Powerof Partnerships Fifty Years of Partners of the Americas Dave Corcoran

Powerof Partnerships Fifty Years of Partners of the Americas Dave Corcoran

Copyright © 2014 by Dave Corcoran

All photos, unless otherwise noted are property of Partners of the Americas.

Published by Partners of the Americas

Cover Photo: Kodak

Editors: Courtney Cornelius, Christina Curtin, Cecilia Martínez Gómez, Colin Nelson Taylor Nelson, Michelle Nicholson, Manuela Tobon, Sherrita Wilkins, and Cheryl Wurzbacher

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Table of Contents

1 Chapter One: Partners Americas and

Inter-Relations

15 Chapter Two: Education and the

Evolution 0f Partnership

31 Chapter Three: Cultivating Leadership

49 Chapter Four: Youth and the

Power of Partnership

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partners americas and

inter-relationsIntroduction: The Maryland Partners SchoolThough the city of Nilópolis is now a suburb of Rio de Janiero, such was not the case in the mid-1960s. Rapid urbanization, a global phenomenon of the 20th century, was particularly pro-nounced in Brazil in the decades after World War II, but before 1965, the metropolis of Rio had not yet reached this neighboring city. The process, however, had begun, and change was only a matter of time.

At that time, Nilópolis was hardly a pastoral outpost. Its agricultural and manufacturing sectors were significant in the regional economy, and the city had high population density and a distinctly urban core. Still, sectors of the city, such as the Chatuba neighborhood, were less developed and retained their rural feel. As populations increased and Rio de Janeiro spread, Chatuba urbanized rapidly. To locals, it seemed to be happening overnight as waves of laboring families, mostly from the lower classes, arrived. Soon the district’s open spaces disappeared, and its streets and housing began to resemble the rest of Nilópolis. Through this transition, residents, old and new, sought opportunities and faced the challenges that came in building their urban modernity.

One such challenge was the need for quality schools for the growing population of Chatuba. Though classrooms existed for some in Nilópolis, they were nonexistent in emerging districts. Searching for options to address the increasing demand of local families, the city’s school board asked for the assistance of a new organization that was forming within the State of Rio de Janeiro, a chapter of

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Companheiros das Américas (Partners of the Americas). Paired with the State of Maryland in the United States, this new group of local volunteers had recently embraced inter-American partnerships as a strategy for community development. Though the partnership was in its infancy and the volunteers were unsure how they might proceed, they were committed to assisting individuals and local communities to meet the challenges of modernity. When the local press had reported on the formation of the Rio chapter in celebratory tones, the members of the school board took note. They seized the opportunity to ask for help. Could the Rio-Maryland Partners aid Chatuba in building a school?

Organized through John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, Partners of the Americas (initially called Partners of the Alliance) encouraged an innovative approach to inter-American relations. Grounded in a philosophy of empowerment, Partners’ mission was to assist communities in directing their own development. Building international networks of private citizens and supporting partnerships across the hemisphere, Partners’ model stood in sharp contrast to traditional government-to-government diplomacy. And across the Americas, it had tremendous appeal. Encouraged by a Kennedy administration that elevated the spirit of volunteerism, high enthusiasm marked the formation of local chapters in both the North and the South; educators, businessmen, artists, and community leaders enthusiastically came forward to join the experiment. Like those in Rio and Maryland, many were uncertain of the direction the initiative might take, and in that pre-Internet age, all saw the challenge of communication and collaboration across long distances as daunting. Nevertheless, most recognized the potential of people-to-people diplomacy.

To the fledgling committees in Maryland and Rio, and in the other 30 locations that formed the earliest chapters of Partners of the Americas, the concept of people-to-people diplomacy was new. While the U.S. government had supported inter-American cultural programs and exchanges since the 1930s and had embraced a variety of people-to-people initiatives, Partners’ model expanded that approach by granting private citizens a role in development projects and diplomacy. The model explicitly recognized that national governments in the North and the South had limited resources and expertise. It loudly acknowledged that governments did not have all the answers and could not provide solutions to all of the problems their citizens faced. History certainly evidenced the crucial point that those who waited for government to act in their stead usually waited for generations. Thus did Partners’ variant on people-to-people diplomacy explicitly acknowledge that citizens themselves knew best the realities of their own communities. They, more than politicians and bureaucrats, were in the best position to assess local needs and implement solutions. Gathering resources and professional knowledge would require significant effort, but through partnerships that crossed national borders, it was hoped that citizens of the hemisphere would share experiences and assist each other in piloting solutions.

Toward cultivating partnership between Maryland and Rio, Texas and Peru, Massachusetts and Antioquia, Wisconsin and Nicaragua, Kansas and Paraguay, and among all of the 60 partnerships that eventually formed, travel and visits from the North to the South and the South to the North were necessary first steps. Fifty years ago, the first meeting of the Rio-Maryland Partners brought Dr. Vernon S. Vavrina, superintendent of Baltimore Public Schools, and a group of prominent businessmen to Brazil. There, in Rio, Ron Hees, who is currently the longest serving volunteer in Partners’ network, was among those who received them. That meeting, together with a reciprocal visit to Maryland by the Rio volunteers the following year, created lasting bonds of friendship. Thus, travel within partnerships was prioritized from the start as an essential element of inter-American collaboration; across the decades, continued support for such travel has been crucial to Partners’ success. Functional partnership—rather than partnership in name only—can never

develop without volunteers getting to know one another, exploring each other’s communities, and building collaborative trust. Working relationships, as the history of Partners of the Americas demonstrates, do not develop overnight and are not built by decree.

The logic of the pairings also proved significant in building functional partnerships. The earliest pairings of chapters, like all those that followed, joined locations from the North and the South based on shared economic, cultural, geographic, and political factors. Indeed, the Rio-Maryland partnership was framed by commonalities and shared experience. Both of the regions were situated on large saltwater bays, hosted sizeable fishing industries, and shared similar environmental concerns. Both contained and bordered large, rapidly expanding cities but they were comprised of expansive, rural agricultural areas as well. Both had developed in close proximity to their respective national capitals (the city of Rio de Janeiro had served the as national capital until 1960, and Maryland shared a border with Washington, DC); as a result, federal agencies and federal workers were important segments of their economies

and populations, respectively. In bringing strangers together in the interest of productive partnership, the logic of this paring was sound.

When the Rio chapter subsequently received a request from the Nilópolis school board, it presented an early challenge. Chapters were, and always have been, comprised of volunteers. They were not in a position to build schools, and they had no such funds. The volunteer committee based in Niterói, a quick ferry ride across Guanabara Bay from downtown Rio, was committed to the idea of building partnerships but not school construction. Not sure where this local request might lead, the committee engaged their Maryland partners. What might they be able to do? Might Superintendent Vavrina offer advice to the board in Nilópolis? Could professional connections in Maryland and Rio translate into voluntary action for the children of Chatuba?

The Maryland Chapter issued a request through local superintendents, and various high schools in the state responded. Through bake sales, raffles, dances, and car washes, students across

Welcoming Ceremony for the IAESC Delegation - Uruguay - JFK

Maryland-Rio Partners Chapter Leadership

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the state raised funds to help make a Chatuba school a reality. The proceeds of the fundraising efforts were small in comparison to projected construction costs, but several checks arrived to the chapter in Niterói over a period of six years. And though none exceeded $1000, each was warmly welcomed. Collectively, the checks were not enough to build a school, but they were enough to inspire and motivate the local community. Responding to the generosity of students they would never know, the parents of Chatuba pressured local government, federal agencies, and community organizations to respond in kind. Thus, what Ronald Hees admiringly identifies as the “unique fundraising tradition of U.S. high schools” was successfully engaged to assist a community in Brazil and strengthen inter-American relations. In effect, the donations from the Maryland school children served as seed money to get the local school project rolling; gathered through an emerging people-to-people network, these funds also served as a seed project for a Maryland-Rio partnership that now celebrates five decades.

Two classrooms were originally built in Chatuba as the local community and the Nilópolis school board responded to the generosity of Maryland students many-fold. Over the first years, as urbanization continued and demand increased exponentially, those two basic classrooms grew to five. In the decades since, the school has added a half dozen more, and today, over 1,000 students attend its classes. With courses for both children and adults, the Escola Companheiros de Maryland (the Maryland Partners School) fills its 11 classrooms day and evening in each of three shifts. Enrollment demand remains strong, and although public schools are now more plentiful in the city, the small school is always adding to its waiting list. As a school built from the grassroots, it is beloved by its students, teachers, alumni, and the broader Chatuba community. Over the years, encouragement and professional support through the Rio and Maryland Chapters has continued. Books and teaching resources have flowed to the school. Visits by chapter members along with educational exchanges have built long-term working relationships. As typically happens through Partners of the Americas, the school’s network of support has expanded. The school

was the first in the city to have computers, and they were donated through the Maryland Rotary Club and its counterpart in Niterói.

At the school in Chatuba and in its public celebrations, the flag of the State of Maryland always flies high alongside those of Brazil, Rio, and Nilópolis—the nation, the state, and the municipality. To the uninformed observer, the line of flags presents an odd juxtaposition and the name of the school seems out of place. Yet to locals, who have come to understand the meaning of people-to-people diplomacy first-hand and who celebrate the power of partnerships, the flag and the school name represent a local success. The Maryland-Rio partnership did not build the Chatuba school, but by offering early encouragement and support, it started the process in motion. It inspired and empowered a community. It connected individuals with the passion to serve, and in the process, it changed lives for generations to come.

Since the mid-1960s, more than 25,000 students have studied at the Escola Companheiros de Maryland. In the same period, hundreds of volunteers have served on local committees in Rio and Maryland, and thousands have participated in their collaborative, community-based programs. Working with local organizations, educational and cultural institutions, NGOs (nongovernmental organizations), philanthropic foundations, independent development agencies, and government departments, the Maryland-Rio Partners have built a broad and collaborative network of individuals with whom they share vision and mission. They have built long-term and productive relationships that ground their success. Significantly, such high levels of engagement and such a broad network are not unique to the Maryland-Rio partnership. Across five decades, many chapters and partnerships within Partners of the Americas have had similarly high levels of community engagement. In an age when networks are virtual, discussions are digital, and relationships are fleeting, the size and scope of Partners’ people-to-people, hemispheric network is impressive.

People-to-People Diplomacy in Historical Context In historical perspective, people-to-people relationships between citizens of the United States and the nations of Latin America existed long before they were endorsed by the Alliance for Progress. In addition to merchants and investors who traveled abroad seeking personal fortunes, and beyond the militaries that arrived on foreign shores to exert power in the name of politics, there were sailors, scientists, artists, agriculturalists, educators, and explorers who also moved between the Americas following European settlement. Such early adventures established inter-American relations at a very personal level. As these various individuals came into contact with their hemispheric neighbors, they got to know one another and relationships developed. Americans, broadly defined, became acquaintances, friends, business partners, and, where marriages resulted, families. Though insignificant in number, such individuals set important precedents for more formal inter-American cultural relations that later emerged.

Away from their homelands, they learned and spoke new languages and participated in community life. They observed new culture and customs, and they shared their own with locals. Some recorded observations, cataloged native species, and measured local climates. Others painted landscapes as they became foreign no more. In this process of cultural interaction, these strangers in foreign lands learned much, and when they returned home, they spread their knowledge and understanding among their family, friends, and professional circles. As school systems expanded and universities proliferated on both continents, this knowledge was welcomed and the gathering of new knowledge was encouraged. Inter-American movements of students and academics soon began, and education was quickly established as a primary incubator of people-to-people relations. Certainly, the volume of educational exchange was limited before the mid-20th century, but a trend was established. That Simón Bolivar, South America’s revered “Liberator,” sent his nephew to the University of Virginia, underscores the early centrality of education in inter-American relations.

Despite growing connections between the peoples of the Americas, U.S. government support for people-to-people initiatives in the

hemisphere was slow to develop. Initial interest in developing better relations within the region began through a Pan American movement at the close of the 19th century. At that time, a representative body, the Pan American Union (PAU), was established to address regional conflicts, to facilitate commerce, and to promote greater understanding and cooperation among the peoples of the region. The PAU’s fundamental goals were fostering Pan American identity in order to bridge the divide between the North and the South; importantly, it also worked to increase cooperation between Latin American countries themselves. Though much of the work of the PAU was commercial and economic in nature, it also sponsored cooperative programs in the areas of science, education, and culture. In the quest for modernity that marked the early 20th century, science, technology, culture, and education were frequent topics addressed at PAU conferences; exchanges involving scientists and academics were the most common result. Thus did cultural diplomacy begin to emerge as a strategy for improving U.S.-Latin American relations. Yet, while the U.S. government always sent a representative to these cultural conferences, its role was relatively passive. Instead, Washington encouraged U.S. philanthropic and professional organizations to take the lead. The Institute of International Education (IIE), the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the American Council on Education (ACE) were the primary activists in funding and organizing new inter-American cultural programs that developed through the PAU.

Various individuals and organizations had long argued the benefits of a cultural agenda in U.S. foreign affairs. Many had encouraged the Department of State to establish formal cultural relations with the Latin America republics, most of whom had a cabinet-level Ministry of Culture. Yet, the U.S. government explicitly rejected these calls. By tradition, an interest in limiting the activities of the federal bureaucracy prevailed, and Washington always deferred to private initiative in the cultural realm. This reflected a celebrated and long-standing tenet of U.S. political philosophy—classical liberalism’s strong distrust for the coercive power of the state. And this tradition allowed only a limited role for the federal government in social and cultural affairs. Thus, formal U.S. engagement in cultural diplomacy, and its people-to-people adjunct, never materialized, and this left the

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emerging initiatives of the PAU in the control of the private sector. One significant result was that the developing inter-American cultural networks and people-to-people programs were restricted to the realm of elite academia. Clearly, the IIE, Carnegie Endowment, and ACE were engaging in productive people-to-people diplomacy, and they built an important base for the official U.S. cultural diplomacy that would later emerge. However, until the U.S. government became directly involved in cultural diplomacy in the 1930s, people-to-people initiatives remained on a small scale and within a narrow class band.

While a lack of federal support stunted the growth of people-to-people relations, and confined it to elite realms, interventionist U.S. foreign policy in the first three decades of the 20th century was the greater obstacle to improving relations in the hemisphere. Beginning with the Spanish–American War in 1898 and continuing through the onset of the Great Depression, the United States established a strong military presence in the Caribbean and Central America. Various Latin American parcels were added to U.S. national territory, and the nation exercised varying degrees of military and economic control over others. In Latin America, where the United States was rightly seen as an imperialist power, the Pan Americanism promoted by the PAU enjoyed only limited credibility. Further, given the shallow reach of its people-to-people programs, the PAU was barely visible in the United States. By the 1930s, however, Washington took new interest in its cultural relations with Latin America.

