States when she was 9. She arrived at the airport in Pittsburgh outfitted in a Stars and Stripes shirt. But with a thick Dublin accent and little knowledge of her new country, fitting in would be a challenge. Soon after her arrival, the city came together to root for the Pirates in their improbable 1979 playoff run, and Power joined in. She fell in love with baseball, and started playing American sports to make friends.

By the time she went off to college, Power was committed to becoming a sports journalist — yet an internship would cause her to question this path. While working in Atlanta at a CBS affiliate’s sports department, she caught a live feed of Chinese students her age in Tiananmen Square experiencing a violent government crackdown as a result of their peaceful efforts to get the Chinese Communist Party to pursue democratic reforms. Struck by their bravery, she wondered what could be done to help them. In the following days, the image of “Tank Man” grabbed Power’s attention. In seeing such a stunning assertion of human dignity, she resolved to learn more about the world.

When she ultimately did pursue journalism, Power’s reporting focused on people experiencing conflict and the stories of those trying to make a difference on behalf of vulnerable people. Yet her love of sports never faded. Now a Red Sox fan who considers Massachusetts home, Power told The Athletic she found practicing diplomacy and playing baseball have much in common: they are the ultimate team sports, with few quick wins. Fortitude, resilience, and patience are must-haves.

Samantha Power writing a story in Sarajevo in 1995. / Courtesy of Samantha Power

She became a journalist who saw the importance of USAID.

In 1993, Power began her journalism career covering the Bosnian War, where she first witnessed the role USAID played around the world.

“I saw USAID staff and partners deliver food to the vulnerable, while supporting mothers as they tried to locate their missing sons and husbands,” Power said at her confirmation hearing. “Since then, wherever I travelled — whether to East Timor just after it became the world’s newest nation; Darfur, in the midst of this century’s first genocide; or west Africa, at the height of the Ebola epidemic — USAID was there — America was there — identifying needs and moving heaven and earth to meet them.”

Power went on to report from Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. In 2003, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her book “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, which drew on her reporting and interviews with policy makers to examine why the U.S. Government had failed to prevent genocides.

She recognizes the power of stories in building empathy: “As a war correspondent, storytelling was the most effective tool I had to bridge the vast space between those suffering the wounds of distant conflict and my American readers.”

Power put these skills to use as a public servant, recalling in her memoir: “As a diplomat, when foreign officials refused to budge in negotiations, I would try to shake up stale debates by sharing authentic, firsthand stories about the many people who were being affected (for good and bad) by our decisions.”

Samantha Power and John Kerry, now President Biden’s climate envoy, at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C. in 2016. / State Department

She was the youngest U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in the Obama Administration.

While at the UN, Power — now a mother of two young children — rallied countries to fight the Ebola epidemic, ratify the Paris Climate Agreement, strengthen peacekeeping efforts, and negotiate and adopt the Sustainable Development Goals. She made a point of visiting the ambassador of nearly every member state in their office. For many, she was the first U.S. ambassador to set foot in their country’s mission.

As Power later reflected, “By visiting the other ambassadors rather than having them travel to the U.S. Mission to meet me (as was traditional), I was able to see the art my colleagues wanted to showcase, the family photos on their desks, and the books they had brought with them all the way to America. Most significantly, regardless of their size, wealth, or geopolitical heft, I could show them America’s respect.”

Power found creative ways to use the arts in her diplomacy. To build support for protecting LGBTQ rights, she brought ambassadors — some from countries that criminalize LGBTQ status — to the Broadway musical “Fun Home,” about a woman coming out.

“You could just see them as humans, watching this young woman try to repress her longings and her crush, and they were living it with her,” Power said in a TIME interview with actress Amy Adams. “The level of identification with that was so much greater than I ever could have mustered through traditional diplomacy.”

The #Freethe20 campaign that Samantha Power and her team developed. / State Department

One of her mottos is “shrink the change.”

Power often talks about the concept of “shrinking the change,” from the book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. The phrase refers to how individuals can come up with small solutions that over time add up to a big solution. This can empower people to act when they might otherwise feel overwhelmed by challenges like human rights abuses, climate change, or the global refugee crisis. Even if one can’t solve the entire problem, Power says, “surely there is something we can do.”

In this spirit, Power and her team developed the campaign #Freethe20 to advocate for the release of 20 female political prisoners from around the world. Complementing the work of families, lawyers, and NGOs, the effort used social media, diplomacy, and the platform of the UN ambassador to pressure countries to stop silencing women’s voices. Sixteen of the 20 women profiled in the campaign were ultimately released.

“In an atmosphere of repression and democratic backsliding around the world, I found it gratifying to focus less on the overall human rights ‘recession’ — an abstraction that could be paralyzing — and more on specific people,” she wrote in a LinkedIn piece. “Once freed, these women would again be able to raise their voices on behalf of important causes.”