Global economic depression and radical reactions to it in Europe forced Washington to reconsider its traditional aversion to formal cultural diplomacy. A reversal of position quickly followed, and this is significant to the larger history of federal support for people-to-people programs. The 1930s initiated a pattern within U.S. foreign policy of funding such programs in times of international crises but slashing support as threatening situations diminished or lost priority. Historically, this pattern, which has continued into the new century, has limited the potential of people-to-people diplomacy. While relationships between U.S. citizens and the people of the hemisphere have never been dependent on the government, federal support has been very useful in building collaboration across the Americas. And to the extent that U.S. tax dollars have been used in people-to-people

programing since the 1930s, it has paid high dividends in inter-American goodwill.

FDR and the Embrace of Cultural Diplomacy

At the start of his presidency, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) called for better and more respectful relations between the United States and its hemispheric neighbors. Rejecting intervention as a diplomatic strategy and sponsoring cooperative agreements in areas ranging from commerce to education, the president pledged to be a good neighbor, and he began a process that changed the dynamic of U.S.-Latin American relations. Confronting economic crisis at home and abroad and concerned about the approaching European war (as well as conflicts in East Asia, Spain, and Palestine), FDR and his Department of State saw long-term stabilization of the Latin American economy as essential for social peace and stable governance. Thus, they initially concentrated on the negotiation of reciprocal trade agreements with the various Latin American republics, and these negotiations brought new attention to a region Washington had long taken for granted. As the foreign policy bureaucracy gained a deeper understanding of Latin American economies and markets, it developed broader knowledge of Latin American society in general and began to engage more comfortably with new forms of diplomacy. Formal support for cultural exchanges found currency.

As the 1930s progressed, intensifying U.S. interest in the new Pan Americanism became a function of its fears over Latin American vulnerability to antidemocratic forces. Well before the outbreak of war across the Atlantic, Washington displayed tremendous concern that Latin American nations were being used as sources of raw materials by Germany and its Axis allies. U.S. leaders continually sounded the alarm that radical influences from abroad, and especially fascism, were penetrating the region. Significantly, there was a building sense that Axis influence in Latin America had increased through well-funded German, Italian, and Japanese economic and cultural campaigns, and this spurred development of more activist and cooperative diplomacy by the United States. Schools, clubs, libraries, and cultural centers sponsored by Axis powers in Latin America suddenly concerned the Department of State. Academic exchanges between Axis and Latin American universities along with official European educational and

technical missions to various nations of the region were equally disconcerting. Surveying the extent of European (both Axis and Allied) cultural programming, the Department of State found that many development projects in Latin American countries had been dependent on European experts for years. That European countries, especially Germany, had provided technical experts at no charge to the requesting Latin American countries provided justification for initiating a similar U.S. program at no cost.

Rather suddenly, Washington became determined to offer an alternative to Axis and European cultural influence and present its own models of modernity to its southern neighbors. As a philosophy to guide its new cultural diplomacy, it identified “mutual understanding” among the peoples of the Americas as the ideal to be cultivated. Such understanding, it was explicitly acknowledged, could not be gained through propaganda campaigns and narrow promotion of U.S. culture; it would require reciprocal cultural exchange and open dialogue. Through cultural diplomacy and people-to-people programming, Washington’s goal was to promote tolerance and appreciation of differences within the hemisphere and to create venues where Americans might discover their common interests and shared culture. Within the context of an emerging world war, Pan American identity could foster hemispheric solidarity.

Like the PAU, the Roosevelt administration gave education and cultural exchange high priority in its new programs. Explaining his new approach to the National Education Association in 1938, FDR cast the looming European crisis as war against education and culture:

when the clock of civilization can be turned back by burning libraries, by exiling scientists, artists, musicians, writers, and teachers, by dispersing universities and by censoring news and literature and art, an added burden is placed upon those countries where the torch of free thought and free learning still burn bright.

Thus did the Department of State initiate its Cultural Relations program, which was specifically designed for Latin America. In the broader history of people-to-people diplomacy and toward contextualizing subsequent federal support for Partners of the

Americas, this was a significant moment. For the first time, education and culture were considered important themes in the realm of U.S. foreign policy. It was the expediency of war that ushered in this policy change, and over the course of that century and into the next, federal support for people-to-people diplomacy would rise and fall in sync with international conflict. However, from that moment forward, there was new appreciation for long-term cultural diplomacy and people-to-people programs in inter-American relations.

The Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA) was founded in August 1940 to manage hemispheric relations. As coordinator of the new agency, it fell to 32-year-old Nelson Rockefeller to convince a skeptical Congress to fund new cultural programs. His challenge was slightly less daunting in the aftermath of the New Deal. Under that 1930s domestic program, FDR had modified the U.S. tradition of limited government and showed less deference to private initiative. More activist governance found favor with the public and elected officials. Still, the essence of the long-term governing philosophy had not been abandoned. Indeed, FDR had specifically appointed Rockefeller because of his connections to industry, cultural organizations, and philanthropic communities; the president wanted the private sector to continue to play a leading role in new U.S. programs in the hemisphere, but he also recognized a crucial role for the federal government in encouraging and funding it. The program was wide-ranging and built upon existing Good Neighbor programs in the areas of commerce, educational interchange, and social development. Its political objectives were clear: to foster “mutual understanding” as an antidote to Axis and anti-democratic influences and to build a more positive image of the United States in Latin America.

OIAA projects centered on a range of areas from commerce and economics to transportation, information, sanitation, and health, but its cultural programs were extensive. In contrast to the cultural programs sponsored by Axis and other European powers, OIAA programs emphasized cultural reciprocity. Rockefeller was adamant that hemispheric solidarity and mutual understanding required that U.S. citizens be educated about and engaged with the cultures of Latin America. As the OIAA formed committees of art, literature, music, publications, education, and cultural interchange, it initiated year-long

… until the US government became directly involved in inter-American cultural diplomacy, people-to-people initiatives remained on a small scale and within a narrow class band.

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interchanges—both North to South and South to North—with leaders in professional and cultural areas. It offered travel grants for short visits by students, teachers, and experts in various fields. Matching European cultural programming, it built libraries, offered assistance to U.S.-style schools that appeared in the region, and encouraged and funded the growth of binational cultural centers (BNCs). Rockefeller gave schools and BNCs, both of which were organized with independent and binational boards of directors, top priority; he viewed them as the most effective approach to building “mutual understanding” and long-term support for democratic principles. Reflecting on the history of Partners of the Americas and its emergence through the Alliance for Progress, it is clear that Kennedy’s vision built on a model of people-to-people diplomacy initiated under FDR.

When World War II ended, the OIAA was disbanded and many of its programs stopped functioning. With the defeat of the Axis powers, cultural diplomacy and people-to-people programs were no longer U.S. imperatives. Though these new approaches to inter-American relations had proved their value to many inside and outside of government, post-war budgets would not sustain them as available foreign policy resources shifted back to Europe.

But international tensions quickly heated up on the Old Continent, and communism rapidly replaced fascism as a threat to democracy. Few would have predicted the emerging Cold War would last 40 years, but with its start, interest in cultural diplomacy and people-to-people programming reintensified. Congress appropriated new money for educational exchange and created the celebrated Fulbright program. Drawing on the OIAA’s Latin American model, the Department of State assisted a growing network of independent U.S.-style schools abroad (since called “American Schools Abroad”). At the same time, increased enthusiasm for BNCs extended these U.S.-affiliated but independent institutions across the globe. Over the course of the next two decades, the expanding foreign policy bureaucracy—the Department of State, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the U.S. Information Agency (USIA)—sponsored robust programs of people-to-people diplomacy through global sports exchanges, lecture series, and musical performance tours.

As had been the case under Rockefeller, public–private partnerships were used to develop many projects, and cultural and educational organizations, philanthropic foundations, and corporations were encouraged to take leading roles. During the 1950s, President Eisenhower fueled an expansion of “citizen diplomacy” through a formal White House conference, and in branding this diplomacy, he inspired the People-to-People Student Ambassador program; emerging in the private sector, the program sent thousands of U.S. secondary school students abroad each summer to meet foreign youth and learn from them, and it actively continues to this day. The president’s efforts also resulted in the Sister Cities program that pairs municipalities across the globe toward building cooperation and mutual understanding.

The Alliance for Progress: A New Approach to People-to-People Diplomacy

The Alliance for Progress, Kennedy’s foreign policy initiative from which Partners of the Americas emerged, was, like all political projects, a reflection of its time. A direct response to the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and Fidel Castro’s embrace of communism, the Alliance was formed in 1961 as an attempt at containment—the official U.S. foreign policy of the Cold War. Entering the presidency, Kennedy, like Eisenhower and Truman before him, sought to stop the spread of communism. Like his predecessors, he believed that the economic, social, and political controls implemented under Soviet and Chinese regimes were unsustainable in the long term. Thus was the U.S. containment strategy formulated to hasten communism’s demise by capping its growth and projecting a U.S. model of democratic capitalism worldwide. Looking south to Latin America, Kennedy was particularly concerned that widespread poverty across the region left many nations vulnerable to communist revolution and other radical forms of governance.

Kennedy’s election in 1960 had been enthusiastically celebrated by many in Latin America. Young and charismatic, he rose in stature as television became more accessible worldwide. His image, his voice, and his ideas were broadcast to an expanding global audience, and this influenced positive public perception of the new president. That he was his nation’s first Catholic president and that he had ancestral roots among the peasantry (of Ireland) added to his broad appeal among the Latin American public. Explicitly calling for renewed partnership with the region during his campaign, Kennedy’s inaugural address hinted at a more concrete plan:

To our sister republics south of our border, we offer a special pledge—to convert our good words into good deeds—in a new alliance for progress—to assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty.

Visiting the region as president in each of the years before his assassination, he was always greeted by tremendous crowds. Some crowds surpassed those that greeted him on visits to Europe, and a few were even as large as those that had cheered him at home

during his campaign. Such an outpouring of support for a U.S. president would not have occurred in the early decades of the 20th century. With the history of U.S.-Latin American relations defined by repeated U.S. violations of national sovereignties—most notably in Central America and the Caribbean basin where military interventions and occupations were common before the 1930s—U.S. presidents were hardly popular figures. But events in Europe and Pan American collaboration during World War II had built new relationship between the nations, their leaders, and their peoples. And as the Cold War emerged, political relationships continued to improve as many regional governments seconded the U.S. policy of containment.

Thus, Kennedy was initially able to garner wide support for his ambitious containment and reform initiatives. In 1961, diplomats gathered at Punta del Este on Uruguay’s Atlantic coast. There, nations of the hemisphere created a formal alliance that would assist member states in formulating and implementing significant economic, social, and educational reforms toward improving living standards for their impoverished populations. Under the plan, loans for infrastructure, new social service programs, health projects, and classrooms would be organized with U.S. assistance, but individual nations were to develop their own plans of action. At the center of the Alliance for Progress was an effort to provide basic services—housing, food, sanitation, clean water, and schools—for those who lived on the margins of modernity.

By all measures, the Alliance for Progress was an ambitious plan, and as a call to action it proved a powerful statement. However, history demonstrates that it was more ambitious than practical. Since their independence movements of the early 19th century, impoverished Latin American populations had waited patiently, generation after generation, for the promise of democracy to materialize. Not surprisingly, when the Allies of World War II framed their war as a struggle for democracy and subsequently promoted a democratic model during the Cold War, that patience waned. In many nations, frustration with the failures of republican governments to curb high rates of poverty, address hunger and health issues, and provide quality schools for all children ran high. And these sentiments would

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not be easily contained. By the mid-20th century, interest in the communist and socialist alternatives was indeed increasing among an activist Latin American minority, and the resource flows of the Cold War ensured that radical voices would be heard. Recognizing Latin American realities, Kennedy knew that his Alliance would need to produce real results. It needed to move beyond an eloquent call to action. If it did not engage the common people in reform processes, powerful interests and the status quo would prevail.

As a practical matter, Kennedy recognized that politicians were crucial to the success of the Alliance, and that governments had to take the lead in planning, financing, and implementing major structural reforms. Yet, the Alliance philosophy also recognized citizen participation as essential to the process. As such, it emphasized community empowerment; it gave priority to reforms that would allow “vulnerable” populations to help themselves at the community level. Thus, while the Alliance for Progress was crafted through formal diplomacy that privileged government-to-government discourse, it also elevated people-to-people diplomacy as a means of empowering citizens.

After a generation of U.S. government support for people-to-people initiatives in response to international crises, the Alliance for Progress introduced an innovative twist. It established Partners of the Alliance (later privatized as Partners of the Americas) in order to create independent chapters of citizen volunteers and encouraged them to formulate and implement their own community development programs. Most of the chapters organized across Latin America were formed at the regional level, and each was paired with a partner chapter in a U.S. state. The goal was to create collaborative partnerships by harnessing cultural and economic resources of the private sector, to diversify Alliance agendas by responding directly to local needs, and to free programming control from diplomats, politicians, and government bureaucrats. Kennedy was building the Peace Corps at the same time, and like Partners of the Alliance, the program embraced people-to-people diplomacy, partnership, and volunteerism. Both initiatives were born out of an idealism that was particularly potent in that historical moment, and they were formulated around strong commitment to community empowerment. The Peace Corps tapped into the energy of youth, especially college students, and sent volunteer

ambassadors to communities across the globe. Partners of the Alliance had a strong youth focus too, but its age demographic was broader. Together, the two programs elevated people-to-people diplomacy as an engine of change, and across five decades, productive collaboration between them has been constant.

Establishing the Chapter and Partnership Model

It was James Boren who gave substance to Kennedy’s vision by building a functional model for inter-American partnerships. Boren was an officer in Peru with the recently formed USAID, the development agency of U.S. foreign policy. From Peru, Boren returned to Washington to develop and implement the Alliance’s chapter and partnership structure. As it came together, the Alliance drew upon contemporary theories of community empowerment that were then circulating in the United States and Latin America; these theories encouraged individuals and local communities to take action to address their own needs. The starting block for broad societal reform would be change at the community level. In Colombia, one such model, Acción Comunal (Community Action), was already growing with the support of its national government. Boren’s model, like Acción Comunal, recognized that governments alone could not solve the serious problems that plagued Latin American society. Certainly there was much that more effective democratic governments might do, but extreme socio-economic inequalities in the region were reinforced by class politics, and this made for significant roadblocks. That elite factions enjoyed disproportionate control over national governments and could steer state resources toward their own agendas had stymied necessary reforms for generations. The innovation of the people-to-people component of the Alliance for Progress was that it created a transnational model for supporting local communities. Discouraging expectations that national governments would solve all of the region’s long-term problems or that state bureaucracies even understood community needs, Boren’s model posited a new strategy that would support community-driven reforms: people-to-people partnership across international borders.

The emerging network of nongovernmental chapters was initially joined under the umbrella of the Partners of the Alliance and administered by USAID. Creating chapters of volunteers in the

United States and Latin America, the program drew upon additional mid-century development theories that envisioned the sharing of expertise and resources between the “developed” North and the “still developing” South. Accordingly, volunteer chapters in the North were paired with chapters in the South, and over the decades the original 30 chapters (15 partnerships) increased steadily to more than 120 chapters and 60 partnerships. By design, northern chapters had a clear mission to assist their southern counterparts, yet the North was never expected to solve the problems of the South. The plan recognized that well-developed economies, extensive educational infrastructure, and long democratic traditions within the United States granted them a resource advantage and a base for extending much assistance. But outside of a general commitment to strengthening democracy and empowering communities toward that end, there was no master plan. Chapters were left to create their own projects and figure out how to fund them. Significantly, the work of neither chapters nor partnerships was orchestrated from Washington or from Latin American capitals. Initiatives were expected to rise out of the relationships that developed among the paired chapters. As the case of the school in Nilópolis, the Escola Companheiros de Maryland, makes evident, chapters had limited budgets but plenty of enthusiasm and functional expertise. That was the power of partnership.

From the start, southern chapters were very different organizations than their northern counterparts. They functioned as service organizations, development agencies, and educational providers. Ongoing dialogue and regular visits between partnered chapters familiarized northerners with the communities in the South and their challenges. Interacting with their northern partners, Latin American chapters had the opportunities to explore various social, cultural, and economic models employed in the United States. Yet, the intention was simply fostering collaboration—not replicating northern society. Through these formal partnerships, chapters had the opportunity to build relationships that met their local needs. While one-directional (North-to-South) flows of support dominated the early work of partnerships, resource flows gradually became more multidirectional. Through every collaborative project that addressed a community challenge in the South, Northerners also gained much in the process: knowledge, experience, professional connections, friendships, and

empowerment as volunteers. As incentives that sustained volunteerism, such intangibles weighed as heavily as the material goods and human services that were transported to the South.

Lacey Gude, who had served as one of the earliest Peace Corps volunteers in Brazil, joined Partners’ Washington staff in 1970. Supporting chapters and partnerships in various capacities over two decades, she came to understand those intangibles that fueled the growing network of volunteers. People, she explains, “get something out of giving.” The chapter/partnership model engages individuals “that might have a particular expertise, but don’t know how to employ it outside their career.” Welcomed into a partnered community, they “learn, and they have a good time in the process. They are able to make connections that they ordinarily wouldn’t be able to make in their lives.” Encouraged and supported within the model, “they begin to make a contribution…then they know and believe that they can make a difference.” Gude’s assessment is echoed by Partners’ volunteers past and present. As they reflect on the 50th anniversary of Partners, no point is more commonly articulated: volunteers get as much out of giving as they put in.

In the realm of government-to-government diplomacy, the Alliance for Progress never met its ambitious goals. Reforms on a massive scale demanded more time than politics allowed, and rhetoric never met reality. Under the strains of the Cold War, tensions between national and hemispheric interests were clear obstacles to the success of the Alliance. While Kennedy promoted inter-American collaboration and mutual understanding through partnership, he simultaneously sanctioned covert anticommunist interventionism in the region by the Central Intelligence Agency. When the president was later assassinated, the Alliance lost dynamic leadership. Commitment to containment shifted U.S. resources to Southeast Asia and Vietnam. In Latin America, the emergence of armed guerilla groups, who advocated alternative versions of community empowerment and allied with the communist governments in Moscow, Havana, and Beijing, changed governing equations; in many nations, authoritarian and military rule replaced democracy, and containment of communism trumped reform. In this context, history regards the Alliance for Progress as a failure. However,

Chapters had limited budgets but plenty of enthusiasm and functional expertise. That was the power of partnership.

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such an assessment marginalizes the history of people-to-people diplomacy and ignores the continuing legacy of Partners of the Americas.

Where formal diplomacy failed, Partners of the Americas’ informal people-to-people approach has succeeded. Decades after the Alliance for Progress ended, Partners continues to thrive as a private initiative that builds locally effective partnerships and welcomes collaboration with community groups, educational and cultural institutions, foundations, philanthropies, and government. Though few recognize it as such, Partners is the legacy of the Alliance for Progress. But in the wider history of inter-American relations, Partners of the Americas has a legacy all its own.

An Evolving Model Reflecting on 50 years of work in the Americas, volunteers and staffers often comment that Partners of the Americas has become “more than anyone imagined.” Conceived as a volunteer network of chapters and partnerships, Partners’ model immediately and organically evolved. As volunteers became engaged in partnered communities, they adapted the model to local conditions and made it functional. Across great distances, they connected people with shared interests and passions, practical experience, and particular skills. As projects developed and relationships evolved, volunteers collaborated with community leaders and civic organizations, and one significant result is an ever-expanding network of individuals and institutions that do the legwork that changes lives.

Adapting to the times and recognizing opportunities to further harness the power of partnership, Partners of the Americas has also emerged as a well-respected development agency. From its earliest years, and when they have been a proper match for its mission, the Partners International Office in Washington has secured grants to carry out targeted development projects for government agencies and private foundations. With a long-term presence in communities across the hemisphere, with a network of experienced volunteers who know local reality and provide crucial advice, and with decades-old working relationships with development professionals and community leaders, Partners has a record of success in this area. Sometimes, such

development work is carried out in direct collaboration with Partners’ volunteer chapters; the chapters themselves choose to participate when objectives and agendas overlap and if their organizational realities allow. When this occurs, it produces productive benefits for all in Partners’ network. As Steve Vetter, president of Partners of the Americas, explains, in working on large development projects “volunteers gain experience and education,” which allows them to “step into the profession of development experts and maintain or revert back to voluntary status when the development program is completed.” Yet, whether chapters choose to directly support such projects, it is always the connections those chapters willingly provide—connections that grant access to an expansive network of passionate and experienced professionals—that ground success. Notably, some chapters secure their own grants from public and private sources, and they carry out development projects independent of the Partners International Office in Washington; they implement programs for local institutions, Latin American government agencies, private foundations, and international philanthropies. As they do, new collaboration further expands Partners’ network.

U.S. approaches to international relations have changed with presidential administrations, and many initiatives that are introduced with fanfare do not survive a single election cycle. Intent may be laudable but in the absence of a functional model of implementation, promise never materializes. Against this historical reality, how has Partners of the Americas thrived for half a century? Analyzing the evolution of the organization in historical context and exploring Partners’ activities in the realms of education, leadership, and youth, a clear answer to the question is found. Partners of the Americas’ longevity is built on a record of success in supporting private citizens in a quest for solutions to community needs. To that end, local grounding is the essential ingredient. Partners has always had a presence in the communities it serves, and its model supports initiatives that are built upon local assessments. It does not impose foreign solutions but assists locals to implement their own programs of change from within their own communities. In comparison to the programs of traditional diplomacy that change with the political climate or the work of many NGOs that are rigidly tied to short-term funding trends, Partners’ work is structured by long-term presence, relationships that are decades in the making, and the local identity that results.

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Introduction: Education in the High Andes As was the case with the Rio-Maryland partnership and its support for the Chatuba school, col-laboration in the field of education was an early focus for many northern and southern chapters. The first of three Bolivian chapters to form was centered in the capital city of La Paz, and it had been paired with the State of Utah in 1964. Responding to an early request from local parents to help found a school, the chapter’s work in education began almost immediately. Fifty years later, educational projects remain at the center of chapter and partnership activity.

education and the

evolution of

partnership

The village of Mallasa sits outside of La Paz on the Bolivian altiplano, the high plains of the central Andes. Placing faith in the power of education to transform, village parents had, in the late 1960s, begun to make plans to establish a school for their children. Looking to the future with promise, they were intent on crafting their own modernity, and they had learned it was best not to wait for government to put the process in motion. Toward assisting the community, the local chapter turned to its partners in Utah. There on another, though considerably lower mountainous plain, local chapter volunteers asked school children for assistance. Students at the McMillan Elementary School in Murray, Utah did as the students in Maryland would soon do. They raised money through typical school fundraisers like bake sales and raffles; some even donated their own savings from paper routes, babysitting, and odd jobs. A continent away, with the proceeds these students offered, the parents of Mallasa bought construction supplies, formed a workforce, and built a modest school.

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Growing organnically in response to local needs, the work of Partners of the America has been extensive and diverse.

Extending the collaborative people-to-people and student-to-student effort in the years that followed, the Utah students continued to raise money to support educational expansion on the Bolivian altiplano. Over its first five years, fundraising by Utah students exceeded $80,000, and with adequate construction supplies, Bolivian parents were empowered to build more than 100 small schools across the region. Based on the program’s success, Gary and Rose Neeleman of the Utah Chapter convinced the Charles Stuart Mott Foundation to support additional community education programs in Bolivia with a $1.5 million grant. In remote towns, with stunning landscapes but few public services, these new schools and programs changed the paradigm of possibility for generations to come. Ironically, some of the towns where schools and community education centers appeared were the very places where Che Guevara and other revolutionaries had promoted socialist and communist visions for Bolivia. But during the expanse of the Cold War, it was just as common to hear shouts of “Viva Utah” (“Long Live Utah”) in these Bolivian communities as it was to hear revolutionary and communist rhetoric.

In the mid-1970s, more than 10,000 villagers, indigenous peoples, and Bolivian campesinos from communities across the high plains, gathered at Santiago de Okola on the shores of Lake Titicaca. They came to participate in community education workshops that were organized through the Bolivia-Utah Partners. However, they also came to honor the partnership that allowed them to chart their futures without taking up arms, and the shouts of “Viva Utah” were heard once more. Chapters in La Paz and Utah were bringing students, parents, and volunteers together with a widening network of Peace Corps volunteers, educators, local government officials, and donors. They were making productive, inter-American partnership possible, and community empowerment was the direct result.

In Utah, La Paz, and elsewhere, education has always been the heart of Partners’ mission, and that has remained consistent across 50 years. Exchanges, at a range of academic levels, have been the core of much partnership activity, and such work has often been instrumental toward establishing chapter identity and agendas. University students and professors, researchers and administrators, and high school teachers and their students have been moving in both directions

between the North and the South since the first decade. Education-based resources and models have been shared as well, and the combined educational activities have been crucial toward building the networks that sustain many chapters. Educational collaboration, however, has not been limited to university-to-university and school-to-school programs. Growing organically in response to local needs, the work of Partners of the America has been extensive and diverse.

Built on its success in assisting the parents of Mallasa and communities across the altiplano, the history of the La Paz Chapter evidences a particular enthusiasm for educational projects. So, too, does the work of the Utah Chapter, which offered early leadership to Partner’s volunteer network in the field of community education. Passion for educational projects continued among the Utah-Bolivia volunteers for decades, and it stretched into the new millennium. Thus, it was not surprising that when Bolivia promulgated a new national constitution in 2009, the La Paz Chapter became active in educating the citizenry about the document. The new constitution was innovative in that it gave voice to native communities and welcomed them into governance; for a nation with an indigenous majority, both the new document and the community empowerment it promised were long overdue. On a practical level, the goal of cultivating participatory citizenship among all social sectors required that the public be educated about their rights, responsibilities, and the new legal structures of government. Toward that end, the chapter was prepared to do its part.

At the time, the La Paz Chapter created a project for educating high school students about the nation’s new penal code. Lizy Bowles, a local volunteer, helped developed a series of lessons that the Ministry of Education soon adopted into the national curriculum. Designed to teach young adults about important legal reforms in the justice system, the program brought university law students into high school classrooms to conduct mock trials; a key focus was introducing and providing practice with oral testimony and procedures. Funding for the production of curriculum materials was extended to the chapter through USAID, which had its own project focused on legal reforms and justice in Latin America. As their broad objectives overlapped, the chapter accepted the support. Funding aside, there was nothing

foreign about the project. Created by Bolivians, it was taught to young Bolivians by fellow citizens. Endorsed by the Ministry of Education, it reached students across the nation, and positive feedback flowed back to the chapter. Based on such success, other groups, including local police forces, asked the chapter to provide them with training.

Chapters and partnerships have always received some funding and assistance from the government—whether U.S. or Latin American, national, regional, or local. Since the 1960s, support from USAID and the Department of State has been most critical in building and maintaining Partners’ volunteer network, and it continues to be so. Chapter-based collaboration with governments in Latin America has also been common. Most governments in the region profess commitment to the principles of democracy and to republican forms of governance, so there have always been opportunities for alliances, which chapters and partnerships have engaged. Thus, while people-to-people diplomacy is not dependent on government, it certainly benefits from productive relationships with government. Toward their local, national, and international agendas, it is clear that governments benefit as well. Nonetheless, within their networks and in their relationships, Partners’ volunteers strive to be apolitical in all activities. And while it can be challenging to negotiate at a distance from domestic and diplomatic tensions that arise, volunteers have excelled at doing so. Had they been less successful at it, chapters and their networks would have disappeared decades ago.

The election of a new national leader can shift the dynamic of government-to-government relations, and this can impact people-to-people diplomacy. Such was the case in Bolivia as its new constitution was drafted and enacted. Under President Morales, relations with Washington soured and USAID’s programs were terminated. Based on its partial funding from that U.S. development agency, the local chapter’s justice program was removed from the national curriculum. Politics, not pragmatism, triumphed. To the chapter and its broad network, the news was most disappointing, but their work did not end. Its five decades of partnership with Utah—along with similarly long-term partnerships between Eastern Bolivia and Arkansas and between the Department of Cochabamba and North Carolina—had fostered powerful support among the citizenry. The chapter’s contributions to

the nation, especially in the field of education, would not be so easily erased. And with a new constitution elevating models of community empowerment, it would prove impossible to disband a group of Bolivians who had long been doing just that. The contributions of the chapter and its partnerships toward improving the lives of Bolivians could be measured in communities across the Andean landscape. That there was power in partnership was well established.

In recent years, the La Paz Chapter has faced roadblocks to its legal status under the government of President Morales. Indeed, it was even forced to rename itself the Alianza Bolivia-Utah (the Bolivia-Utah Alliance) when it was barred from identifying as a chapter of Partners of the Americas. Yet, based on its network of allies in cities and towns across the altiplano, among students, parents, teachers, and school administrators, and indeed, within sectors of the government itself, the chapter has continued its mission. Amidst less cordial government-to-government relations between Bolivia and the United States, education-based relations among private citizens have continued to thrive.

A current project, developed through the Cochabamba-North Carolina partnership, is educating parents, teachers, and medical professionals about autism. In recent years, a series of conferences in Cochabamba, La Paz, and Santa Cruz, organized through the distinct chapters in each city, attracted over 300 participants. The project and conferences are ongoing with crucial financial and resource support from the North Carolina Chapter, the School of Medicine at the University of North Carolina, the U.S. embassy in La Paz, and American Airlines. Autism’s impact is felt across political borders, and significant collaboration has emerged in the interest of education and training. Significantly, the program has opened a productive dialogue between Bolivia’s three chapters, the nation’s Ministry of Education, and other interested government entities.

High in the Andes, partnership around education has powerful potential in the struggle to effectively address autism. Amidst strained diplomatic relations, volunteers in La Paz, Cochabamba, and Santa Cruz also note the power of partnership and of people-to-people diplomacy to sustain inter-American understanding and trust.

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Strengthening Partners While many early chapters found ways to collaborate around education, those tasked with building Partners at the administrative level in Washington were in a unique learning process all their own. Government funding had been essential to the implementation of Kennedy’s people-to-people vision, and under USAID there were 80 local chapters and 40 inter-American partnerships by the close of the 1960s. New ones were continuing to emerge. By design, however, Partners was expected to transition from under the umbrella of the U.S. government agency and to establish organizational independence. The plan called for Partners to function in the private sector. Such a transition raised serious questions about the most effective methods for supporting chapters and partnerships and how to build and strengthen the volunteer network. Without question, the fundamental challenge was the question of funding.

During World War II, formal government participation in cultural diplomacy had resulted in widening support for people-to-people programming. Based on its wartime successes, the approach had gained powerful advocates within Congress and the U.S. foreign policy bureaucracy. But the tradition of deference to private initiative remained strong, and thus independence for Partners was always part of the equation. The mechanism for removing Partners from government control was the establishment of the National Association of the Partners of the Alliance (NAPA). Incorporated as a nonprofit 501(c)3 in 1967, NAPA served as an executive committee that would guide the program and oversee its separation from government. Comprised of volunteers, most of whom were active in chapters across the United States, NAPA was led by Stanley Marcus of Texas, then CEO of Neiman Marcus.

Alan Rubin, an enthusiastic volunteer with the Maine Chapter, was also a member of the NAPA executive committee. His chapter had been paired with the State of Rio Grande do Norte in Northeast Brazil in 1967, and he soon served as NAPA’s regional vice president for New England. When a firm date had been established for Partners’ separation from USAID, Rubin was hired as the first president of the newly christened Partners of the Americas and

charged with building a small staff in Washington. At that time, as throughout its history, Partners’ professional staff was drawn heavily from individuals who had direct experience in people-to-people programming in the public or private sectors. Setting a tradition that prevails among many to this day, staffers brought experience in the Peace Corps, international education, study abroad, humanitarian relief, and inter-American cultural exchange. Among the group of seven employees in those early years, key staffers David Luria had worked for Care in Colombia and Panama while Lacey Gude had recently returned from a Peace Corps assignment in Brasilia. Based on their experiences, both were interested in supporting community development through volunteer networks. And they valued development efforts that were grounded in local realities.

With a small staff in place, building functional partnerships was the principle mission of the newly independent organization, and Rubin, Luria, and Gude recognized that this would not happen overnight. In that pre-Internet age, when international telephone calls were cost-prohibitive for volunteer chapters with minimal budgets, assisting volunteers to know one another across great distances became Rubin’s top priority. Harnessing the power of partnership, he asserted, required chapters to trust each other, and Partners’ staff had to help cultivate that trust. Toward that end, it was also important to strengthen the democratic organization of the local chapters. While a tradition of parliamentary procedure existed in the North and was manifest in northern chapter structure and leadership, such was not the case in many southern chapters. Additionally, many volunteers from both regions had limited experience developing organizational bylaws. Establishing democratic governing principles within all chapters, therefore, was a necessary step toward developing working relationships within the partnerships.

Though the challenge of funding Partners of the Americas as an independent organization loomed large, and though efforts to retain some government support were necessary, Rubin placed his faith in productive partnerships as the mechanism of sustainability. Supporting partnerships had to be the priority. He constantly reminded his staff to see their work as among the chapters and not in the bureaucratic maneuverings of Washington. And he believed that a record of productive partnerships was essential to solving the question of funding.

The Question of Funding

In modern times, few in the U.S. public recognize the extent to which the nation’s foreign policy is carried out in collaboration with the private sector. Since Washington initiated a program of cultural diplomacy during World War II and subsequently forwarded an active development agenda during the early decades of the Cold War, it has collaborated with the private sector in building and maintaining international relations. Toward a broad goal of strengthening democratic governance through community-based initiatives, the federal government has always been realistic about its limitations. While it has financial resources, it lacks the manpower and local knowledge that it needs to be effective. As a result, its approach in implementing foreign aid programs has relied on the private sector as more efficient, innovative, and effective than government bureaucracy.

Upon its independence in 1970, Partners of the Americas continued to receive a core grant from USAID for supporting partnerships. The funds covered travel that brought distant partners together, and while it was generous, it was never enough to realize the full

potential of the paired chapters. Then, as now, there were many committed volunteers in both the North and the South who, seeing the positive impacts and recognizing the long-term potential of their participation, funded their own travel to annual conventions and regional meetings. But securing more funding to support partnerships was increasingly important if Partners was to avoid the fate of the Alliance for Progress. While there had been tremendous early support on Capitol Hill for the “Partners Program,” and while its appropriation within USAID initially sailed through Congress along with funding for the popular Fulbright Program, there was decreasing support for people-to-people programs in the early 1970s.

That decade introduced economic downturn in the United States. The war in Vietnam was taking a devastating human toll, and its financial costs were having a negative effect on the broader foreign aid budget. Simultaneously, the politics of the Arab-Israeli conflict led to an oil embargo that fueled spiraling inflation across the nation. Making things worse, the United States faced increased economic competition from its new German and Japanese allies, who with tremendous U.S. assistance had fully embraced democratic capitalism after the Second World War; by the early 1970s, the United States

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had become a net-importer of goods for the first time in the 20th century. When a brief period of détente shifted approaches to the Cold War, already limited U.S. foreign policy resources (and especially those designated for people-to-people programming in Latin America) were optimistically reoriented along the East–West axis. In the shuffle, inter-American programs had lost priority. Given that several Latin American governments were then moving away from democratic governance and embracing military rule and dictatorship, this decline in resources was troubling to Partners and its network of volunteers.

When Partners’ core grant from USAID was threatened by these circumstances, the staff moved to secure a greater commitment from Congress to inter-American people-to-people programs. It successfully campaigned for and received a line item appropriation in the federal budget, and the measure meant funds would now flow directly to Partners. Though this budgetary line item was temporary at first, it was subsequently extended year after year as the long-term impacts of productive partnerships were recognized. Significantly, the campaign for the line item had succeeded with the help of the volunteer network. As Gude explains, given the nature of Partners’ model, “we had a network all over the country, who could mount a letter writing campaign to Congress.” With passionate citizen advocates articulating their personal experiences with inter-American partnership, demands were heard. Gude recalls, an “array of senators and congressmen lined up as cosponsors.” In retrospect, it is clear that the letter writers had aggressively asserted a role for citizens in maintaining foreign relations. They were learning through partnerships that the federal government had no monopoly on diplomacy.

U.S. Senator Ed Muskie was familiar with the activities of Partners’ chapter in Maine, and he championed his home state’s volunteers and their partnership with Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil. He particularly favored educational programs, and he became a powerful voice for funding in Congress. From the floor of the Senate, Muskie declared that Partners’ programs offered the “greatest benefit for the least dollars.” Responding to critics who railed against the proposed line item, he detailed the concrete results of Partners’ people-to-people

approach and reminded his colleagues of the “incalculable goodwill” volunteers had “generated for our country in this hemisphere.” Muskie directly challenged those who would leave support for Partners and other people-to-people programs exclusively to the private sector. Supporting partnerships required professional staff, and he correctly argued that it was “more difficult to raise funds for generalized and administrative purposes from private sources than it is to secure funds for the relatively more appealing project purposes.” That funding reality, which presented a serious budgetary challenge for Partners at the time, is as true today as it was then.

Other influential allies came from within formal U.S. diplomacy. On the ground in countries across the hemisphere, diplomats and foreign service officers were quick to note how successful Partners’ volunteers were in getting things done. Removed from formal diplomacy with its large bureaucracy and sensitivity to politics, these volunteers had a record of accomplishment. Though small victories at the community level seldom made national and international headlines, they were noticed in U.S. embassies and consulates and by officials of the host nation. U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia Bill Stedman, who had served in Peru and Mexico before arriving in La Paz, had observed the working of Partners’ model first-hand. Later, when he was asked by USAID to evaluate Partners’ program and determine its effectiveness for continued funding, he argued that Partners offered high return on little investment. The Partners’ model, he asserted, worked well and strengthened U.S. relations with its southern neighbors. He spoke with authority. Stedman subsequently joined Partners’ staff and became a powerful advocate for people-to-people diplomacy.

As the line item brought a semblance of stability to Partners’ administrative operation, Rubin accelerated his efforts to secure grants from the private sector. Government assistance, as Senator Muskie, Ambassador Stedman, and many others had argued, helped to sustain Partners’ volunteer network. Continuing support through that line item was crucial. And so, too, were project-specific grants, which were soon offered through USAID and shortly thereafter through the Department of State. But singular dependence on government funds was not desirable, and diversifying its donor base was Partners’ long-term goal. When the Lily Endowment, the

philanthropic arm of Eli Lily and Company, extended a three-year grant that supported partnership activity, the organization turned a corner. That was the first of many private grants that have been instrumental in sustaining chapters and partnerships, maintaining a professional staff, building broad networks around volunteerism, and supporting larger-scale initiatives in community development. In those early decades, additional grants, donations, and support came from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, IBM, Coca-Cola, the Tinker Foundation, the Summa Corporation, the Kellogg Foundation, and two dozen other private entities.

Politics and Collaborative Funding

The Michigan-Belize partnership was formed in 1966, and had strong ties to Michigan State University through Warren Huff. A trustee of the university, Huff worked on behalf of Partners at multiple levels; he guided the formation of NAPA, visited Belize to organize its chapter, and was an active supporter of the local Michigan volunteers. Within its first years, Huff’s home state chapter secured scholarships to Michigan State and Eastern Michigan University for deserving students from Belize. It helped to build library collections in the newly independent Caribbean nation. It organized donations of band instruments, and it later hosted those young touring musicians who had benefitted from the chapter’s musical support. Drawing on university connections, the chapter also collaborated with its partners to bring educational services to disabled populations in Belize.

In addressing the challenges of local communities, partnerships became laboratories of practical solutions (and they still are). Since the 1960s, successes, best practices, and localized triumphs within partnerships have circulated in the broader volunteer network. In partnered communities across the hemisphere, successful programs are piloted anew and adapted to local conditions. Sometimes, effective programs spread via cross-partnership collaboration or are promoted with the assistance of Partners’ professional staff in Washington. Other times, development agencies and donor foundations borrow these programs as models to be emulated; some offer grants to Partners’ network to employ the models more widely while others spread the approach through their own projects in far corners of the globe. In the case of the Michigan-Belize partnership, one of its initiatives grew into the Partners Rehabilitation and Education Program (PREP). Funded by USAID via a dedicated grant, PREP allowed chapters to expanded Partners’ educational activities into new realms of mental health, physical disability, and rehabilitative services. Directed by Dr. John Jordan, of Michigan State University, and supported by Partners’ staff, the program was well received in the volunteer network, where education was a central theme. Various partnered chapters, like Kansas and Paraguay, were already collaborating to address disability issues in local communities, and they welcomed the new support.

We had a network all over the country, who could mount a letter writing campaign to Congress.

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PREP positioned disability as a major educational concern in Partners’ programming. Collaborating with educators and their institutions from the late 1960s forward, volunteers were ahead of the curve. Before the American With Disabilities Act was the law of the land, and well in advance of the substantial public and private funding that would flow for special education services, Partners’

model of inter-American partnership was forwarding solutions. In both Latin America and the United States, individuals with mental and physical disabilities had historically been hidden from sight. They were marginalized and frequently institutionalized; they were afforded few educational resources. Partnership, however, proved powerful. It amplified a public discourse that had been held to whispers for too long, and it empowered interested volunteers and allied professionals to change disability paradigms.

Sparked by volunteers in Belize and Michigan and fueled by PREP, the trajectory of disability programs in the history of Partners has been paved through collaborative relationships. Chapter partnerships were strengthened as volunteers found common cause in a challenge that impacted both communities. New collaborations with government agencies, private institutions, professional associations, as well as disabled individuals and their families, widened Partners’ network and enlarged its model. Working with the Organization of American States (OAS), the successor to the PAU, and various universities across the hemisphere, Dr. Jordan helped to establish a regional center for educational research at the University of Costa Rica. Other partnerships with the U.S. Department of Education, USAID, community organizations, and NGOs created resource centers throughout the Caribbean that offered training in disability prevention and rehabilitation services. In the late 1970s, a multi-year grant from IBM funded volunteer efforts and professional guidance to design inexpensive equipment that would make sitting, standing, and working easier for those with physical challenges; the PATH program (Partners Appropriate Technology for the Handicapped) met a high demand for adapted technology—wheelchairs, seats, work spaces, and tables. IBM’s Brazilian division also provided a generous grant that helped to establish 1,000 community schools for children with disabilities across that vast nation.

Large grants that were secured for specific disability programs changed lives. So, too, did smaller seed grants of $600 that were extended to chapters to support modest projects that were framed with passion and promise. Additionally instrumental in building disability and partnership programs were modest travel grants covering airfare. For the Antioquia-Massachusetts partners, and all others, training

seminars, internships, and curriculum development projects often began with a travel grant. The Perkins School, the Carroll Center for the Blind, the University of Antioquia, Medellin’s public schools, and Boston University are just a few of the educational institutions that have been linked in productive relationships through a grant of airfare to an individual. As disability specialists, educators, physical and occupational therapists, and mental health professionals moved back and forth between Colombia and the United States over the decades, the value of plane tickets has been paid forward many times over.

With PREP working so well from the start, Partners’ staff began to seek new opportunities to apply the dedicated-grant approach to new areas. Through such grants, Partners, which had struggled through the 1970s to find its organizational and financial footing, achieved a new level of stability. In the process, Partners’ professional staff in Washington developed a clear mission: they would support volunteer chapters in identifying need (through local assessment); connect volunteers with resources, training, and professional networks; and secure collaborative funding from a variety of sources to implement the solutions that met local needs.

As successful educational projects proliferated under PREP, PATH, and subsequent initiatives that secured dedicated grants, interest in collaboration with Partners grew among diverse segments of the public and private sectors. Its growing network of volunteers constituted an impressive mechanism for delivering programs. And to the extent that chapters and partnerships shared the objectives of potential funders, teamwork was attractive to both sides. USIA, for example, had been involved in sports programming since the agency was founded in the 1950s, but its mission ran deeper than sports. The agency’s activities were grounded in Cold War competition, and its ultimate goal was to defeat communism; engaged in propaganda and anti-communist cultural projects, its intent was unapologetically political. Such were the polarized times of the Cold War, when the goals of containment justified increased funding for sports, education, and the arts of the free world.

How Partners balanced its apolitical principles with the funding imperatives of the Cold War is an interesting historical question.

Within Partners, the general objectives of strengthening democracy and building community were shared among northern and southern volunteers. Logically, those with a communist vision were not joining the chapters and had found more appropriate outlets for their energies and political activism. This is not to suggest that volunteers were without political opinions. Indeed, then as now, volunteers in the North and the South, might be critical of both U.S. and Latin American governments. Most would take strong exception to the interventionist policies that marred U.S. relations with the region before World War II and periodically since. Yet, the very nature of their participation in inter-American partnerships was and is indicative of a shared philosophy among volunteers: they enjoy cultural exchange, they see value in strong and respectful U.S.-Latin American relations, and they believe people-to-people diplomacy can strengthen democratic tradition. Thus, when USIA turned to Partners to develop sports programs in Latin America, chapters were very willing to organize exchanges, clinics, and competitions that matched local objectives. Politics could be easily avoided.

Beginning in the early 1970s, USIA funded the Partners Inter-American Cultural Exchange. It provided for both full-time staffers and participant travel in the area of sports and culture. In collaboration with the National Wheelchair Basketball Association in 1974, Partners sent U.S. players and coaches to Brazil; hosting clinics where this version basketball had never been considered, this collaboration sent a powerful message about the visibility of people with disabilities. A reciprocal visit to the United States by a Brazilian team was funded the next year. Players traveled to Maryland, Virginia, and the nation’s capital to compete in a series of games. Partners’ chapters in each location formally welcomed the 13 players of the Clube do Otimismo (the Optimism Club). Indicative of societies changing views on disability and revealing of the role volunteers played in fostering such change, the players were even greeted by President Ford on the South Lawn of the White House. For Partners’ staff and the many volunteers who made that basketball program possible—along with dozens of other programs designed and implemented under the Inter-American Cultural Exchange—the effort was apolitical. With or without the Cold War raging, resources were crafted to meet local needs.

Within Partners, the general objectives of strengthening democracy and building community were shared among northern and southern volunteers.

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Education and Network Expansion In its diverse forms—professional and academic, formal and informal, technical and artistic, institutional and community-based—education formed the center of early partnership activities. And that has not significantly changed over five decades. Because education is a dynamic process that is strengthened through collaboration, it has always found a comfortable home within Partners’ model. Aside from the school construction projects that were initially popular within the volunteer network, many chapters worked on educational exchanges from the start. U.S. chapters always encountered high enthusiasm for collaborative educational projects from their southern partners.

Latin Americans’ strong interest in the U.S. education system began at a specific moment in time. Before World War II, educational ties between U.S. and Latin American education systems were insignificant. However, that war fueled new interest in the U.S. educational model, and Washington’s new programs of cultural diplomacy cleared pathways for Latin American access to the nation’s university system. The wartime closures of European universities made some upper-class Latin Americans more willing to send their children to schools in the U.S., and they continued the trend after the war. But there was also growing interest in U.S. educational options among the region’s small but emerging middle and professional classes—the very groups considered most crucial in national modernization schemes. Traditionally, school systems in many Latin American countries were limited, and secondary education was effectively the privilege of the elite. As the European war broke out in the late 1930s and as the OIAA soon increased Latin American exposure to U.S. culture, many began to see the U.S. education system as a model worth emulating.

Lack of classrooms and high rates of illiteracy in Latin America were serious roadblocks to modernity, and more and more citizens were demanding reforms by mid-century. Looking to the United States, many saw a world power with economic stability and a high standard of living. They saw an education system that was the engine of national development, and while it was still an imperfect system,

it reached the overwhelming majority of the citizenry. Beginning around 1900, the United States had rapidly increased secondary education options for its children. Where less than 20% of the age-appropriate population was enrolled in high school in 1910, the figure exceeded 70% just 30 years later as the war began. By the early Cold War, universities were expanding to meet accelerating demand from high school graduates. And as they grew, they offered new programs in science, medicine, and technology to address modern needs. Thus did the “High School Movement” make the U.S. education system the envy of the world. In the decades that followed, Latin Americans took full advantage of opportunities to enroll in U.S. universities, access U.S. educational resources, and, in the case of Partners’ southern volunteers, collaborate with educators and their institutions.

In Partners’ history, university faculty members always had a strong presence in chapter activities. Faculty exchanges between the North and the South were very common, and they’ve had lasting impact. When invited to participate, academic specialists usually embraced collaborative projects with Partners; from inside and outside classrooms and research spaces, they enthusiastically offered guidance. Linking volunteers with their academic colleagues, they extended Partners’ network considerably. At the institutional level, connections to universities and colleges have provided human and material resources that make cross-border dialogues, intercultural exchange, and local programming possible on limited budgets. Not surprisingly, the most energetic phases in the history of many chapters have been periods of strong relationships with local universities or other educational institutions. Notably, retired professors and educators have been strong volunteers within the most successful chapters in the network.

Faculty exchanges and engagements have been complemented by university student exchanges. Most U.S. chapters have actively facilitated the movement of Latin American students into local universities and colleges. Toward making enrollments more feasible, many campaigned to establish in-state tuition rates and scholarship programs that would encourage a steady flow of students. Establishing such programs required serious lobbying efforts to convince

legislators, governors, and college presidents of the value of cultural exchange. And by most accounts, this was an easier task in the past decades, before costs for tuition and room/board skyrocketed. In Kansas, the extension of in-state tuition rates to accepted students from Paraguay made the state university accessible to approximately 1200 students across decades. Before the program was initiated, few foreign students enrolled in the Kansas University system, and those who did were not from Paraguay. Increasing the cultural diversity of the student body was desirable from the perspective of university administrators, and while the arriving Paraguayans were a demographic oddity to some locals, their presence was soon well established. Over time, they became the least foreign of the Kansan foreigners. As students graduated and returned to Paraguay, a growing alumni network ensured continuing interest in and affection for Kansas. It was also common for returning graduates to join the local chapter in Asuncion as a way to stay connected with a culture that they had come to know. In contrast, however, the flow of Kansan students to Paraguay was minimal.

For the Texas Partners, the route to university student exchange was through scholarships. Texas, the home state of Jim Boren, had been informally linked with Peru even before Partners of the Alliance had been created. During his days with USAID in Lima, Boren had experimented with informal partnership. Frustrated with bureaucratic diplomacy, he often helped solve local challenges by calling old friends and prominent Texans to directly ask for help. As volunteers across the hemisphere have learned through experience, asking for help is often all it takes to initiate a working relationship. And this is especially the case among educators. Piloting what would emerge as Partners’ model, Boren saw great potential in connecting distant communities through education.

The history of the Texas Chapter could fill volumes. The breadth of its activities and the reach of its network have been substantial. Historically, the Lone Star state was part of Mexico, and it retained strong Latin American influences. With a significant Mexican-American population and strong economic ties, the Texas Chapter began expanding its partnerships across the border. While it maintained a vigorous agenda with Peru, it established new relations

with the Mexican states of Guanajuato, Guerrero, Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, and Vera Cruz in the late 1970s. Branching in new directions, beyond its original pairing with Peru, the Texas Chapter initiated these partnerships with Mexico because they had much in common. Through the Good Neighbor Commission, a state entity charged with improving conditions for Mexican-Americans in Texas as well as fostering cooperation with its neighbor, the chapter established a scholarship program at the University of Texas (UT) in Austin. A scholarship for students from Peru was created at the same time. Among other benefits, the program helped to build and sustain the chapters in Mexico. As UT graduates returned to their homes, many became leaders in the local chapters and steered cross-border collaboration for decades.

Supported by scholarships, tuition assistance, and other programs in Texas, Kansas, Arkansas, and many chaptered states, thousands of Latin American students have attended and graduated from

Because education is a dynamic process that is strengthened through collaboration, it has always found a comfortable home within Partners’ model.

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universities and colleges across the United States. Experience studying abroad produces direct and personal benefits for the students, but it is an advantage for the host institutions and their local communities as well. Further, it is an effective vehicle of mutual understanding among peoples of the Americas and a powerful engine of people-to-people relationships. Recently, however, relative declines in the number of Latin Americans enrolling in U.S. higher education have been noted in Washington. While the United States remains the world leader in higher education, and the number of foreign students attending its university-level programs shows steady growth year by year, Latin American students have a declining presence. Comparatively, U.S. students who study abroad seldom choose programs in Latin America, and only a small percentage who do go to the region enroll in degree programs. These negative trends will likely have an impact on inter-American relations, and the Obama administration is hoping to change that through its 100,000 Strong in the Americas initiative. Increasing the flow of students within the hemisphere to 100,000 in each direction is the ambitious goal.

In its capacity as a development agency, Partners of the Americas is now collaborating with NAFSA: Association of International Educators to carry out the 100,000 Strong in the Americas initiative for the Department of State. With its long history of engagement in educational exchanges and extensive connections to a broad network of schools, colleges, and universities across the Americas, Partners is in a favorable position to reinvigorate inter-American educational exchange. The Obama administration recognizes that. The initiative offers grants to universities based on promising proposals to increase the movement of students. As is Partners’ approach, proposals are generated locally in both the North and the South, and they involve collaborative partnerships of various kinds. Over several years, grantees will pilot programs that have been developed for local conditions. No one formula will necessarily work for every institution and every community, but some models will likely be adaptable.

North-to-South and South-to-North exchanges among high school students, teachers, and administrators have also been a core activity around which partnerships developed. But educational endeavors have hardly been restricted to the orbit of students and schools.

All cultural exchange is an exercise in learning, and inter-American collaborations among artist, musicians, and performers have educated as much as entertained. Brazilian and Pennsylvanian artists have visited Philadelphia and Bahia to create public murals in inner-city neighborhoods. They have worked with local youth to build leadership skills, cultivate community pride, and foster cross-cultural energies. From Appalachia to the Andes, performance and visual arts have been shared between partnered communities in Kentucky and Ecuador. Marching bands from Texas have been cheered in parades in Peru, and jazz musicians from the Caribbean have been welcomed in New Orleans. The partnership between Rochester (New York) and the islands of Antigua and Barbuda runs high school band exchanges, and a youth orchestra from Rio Grande do Sul in Southern Brazil has performed to smiling crowds in various venues in Indiana. Native American storytellers from New Mexico exchange visions and outlooks in Chile, and youth from every possible cultural and class background join community sport programs and creative arts workshops. With State Department, USAID, and other government funding; grants from corporations, philanthropies, and educational institutions; and guided by the cultural interests and passions of its volunteers, thousands of educational exchanges have brought depth to bilateral relations in the hemisphere.

Because it involves learning, cultural exchange widens perspective. It impacts the participant, and this often spills over into the circles of relationships that define the individual’s world. U.S. visitors to Guatemala share their experiences with family and friends upon return. Artists from Andean nations think more intensely of U.S. landscapes, light, and colors for having seen them. Writers from everywhere in the hemisphere offer readers new visions and deeper understandings as a function of cultural exchange. Sometimes, the cultural experiences that come through involvement in people-to-people diplomacy have remarkably wide impact, and the developing music passions of Felix Grant evidence the case. One of the first presidents of the Washington, DC volunteer chapter of Partners of the Americas, Grant was a radio personality with a passion for jazz. He became fascinated with Brazilian music, and this led to his first connection to and volunteerism with the chapter. Ultimately leading the partnership between the two capital districts of Washington and

Brasilia, he pursued his musical interests and shared them with his radio audience. A pioneer, many have credited him with introducing the bossa nova genre to U.S. listeners. Educating the public with music, Grant strengthened inter-American bonds.

Firefighters and paramedics, judges and lawyers, environmentalists and public works engineers have also built Partners’ legacy in the fields of education and training. With volunteer fire departments the norm in rural areas of both the United States and Latin America, partnerships have found opportunities to share techniques and technologies among fire and rescue professionals. Disaster prevention and response programs in the South and the North have been strengthened through long-distance dialogue and exchange. The movement of surplus resources from the North to the South has had life-saving impact, and it comes quite cheaply. The U.S. culture prizes innovation and efficiency; the nation values new technology and is quick to replace what is old (or what is perceived to be old). Working in chapters with very little financial reserve, volunteers do not let good resources rust; discarded U.S. fire trucks, ambulances, and rescue equipment find grateful homes in Latin American regions with more challenged economies. Communities in the United States, and the first-responders within them, feel tremendous

pride in sending quality equipment to needy cities and towns, and partnership between fire departments continue long after equipment arrives. Not surprisingly, many U.S. travelers in Latin America have been puzzled when they catch glimpses of speeding ambulances and fire trucks that are emblazoned with the names of towns in Kansas, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, or any of the dozens of partnered cities. Nothing makes a volunteer or collaborator laugh and smile more than to recall the puzzled look of a traveling bystander when such a scene plays out.

Building on the early collaborative efforts between its chapters, Partners began its network-wide Emergency Preparedness Program in 1984. Funded through USAID’s Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) for almost two decades, the program funneled educational and training resources to assist communities in preparation for natural and man-made disasters. By intent, education was at the center of the program. Many of the chapters already had emergency preparedness subcommittees, but this new funding allowed for substantial dialogue and exchange across the volunteer network. It also created a new network of fire and rescue, first-responder, and medical service professionals who have since anchored emergency preparedness programs in communities across the hemisphere. Some within the new network even served as instructors for OFDA’s emergency training program, and many chapter-based volunteers participated in its sessions. In Peru, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, more than a quarter million students were trained in disaster preparedness and response during the 1990s.

Since the 1970s, emergency preparedness has remained an important focus of community development projects within chapters and partnerships. Along with disability services, it has been a program area for which Partners’ Washington staff have successfully secured funding through government and private grants. Whether educational projects around emergency preparedness (or any other theme) have risen organically out of chapters or have been encouraged with project specific grants that match local needs, they continue a tradition of educational collaboration that proves, decade after decade, the power of inter-American partnership.

From Appalachia to the Andes, performance and visual arts have been shared between partnered communities in Kentucky and Ecuador.

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Education, Agriculture, and CollaborationPartnerships between rural U.S. states and similar Latin American regions have consistently emerged to address agricultural challenges. Farmers and farm families have shown long-term presence in chapter leadership, and their dedication to people-to-people and farmer-to-farmer programs reflects the work ethic that their lives demand. Faculty volunteers from university agriculture departments have also been crucial contributors. Paired communities that share a culture of agriculture never needed strong enticements to build productive partnerships. Long before Partners administered USAID’s Farmer-to-Farmer program in Latin America, chapters found common ground

and set to work. Three decades later, it was this history of supporting such collaboration, a track record of success among volunteers, and the ability to engage an expansive network of inter-American agriculturalists and institutions that made Partners of the Americas the logical choice to carry out USAID’s project in Central America and the Caribbean basin.

Partners has administered USAID’s Farmer-to-Farmer program in a dozen Latin American countries since 1991. The program has a staff of 53, who are based in regional offices but mostly in the field, and Partners competitively bids to renew the contract in five-year cycles. Addressing the challenges of poor and mid-sized farmers is

the primary focus, and its work involves education and training around the themes of natural resource management, rural enterprise development, and dairy/livestock/horticulture production. The approach, as the program name suggests, brings farmers and agriculturalists together to solve challenges in local context. Broad USAID objectives frame the funding, but staffers develop the programs based on locally assessed needs. While the program was initially managed through the chapter structure, that changed after USAID standards for professionalization restricted reliance on volunteers. Still, Partners’ ability to successfully implement such programs is based on decades of experience supporting chapter-based collaborations between farmers. It is based on a half-century of supporting productive people-to-people relationships in agriculture. And the broad agricultural network, which its volunteers have been constructing since the 1960s, allows Partners access to countless willing collaborators who share interest in agricultural improvement through training and education.

Guyana was an important focus of Farmer-to-Farmer projects from 1996 through 2012. Collaborating with USAID but also with the State of Mississippi, with which it had formed a partnership in 1988, the local chapter concentrated substantial efforts around agricultural improvements. Promoting sustainable farming practices in poor coastal communities, the chapter tapped into Partners’ broad network of agricultural experts. Over the years, the volunteers have learned how to connect with those who can assist them in serving local communities. As a testament to its success in piloting local solutions, the chapter recently was awarded a $1 million grant from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) for its own agricultural programs. The Guyana Chapter has evolved with its mission and will continue to do so. Guyana’s partnerships with Mississippi and Farmer-to-Farmer, its successful experiences engaging networks of agriculturalists, and its recent emergence as a development agency highlights a significant strength of Partners’ model. The model provides connections, education, encouragement, and support for those who confront problems head-on. It empowers volunteers and collaborators, as individuals or institutions, to take responsibility within their own community.

Since the establishment of a volunteer network of chapters and partnerships, Partners’ model has evolved with the times. Volunteers have expanded their networks through collaborative connections to individuals, organizations, institutions, and agencies at home and abroad. Partners of the Americas staff has searched for and secured the financial resources to support those growing networks and the innovative solutions they can generate. Toward both encouraging local initiative and strengthening democracy through community development, Partners has enthusiastically collaborated with USAID, the Department of State, and other government agencies to build programs that meet local needs; it has simultaneously cultivated donor support from the private sector that increases its ability to get things done. In recent decades, Partners has begun implementing larger-scale development projects like Farmer-to-Farmer, 100,000 Strong in the Americas, and A Ganar. Such programs might engage chapters and volunteers or they might not, depending on how well they match local needs, interest, and capacity. But either way, these programs continue Partners’ long-term commitment to people-to-people diplomacy, productive partnership, and education.

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Introduction: Appleton, Chinandega, and Las Lagunas While it established a model of inter-American partnership that functions across great distanc-es, Partners of the Americas has always remained locally grounded. Structured by networks of volunteers and development professionals, the basic formula for success has not changed across five decades: locals assess their needs and implement solutions.

In programming that is developed with a partnered chapter, is implemented with resources from a donor’s targeted grant, or is part of a larger development project like Farmer-to-Farmer or 100,000 Strong, locals drive the efforts that change lives. As the work of Partners of the Americas has diversified and its networks have expanded, its focus has consistently remained on supporting productive partnerships that allow local communities to solve problems. Community empowerment, Partners has learned, requires strong leadership. At the local level but also within inter-American partnerships and the extended network that supports them, leaders provide the crucial energy that creates critical mass for change.

cultivating leadership

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That leaders are natural born is cliché. Certainly, some individuals demonstrate leadership skills from very early in life through the capacity to unify and guide those around them. Yet, such leadership is rare. More common are leaders who emerge over time in response to challenges. They are not born as leaders, but they become them. Through professional careers, community involvement, and family life, they develop specific skills and comfort in applying them. Recognizing a problem that needs to be addressed, they act in a moment and they continue to engage. They may be driven by conscience or passion. They may be reacting to crisis. Often, they are simply responding in the affirmative to a direct request for help. Unsure of the direction things may take, they choose to be part of the solution.

In Appleton, Wisconsin, effective leaders are in abundant supply. In that small city in the central region of the state, leaders have emerged through people-to-people partnerships with two communities in

Nicaragua. In each place, Partners’ model has been a mechanism by which local volunteers have discovered their capacity to lead. Wisconsin and Nicaragua have been paired since 1965, and their relationship has exceeded all expectations. The Wisconsin-Nicaragua partnership, of which the Appleton volunteers are a part, has evolved into a remarkable organization that prioritizes multicultural understanding, community empowerment through education and training, and humanitarian volunteerism. Because their projects have been effective and they maintain a reputation for using resources efficiently, the Wisconsin Chapter has regularly received grants from government and private sources. Small professional staffs at Stevens Point, Wisconsin, and Managua, Nicaragua, support the work of the volunteers. Thus, as an organization the Wisconsin-Nicaragua Partners is both a volunteer network and a development agency. Most of its income comes from small donations, and volunteers, themselves, are significant donors. It is a model of people-to-people diplomacy and a testament to the power of partnership.

In 1981, this partnership established the first of many dozens of sewing centers in Nicaragua. Designed to build income-producing skills among women, the centers were autonomous local organizations. They were supported by the Wisconsin volunteers, but they were managed locally within the host communities. Frequently, the centers formed in simple rooms or covered patios of women’s modest homes; these were unremarkable spaces but their impacts were tremendous. Over time, sewing education evolved into larger processes of discovery, and the sewing centers were rechristened as learning centers. They became community schools that responded to local needs and incubators of leadership that empowered women and families.

Appleton’s partnership with Chinandega, which began in 1992, was an initiative of the Wisconsin-Nicaragua Partners. Through a partnered city program initiated to extend collaboration, these two communities in Wisconsin’s dairy land and on Nicaragua’s sugar-growing Pacific coast were joined. In Appleton, the group first focused on medical and healthcare issues. They drew upon the career experience of volunteers like chapter member Otto Cox, and they sent hospital equipment, medical supplies, and surplus ambulances to Chinandega. Circulating requests for assistance, they received

resources from their community and soon sent local paramedics to Nicaragua on training missions. By then, collaboration in agriculture was already a well-established tradition within the broader Wisconsin-Nicaragua partnership; for more than 30 years, agricultural projects had developed organically out of the logic of the pairing as well as through USAID initiatives. Among Appleton-Chinandega’s earliest projects were two that focused on cheese making and milk production. Each tapped into the expertise and energies of local leaders in the agricultural community.

Teachers from local Appleton schools have also provided important educational leadership. Teacher members of the group, as well as the educator networks they have connected with, assisted in establishing a new learning center in Chinandega in 2003. More recently they have helped create a center in Las Lagunas, a poor village in the Department of Boaco with which the group has begun working. When Linda Webber joined as a chapter member of the Appleton group, she was a Spanish teacher looking for opportunities to use the language outside the classroom. She offered her skills to the group not knowing where things would lead, and a range of collaborative projects developed between schools, students, and educators. Webber also developed friendships with her Nicaraguan counterparts, and this increased the culture of collaboration within the partnership. It made it easier to lead as needed. When a request came for assistance in teaching children in Las Lagunas how to build and maintain gardens, Webber lacked the expertise; she was not a gardener. She did, however, have access to the network of local teachers and made helpful connections. Fellow teacher Judy Miller, a certified master gardener, immediately said “yes” to Linda’s request for help—even though she “didn’t really know where Nicaragua was.”

Since the founding of the Wisconsin-Nicaragua partnership in 1965, the violence of dictatorship, war, and political division has marked the history of the Central American nation. The devastating toll can be measured in many ways and most powerfully in bloodshed and loss of human life, but there have been more subtle effects as well. Gardening, for example, became a casualty of war. In Las Lagunas, food was always in limited supply, and small garden plots had been common to supplement family nutrition. Yet, beginning in the 1980s,

an entire generation never learned to garden. During the war, children and adults innocently gardening in their local field were vulnerable; they could be taken and pressed into combat service by either side. Thus, when conditions improved, community leaders wanted to reestablish the practice of gardening, and local enthusiasm was high. Miller’s program, which was a tremendous success, had support from a Wisconsin network that included master gardeners and educators. Teaching the cycles of gardening and introducing seed conservation, as a self-sustaining practice, Miller expanded the program the next year to other locales. Funding from the Farmer-to-Farmer program made the expansion possible, but dynamic leadership—Miller says she “can go a long way on a smile or a seed”—made it happen.

Through gardening and other projects, the Appleton volunteers met what Webber and Miller describe as the “coolest kids.” As they got to know them and their communities, the volunteers became painfully aware of the limits of educational opportunity. Las Lagunas offered students school options only to grade six, and while a secondary school was only eight kilometers away, it was beyond the practical reach of many of the children. Thus did the Appleton volunteers start a scholarship program to provide a stipend for travel, school uniforms, books, supplies, and other expenses. Drawn largely from individual donations, the volunteers have sent $25 per student each month and supported approximately 12 young learners. At times, there have been frustrations with the delivery of the funds, but this has only strengthened the resolve to make the program work. Effective leadership always has a learning curve, but it perseveres. As the program improved, groups of these scholarship recipients have become adults. With continuing scholarship support, some of the graduates have moved on to college, and in this Internet age, many have regular contact with their friends and mentors in Appleton. Among the former students who now have children of their own, several have named daughters and sons after Appleton volunteers. There is no greater evidence of the impact that leadership can have than the changing educational culture in Las Lagunas.

Appleton’s volunteers’ success in building partnership is a function of dynamic leadership. Such leadership has long been prioritized within the broader organization of the Wisconsin-Nicaragua Partners. From

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the start of its relationship with Nicaragua, the Wisconsin Chapter has made it a priority to cultivate leadership. It has not simply sought out existing leaders—though it certainly attracts them. Nor has it wasted time searching out the natural-born leader because it recognizes that leadership skills can be developed. Within the context of its partnership activities, the Wisconsin-Nicaragua Partners explicitly work to help volunteers to realize their leadership potential. Often, the starting point has been asking individuals to join a project, and in this chapter, leaders have never been shy about asking. Invariably, most have said “yes.” Some eventually take roles directing a project, and others work behind the scenes managing finances or logistics. Filling a void, they begin to put systems and human resources in place that will prevent the void from reappearing. In this process, the individual becomes a leader.

In historical perspective, the Wisconsin Chapter’s success at cultivating leadership has been influenced by two important factors. First, direct observations of poverty can create tremendous motivation among individuals to serve. Through travel grants from Partners of the Americas but more often through self-funded service trips to Nicaragua, thousands of middle-class Wisconsinites have had first-hand exposure to poverty and communities with a range of basic needs. Reflecting on their activities, volunteers are quick to note that initial visits to impoverished communities provided strong motivation to serve. Second, the progressive tradition that marks the history of Wisconsin manifests in the culture of the chapter. Prioritizing the needs of the citizenry against powerful interests, the people have long demanded and directed government reforms to make elected bodies responsive to community needs.

Many factors that motivate volunteerism are unique to chapters, and Wisconsin and Nicaragua are unique places. Likewise, Brazil is not Belize, and Maine is not Maryland. As a result, not all partnerships focus on humanitarian issues to the extent that Wisconsin and Nicaragua do. Under Partners’ model, strong partnerships are built to respond to locally assessed needs, but motivation alone does not sustain productive agendas and strong working relationships. Instead, there must also be dynamic leadership to plan and carry out collaboration on both ends. Otherwise, the best intentions will fall flat. If, lacking such leadership, crucial local assessment of needs is overlooked, synergy will not develop. Linda Webber recalls “failures when there were things that we wanted to do that did not match up with” the interests and needs of Chinandega or Las Lagunas; recycling plastics, for example, “didn’t fly.”

Within Partners’ volunteer network, highly engaged partnerships like Wisconsin-Nicaragua (and its many partnered cities) embrace the learning curve of leadership. They learn to make things “fly” by cultivating leaders at home and abroad and not leaving leadership to chance.

Leadership and the Evolving ModelAnalyzing Partners’ 50-year history of supporting partnerships and building networks, it is clear that many challenges can undermine effective partnerships and limit the potential of people-to-people diplomacy. The precise wording of Partners’ mission statement has varied over the decades, but in practice the mission itself has been consistent and clear from the start. Partners aims to connect individuals and/or organizations that have a passion to serve; in doing so, it effects change in communities and strengthens democracy in the hemisphere. Operating as a decentralized network that spreads across geography and time, Partners confronts many obstacles to achieving its mission. Cultural divides and language barriers are significant, but these can be diminished through regular contact between volunteers. International politics and formal diplomacy can create more menacing obstacles, but citizen diplomats have found ways to work around both. Another challenge has been sustaining volunteerism, and while there have been far more successes than failures at this task, it requires constant efforts that are adapted to changing times. Finally, in the realms of collaboration, volunteers and participants must balance the interests and objectives of partnered chapters and communities, volunteers and professionals, and the important donor base. Many are the obstacles that discourage the citizen diplomat.

While local grounding has been the essential factor in Partners’ longevity, it is also effective leadership that has made inter-American partnerships functional across decades. Success in overcoming challenges and negotiating balances depends on leaders at all levels. Thus, a commitment to cultivating effective leadership has always been prioritized at the chapter and partnership levels, within the broader networks, and among Partners’ professional staff in Washington. It is only with effective leadership that the mission statement of Partners of the Americas is converted from words to action.

Texas-Peru: Leadership, Connections, and Crises

The Texas-Peru partnership existed informally before the Alliance for Progress. From his USAID post in Lima, Jim Boren had piloted inter-American collaboration between businesses and universities in Texas and Peruvian communities with need. Under the people-to-people program of the Alliance for Progress, Boren formalized that collaboration in 1964 and extended its reach. From a new post in Washington, Boren continued making requests of Texans; developing the original organization as Partners of the Alliance, he asked career professionals in Austin and Dallas, some he knew but many he did not, to apply their skills in new areas. His model proved successful as local leaders in the private and public sectors learned to be international leaders.

In the early 1960s, a tremendous enthusiasm for volunteerism prevailed in the United States. The young energy and charisma of President Kennedy shepherded new optimism in the nation. But more than simply making eloquent statements about volunteer service at home and abroad, Kennedy also forwarded practical models that made such service possible. He offered leadership models for channeling inspiration. In this regard, the Peace Corps was his most high-profile program but Partners was just as extensive.

Significantly, the contemporary spirit of volunteerism that Partners responded to was reinforced by the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. As the push for racial equality was then reaching critical mass, and as other grassroots domestic movements focused on gender equality, ethnic identity, and poverty, there was building enthusiasm for citizen activism. In this atmosphere, positive change seemed inevitable in many quarters. Before public cynicism was reborn in reaction to the Vietnam War, Watergate, and increasing CIA interventionism, a spirit of volunteerism was palpable. Partners’ volunteers from those earliest days frequently note the infectious nature of volunteerism. Importantly, their willingness to become leaders in inter-American collaboration gave momentum to a nascent partnership model that subsequent generations have followed.

They learn to make things “fly” by cultivating leaders at home and abroad and not leaving leadership to chance.

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Given that Partners began as a government-sponsored initiative, elected leaders in both U.S. states and in their Latin American counterparts played important roles in forming early chapters. Responding to the moment, governors across party affiliation asked well-regarded individuals to form chapters, and few refused. Drawn from the business community and higher education, the early leadership of the Texas Chapter had strong credentials and useful connections. With Stanley Marcus leading NAPA, the chapter had great support and much incentive to succeed. That the president of Peru in the early 1960s, Fernando Belaúnde Terry, was a graduate of the University of Texas (UT) also helped; he took personal interest in the Peruvian chapter as it formed. Though he would shortly be deposed by a military coup, from exile in Boston and Washington he remained a strong advocate for continued Texas-Peruvian collaboration. Though there were roadblocks, during more than 10 years of dictatorship, the partnership continued to forward an active and apolitical people-to-people agenda. When civilian rule was reestablished in the early 1980s, President Belaúnde was reelected to his former post. He continued to support the Peru-Texas partnership and celebrate its leaders who had supported localized democracy during dictatorship. Perseverance, he recognized, was a key quality of effective leadership.

Through chapter-based partnerships, volunteers have often developed new leadership roles in response to crisis. When an earthquake struck the northern coast of Peru in 1970, it killed 100,000 people and left communities and survivors in great need. The Texas Partners, skilled leaders in business and higher education, used their connections to organize relief efforts. The results were impressive, and they speak to the way broad networks can support partnerships. Communicating via ham radio, the Texans received local assessments of conditions and requests for aid. They acted quickly and became leaders in disaster relief in the process. Bob Honts, a volunteer who also chaired the Texas Jaycees, organized regional relief parties for Peru; tools, which were in great demand for rebuilding, were the price of admission, and across the state the Jaycees’ network supplied the need. When labor disputes with longshoremen delayed the loading of the shovels, hammers, generators, and supplies, the Texas Partners did it themselves. The crisis in Peru required them to adapt, take on

new roles, fill voids, and even fill shipping containers. Relief efforts were also forwarded when the chapter secured the assistance of movie star John Wayne, whose wife was of Peruvian descent; he filmed public appeals to air on television that encouraged donations. When the Neiman Marcus Company dedicated its annual fundraiser to the cause, the combined donations from Texas exceeded $1 million.

The early years of the Texas Partners demonstrate how the contemporary spirit of volunteerism induced many to serve in capacities they had never imagined. Skills that leaders from business and education brought to the new organization were valuable, and they willingly applied these skills to new areas as needed. Connections they brought to the chapter allowed them to build working relationships and to extend Partners’ network of support. The crisis in Peru also transformed leaders in business and higher education into effective leaders of citizen diplomacy.

Wisconsin-Nicaragua: Women and Leadership

From Indiana to Colorado and Jamaica to Ecuador, chapters founded in the first decade were usually led by prominent figures from the fields of business and higher education. Subsequently, however, leadership in most locales diversified, and after the founding decade, most chapter leaders have since risen from within the ranks of volunteers. Thus, it has been important for chapters to consciously build leadership from within. In this regard, the Wisconsin-Nicaragua Partners have been particularly effective. They cultivate leaders who excel at programming, building collaborative networks, and managing wide-ranging operations of their unique organization.

Sherin Bowen led the Wisconsin-Nicaragua Partners for many years and was master at cultivating leadership. She had raised a family on a central Wisconsin farm and returned to college when she became a grandmother. Graduating at the age of 54 with a degree in international development, she began to volunteer with Partners of the Americas. Helping other women find opportunity was her particular passion, and with its network of sewing/learning centers across Nicaragua, the Wisconsin-Nicaragua partnership was

a perfect outlet for her energies. When she later became the executive director of the organization, she used her position to attract new volunteers, keep them engaged, and cultivate effective leadership. She organized service trips that brought Wisconsin volunteers to the learning centers, and she invited everyone she knew (and did not know) to participate. Not everyone said yes right away, but Bowen was persistent and most eventually gave in. She recognized that everyone has something to offer and that leadership skills are learned through experience. Bringing newcomers to the learning centers (on their own dime!) was the first step in helping them to discover their own leadership potential. Under a model that continues to function, volunteers are asked to teach a lesson at the learning center they visit. Thus, these centers have served as incubators of leadership for both Nicaraguans and Wisconsinites.

In historical perspective, the Women’s Rights Movement that began in the 1960s introduced questions of gender and family into international development planning. Through that movement, there emerged greater consciousness that gender inequality marginalized women and limited the political, economic, and social potential of society as a whole. As emerging feminist perspectives empowered activism in the United States and around the globe, Partners’ impact was visible at all levels. Although males dominated chapter and organizational leadership through the early decades, women were volunteers from the start and their numbers were growing through the 1970s. The flourishing of linkages between universities and local chapters was especially significant in bringing female academics into Partners’ volunteer network; there, many have observed, women were more welcomed to direct projects and take leading roles than within their own university departments. Importantly, collaboration on women’s issues had developed organically among the volunteers and within their partnerships—just as had programs around environmental issues, educational and disability services, emergency preparedness, and agricultural improvement. Government was not the driving force, though it soon joined the efforts.

In the world of formal politics, pressure on the U.S. Congress by an expanding feminist lobby resulted in passage of the Percy Amendment in 1973. It mandated consideration of women’s issues

in foreign aid allocations, and within a couple of budgetary cycles its impact was felt. Partnership activities in women’s development increased as USAID and private grants became more plentiful. Across the 1980s and beyond, “Women in Development” became a significant policy theme in Partners’ relationship with government. As the gender systems of society altered, support from the private sector also increased. Projects in reproductive health could draw challenges in Latin America from powerful voices in church and state, so Washington diplomats usually kept a distance. But in the realm of people-to-people diplomacy, politics had less sway within communities. The activities within Partners’ volunteer network evidenced much need for these health programs, and the Hewlett Foundation offered grants to educate on reproductive issues. With the assistance of other private donors, Partners also supported chapter-based initiatives on domestic violence and prevention. This theme, too, could be a controversial one to address, especially with male-dominated police departments. But with local volunteers steering the effort, concerns for women’s reproductive health and for ending domestic violence could not be dismissed as foreign meddling.

Nicaragua’s sewing centers appeared in the early 1980s in the context of new collaboration around the issues of women and development. As the centers expanded in scope and became learning centers, empowering women remained a priority. Work and leadership skills gained in these centers have had life-changing impact on women and their families. With new skills, women find work opportunities, earn income, and discover new confidence to address life’s challenges. Many become leaders and agents of change in their own communities. Recently, several of the women, who had learned to sew in a learning center, organized a volunteer project that fills a desperate gap in local medical care. Using industrial-weight sewing machinery donated from Wisconsin, they work with a medical doctor to create precisely fitting compression garments for burn victims. The local hospitals have limited capacity in this area, and they turn away many who come with horrific burns. The project responded to a request from frustrated doctors who could not meet the needs of their patients; they recognized the skills local women had gained at the learning centers and worked with them to build a professional program. Volunteers have produced hundreds of these garments in the project’s

They cultivate leaders who excel at programming, building collaborative networks, and managing wide-ranging operations of their unique organization.

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first year, and each garment is expertly tailored to individual need. The Wisconsin Chapter has provided some financial support, but local women donate the labor. Amy Bowen-Wiza, program director for the Wisconsin-Nicaragua Partners, explains that well-intentioned development specialists “always talk about developing skills,” but they speak less about actual outcomes of skill-based programs. In the partnership between Wisconsin and Nicaragua, however, volunteers are always happy to discuss outcomes. The burn compression garments are just one example of the way Partners’ model produces outcomes that change lives.

While strong leadership on both ends of the Wisconsin-Nicaragua partnership has sustained working relationships, it has not always been easy. In the 1980s, Washington and Managua took opposing sides and faced off in war. Since then, amidst tensions that continue to divide the nation and challenge formal diplomacy, the two chapters have worked to maintain apolitical programs in local context. Wisconsin volunteers are taught to stay out of the fray because politics can prevent people-to-people collaboration. The Nicaraguan volunteers, on the other hand, have not often had the luxury of political neutrality; some support one side or the other, and many are caught in the volatile center. Thus, Wisconsin volunteers are encouraged to listen but to refrain from opinion making. Clear divisions exist within communities, but the organization has always been willing to work with all sides. In Chinandega, for example, there are two fire departments representing distinct political camps, but the Appleton volunteers have worked with both. The volunteers have provided fire equipment and training resources through emergency preparedness programs. They have also made donations to replace damaged musical instruments that had kept one fire department’s band silent since the war. Overcoming extreme political roadblocks to inter-American collaboration has only been possible because of the effective leadership and apolitical culture that the Wisconsin-Nicaragua Partners have cultivated.

Minnesota-Uruguay: Leadership by Design

Facing a range of challenges that can prevent functional partnerships, successful chapters have not left the task of leadership building to chance. Instead, they cultivate leadership by design because they are dependent on effective leaders to direct their chapters as organizations, build international partnerships, and guide their projects. Toward these ends, they make conscious efforts to connect with potential volunteers who demonstrate professional passion and willingness to serve. In providing new volunteers with access to networks of people who share interests, chapters support collaborative opportunities that are a result. In doing so, they consciously build leadership that can sustain their organization, energize partnerships through outcome-based projects, and impact communities at home and abroad. Among many others, the Minnesota chapter has a long tradition of success in cultivating leadership.

Rob Scarlett, president of the board of directors of the Minnesota-Uruguay Partners, notes, “efforts to build new leadership take a lot of work and a lot of time.” But he sees that it is worth it. As a strategy, the board identifies individuals whose interests and experience might be tapped in support of Partners’ broad mission. When invitations to join the chapter are accepted, the existing board engages new members in existing projects. Soon it encourages them to develop a project of their own. Selectively using available travel grants, it sends volunteers to Uruguay to foster new knowledge and working relationships within the partnership. Always thinking ahead to the next generation of organizational leadership, the chapter has structured its bylaws to require regular leadership changes. A defined system of leadership succession is in place, and this motivates the board to always be grooming leaders for new roles.

Eric Brand, who is a member of the Minnesota chapter and also serves on the international board of Partners of the Americas, was groomed for chapter leadership. Returning home after a decade in Washington, he had years of experience working with inter-American policy and nonprofit organizations. Identified as a potential volunteer, he was casually invited to join the chapter’s board. At his first meeting, Brand was amazed at the caliber of career professionals gathered around the

table. Among the group were individuals who were leaders in their fields: a researcher from the University of Minnesota, the warden of a state prison, health policy experts, and directors of local museums. He could identify them all, and he remembers being amazed to find them together “squirreled away in a little building working on inter-American issues.” As Brand understood from his own career, none was an expert in a Latin American field. Indeed, their professional pursuits and achievements were locally grounded in Minnesota. Yet, he recognized the dynamic potential of that group.

From within the Minnesota Chapter, individuals with professional passion and willingness to serve have led projects with powerful impact. Responding to requests from its Uruguay partners for assistance with prison reform, the board turned to Bruce McManus and Connie Roehrich. Nationally, Minnesota has been a leader in alternatives to incarceration, and the pair were career professionals with the Minnesota Department of Corrections. Together, they led an effort over several years that included conferences, training, and ongoing advising to meet Uruguay’s needs. Sharing their models and their experiences, they helped construct approaches to criminal justice that were adapted to the realities of prison in Montevideo. The impacts are ongoing, but one clear outcome has been the establishment of a successful parole system in the nation. Indicative of the power of partnership and the potential of leadership, Uruguay’s system has gained the attention of neighboring countries, which send their own representatives to Montevideo to learn.

In Minnesota and within Partners’ volunteer network, effective leadership has produced successful collaborations that cross great geographic distances. Yet, chapter leaders also harness local energy and inter-American resources to effect change closer to home. Montevideo, Uruguay has had a sister-city relationship with Montevideo, Minnesota for 110 years. The relationship started with an exchange of letters between mayors of the distant cities, and it predated President Eisenhower’s Sister Cities initiative by more than a half-century. Collaboration between Partners in metropolitan Minneapolis and Montevideo (Minnesota) has flourished as a result of the sister-city connection. The Minnesota Chapter has had a strong presence at local Montevideo’s annual Fiesta Days, which celebrate

its Uruguayan friendship. Over the years, Montevideo Minnesotans have joined the chapter and serve on its board; they often participate in meetings via Skype. And the Partners International Office in Washington has extended travel grants to encourage collaboration between artists and musicians from Montevideos of the North and the South. One project that explores African influences on Uruguayan music is providing new openings for the Minnesota Chapter to engage with African-American and immigrant Somali communities in Minneapolis. The chapter previously sent two Somali students as Minnesotan representatives to the World Youth Summit sponsored by Partners of the Americas in Barranquilla, Colombia. And continued local outreach by the chapter is planned as a way to use its unique position to build cultural bridges and strengthen community at home.

Kansas-Paraguay: Leadership and Democracy

Building democratic governance and strengthening it for the long term was a principle objective of the Alliance for Progress, and people-to-people partnership was charged with doing so at the local level. Chapters were not expected to lead broad electoral and legislative reforms but to model the functioning of democratic systems in local context. Interestingly, across five decades of inter-American partnerships, many chapters have done both. In this area, they have formed partnership with schools, civic institutions, community organizations, and local and national governments.

The work of the Kansas-Paraguay Partners is illustrative. Founded in 1968, their partnership began during the early years of a military dictatorship that ruled Paraguay for 35 years. The dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner embraced anti-communist rhetoric, and under the Cold War imperative that fueled contemporary U.S. foreign policy, it found influential allies at the highest levels in Washington. Stroessner’s turn away from democracy was not supported by U.S. diplomacy, but it was tolerated in the interest of containing communism. He and the other Latin American military rulers of the period understood a practical reality of U.S. diplomatic strategy: military aid would be extended to anti-communist regimes. Stroessner’s aggressive anti-communism would also serve to mute

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U.S. criticism of repression, violence, and antidemocratic practices. While historians debate U.S. culpability for human tragedies in Latin America’s Cold War, it is clear that Washington’s priorities did not then match its democratic rhetoric.

During Stroessner’s long rule, the Kansas-Paraguay Partners of the Americas collaborated on projects but kept their activities apolitical. For the Paraguayan volunteers, who endured a culture of terror, this was an absolute necessity. Projects implemented across the 1970s and 1980s followed the general pattern set by partnerships throughout the Americas; agriculture, health, disability, emergency preparedness, and culture were the key themes. In quietly cultivating leaders and empowering communities, however, the partnership kept the principles of democracy alive. The extensive student exchange program, which had begun to bring hundreds of young Paraguayanos to Kansas, made an important contribution as well. Study abroad provided a safe outlet for students who opposed Stroessner’s rule and passionately awaited the return to democracy. The Kansas Chapter, the university system, and host communities across the state served as models of democracy for students who would soon guide their nation’s transition from dictatorship. Democracy returned when Stroessner was forced into exile in 1989, and the Kansas-Paraguay Partners immediately assumed an important role in the transition. At that point, democratic tradition had been lost for two new generations of citizens, and reestablishing participatory citizenship was an essential first step. Assistance flowed from many nations, but the Kansas-Paraguay volunteers were in a unique position to assist.

Democracy is an imperfect system that needs popular support in order to maximize potential and serve the interests of citizens. In the United States, the League of Women Voters plays a crucial role in educating the public and facilitating electoral processes. Engaging with its local network, the Kansas Chapter enlisted the support of League volunteers in smoothing Paraguay’s transition. League members hosted Paraguayan women who arrived on travel grants. Touring them around civic institutions in the state, they shared their experiences, promoting voter participation and sponsoring candidate forums. Nan Wilson, who was a League member and subsequently became a volunteer for the Kansas Chapter, “had no idea” what she was getting into when

she agreed to host the visitors. For her and others in the League, what followed were trips to Uruguay to run workshops facilitated by Spanish translators. Working together over years, they encouraged Paraguayan women and men to see themselves as constituents, to be vocal participants in elections, and to build government that responded to citizens needs. Challenges remain, and the work is ongoing, but in supporting Paraguay’s return to democracy, Partners’ model has been powerfully functional. Chapter-based volunteers and their extended networks are cultivating leadership that strengthens communities at home and abroad.

As has occurred elsewhere in the wake of violence and repression, newly empowered citizens in Paraguay have made documentation of government abuses a national priority. For the nation, this is an important step in a long healing process, and from a historical perspective, it’s a safeguard for future generations. When the Archives of Human Rights was initiated by Paraguay’s Supreme Court, project managers turned to the Kansas volunteers for assistance in cataloguing digitized testimony and evidence of Stroessner’s repression. The request sparked interesting debates in the chapters as to whether such collaboration would violate apolitical intent. But considering that the project involved formal agreement with the nation’s Supreme Court, there was consensus that it would strengthen democracy. Thus were the Kansans very willing to participate.

After the fall of Stroessner, the Kansas-Paraguay Partners also engaged in strengthening social and cultural institutions that had suffered under the dictatorship. Assisting schools and hospitals but also historic sites and zoos, inter-American partnerships helped locals to reclaim pubic spaces and reverse cultures of fear. As the work of empowering individuals, building community, and strengthening democracy continues in Kansas and Paraguay, cultivating effective leadership remains a focus for Partners of the Americas.

Antioquia-Massachusetts: Institutional Linkages and Leadership

Volunteer organizations often face high turnover rates as the demands of professional careers and family responsibility make it difficult to sustain active participation. As not-for-profit organizations, chapters in Partners’ volunteer network have limited resources, and paid staff are the rare exception and not the rule. Support for chapters and their programs come from many sectors. Crucial human capital flows between paired chapters. Small grants are funneled from USAID, the Department of State, and the private sector through Partners International Office. In addition, local businesses, organizations, and philanthropies help to cover expenses that must be met. It is in combining available resources with hours of volunteer service that chapters sustain their productive agendas. However, making this model functional takes significant effort, and every chapter has experienced periods of both dynamic and diminished activity. Indeed, some chapters have endured periods of dormancy.

Historically, leadership is the key ingredient that has produced more highs than lows among chapters and partnerships. Because leadership brings vision, volunteerism, and resources together, cultivating it is a priority at all organizational levels. Noteworthy, energetic phases in the history of most chapters have occurred when dynamic leadership was in place on both ends of the partnership. However, these productive periods were also framed by strong connections between chapters and local institutions. As effective leaders built linkages to universities, schools, cultural institutions, and a range of other civic organizations, they deepened chapters’ local grounding and opened doors for sustained collaboration. As linkages drew new volunteers into the orbit of chapters, they fostered critical mass for initiatives that changed people’s lives. Professors, teachers, curators, administrators, and community leaders have joined the ranks of volunteers and found opportunities to pursue their passion to serve. The emerging institutional relationships expanded chapters’ community networks, making it more feasible to plan and host conferences, craft meaningful programs, reach diverse communities, and find innovative alternatives to addressing local needs. Across the hemisphere, some local institutions provided chapters with free office

space and others funded executive director positions or temporary staff. Many covered administrative costs with labor and supplies. For the chapters, such support has been invaluable.

Bill Reese, who served as president of Partners of the Americas from 1988 to 1998, appreciated the potential of chapter linkages with local institutions because he had seen it in action. When he first joined Partners’ staff in the early 1980s as director of development, he brought years of Peace Corps experience to the position; he had been a volunteer in Brazil and subsequently worked in Washington as a deputy director for the program. He understood that the challenges of sustaining volunteerism could be minimized through productive relationships between chapters and local institutions. He had seen this proven in the field—through informal encounters with Partners’ chapters in the Brazilian states of Pernambuco and Minas Gerais. Impressed by the potential of such partnerships, he had even encouraged Peace Corps administrators to adopt it as strategy. In Brazil, working relationships with local universities, schools, and museums energized Partners’ volunteers, increased chapter membership, took programming in new directions, and established networks of support for future collaboration. During his almost two decades in leadership at Partners, Reese made institutional linkages his primary concern. He recognized that the benefits of such connections were tremendous for chapters, but he also saw that they were equally beneficial for civic institutions and the communities they served. Within Partners’ volunteer network, that fact was evident.

In Colombia, linkages between EAFIT University and the Antioquia Partners developed quickly. As the chapter and the university were each founded in the early 1960s in the city of Medellín, both joined citizens in efforts to reverse the horrific cycles of violence that had plagued the nation since the 1940s. Though the university and the chapter took distinct approaches to solving societal problems, their visions converged and they collaborated often. A shared mission grounded the relationship. Both sought to raise the standard of living in and around Medellín, and they placed faith in the power of education to transform. They shared strong commitment to participatory citizenship, and in their own ways advocated for

Chapter-based volunteers and their extended networks are cultivating leadership that strengthens communities at home and abroad.

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democratic governance that would respond to all segments of society. As they projected optimism, both embraced knowledge, science, and technology as tools.

Across Latin America, education systems entered an important phase of transformation and expansion in the second half of the 20th century. High demand for educational resources among the growing middle and professional classes fueled much local collaboration with chapters in Partners’ network. Decades earlier, through community-based efforts, the U.S. education system was expanded, and as high school graduation became the norm, the nation enjoyed the highest standard of living in the world. This transformation was not lost on educators in other parts of the hemisphere. In fact, many believed the United States offered educational models that could be adapted and emulated in their own communities. Thus, Partners’ volunteer network appeared at a time when enthusiasm for inter-American educational collaboration was strong and extensive linkages between chapters and local universities, schools, and professional organizations proliferated.

In Medellín, EAFIT University directly benefited from the Antioquia Chapter’s partnership with Massachusetts, a state that had always been a national leader in education. EAFIT professors Alvaro Estrada and Bernardo Perez took active roles leading the local chapter and piloting projects. They established connections with faculties in several universities and colleges in metropolitan Boston. These university linkages provided the chapters and their partnership with new leadership, new volunteers, and crucial organizational and administrative support. In building inter-American connections, Estrada and Perez were clearly forwarding the mission of Partners, but they were also fulfilling an explicit policy objective of their employer, EAFIT: fostering ties between their young university and schools, institutions, and organizations abroad. Chapter volunteers in Medellín also built important linkages to the University of Antioquia, and over decades that public university became the first line of support for chapter initiatives. The majority of Partners’ local volunteers are alumni of the school, and they forge strong ties for the chapter.

Linkages to the Centro Colombo-Americano de Medellín have also furthered collaboration and support for the chapter. The BNC was founded in the 1940s under the new program of cultural diplomacy that was coordinated by Nelson Rockefeller and the OIAA. Like Partners of the Americas, the BNC had been founded at a moment when U.S. government interest in people-to-people diplomacy was strong. A local institution run by an independent board, the “Colombo” has promoted Colombian-U.S. understanding through education and the arts for more than 60 years. For much of that time, it has provided the Antioquia Chapter with office and meeting space, classrooms, and crucial administrative services. Perhaps most importantly, it has a tradition of facilitating collaboration between the chapters in Antioquia and Massachusetts. With its own wide network of educators and contacts, the cultural center has often provided human and material resources that make cross-border dialogues, intercultural exchange, and local programming possible.

In Colombia, as elsewhere in Latin America, there are no easy solutions to challenges of modernity. Yet, in the late 20th century, that nation confronted problems that few others have faced. The city of Medellín and the Department of Antioquia share a proud history. Blessed with an agreeable climate, stunning geography, and a wealth of natural resources, the region was built by industrious and civic-minded folk who embraced modernity by planning for it. To those who understand the local culture and its strong traditions, Antioquia’s early and enthusiastic embrace of Partners’ people-to-people model comes as no surprise. In the 1960s, the formation of local volunteer chapter was an opportunity to address problems in new ways and to work proactively in community development. The model functioned very well for two decades, but it was seriously tested during the 1980s. At that time and continuing for years, Antioquia and many regions of Colombia were torn apart by the bloody violence of the inter-American drug trade. In Medellín, all sectors of society felt the terrible impact as a culture of fear replaced the traditional culture of community. Government was paralyzed, and the threat that the city might disintegrate was very real.

In the two decades of conflict that followed, Medellín, Antioquia, and Colombia persevered, and this was in no small measure attributable to the efforts of leaders at the community level. The volunteers of the Antioquia Chapter offered much leadership. With every reason to be pessimistic, these volunteers stuck to their mission of improving the quality of life for citizens in their community. Certainly, they recognized their limits. They could not stop the drug trade or end the war it brought to their streets, but they could continue to model civic engagement. Through their community-based projects in drug prevention, disability services, HIV/AIDS education, recycling and environmental protection, youth empowerment, conflict resolution, and cultural exchange, they staked claims to sanity and rejected chaos. While others gave up, they used their partnership with Massachusetts, their linkages to universities and the local BNC, and their access to Partners’ broad network of development professionals to effect change. In a period when embassies in Bogotá banned employee travel to Medellín and when NGOs departed for safer fields, Partners of the Americas maintained a strong presence.

Gabriel Márquez Vélez first volunteered with the local Colombian chapter in the troublesome days of the 1980s. While subsequently serving as president of the board of directors, he continued to build strong institutional linkages for the chapter. In recent years, this has produced generous support from Fundauniban, a charitable foundation that promotes community development in Colombia’s banana growing region—and an organization that Márquez himself directs. Because he lived through Colombia’s chaos of the late 20th century, Márquez knows well the debilitating impact that fear can have on communities. He understands that “difficult times can lead to despair.” But through his experience with the local chapter of Partners and with the broad network of support it has built at home and abroad, he knows that the most difficult circumstances “can also breed hope.”

As the inter-American drug trade and the war to stop it have shifted northward toward the U.S. border, the city of Medellín is playing a fascinating role in assisting impacted cities. Medellín’s local government, institutions, and civic organizations are in dialogue

with their counterparts in Cuidad Juarez, Mexico—a city that is now suffering much violence from the trade. The Antioquia Chapter has been directly involved in these conversations and through Partners’ travel grants has sent local experts to Mexico to participate in workshops and share their experiences. There is much to learn from the way local organizations and engaged citizens successfully confronted fear in Medellín and Colombia, and Partners’ model proves a functional vehicle for connecting resources and need. Travelers from Colombia offer valuable insight to professional and neighborhood groups in Juarez for keeping communities in balance. In doing so, they breed hope and demonstrate the power of partnership.

In Antioquia and Massachusetts, New Jersey and Haiti, New York’s Long Island and the Caribbean’s St. Vincent, the mission of Partners of the Americas has been forwarded through linkages to civic institutions and the professionals that staff them. Universities, schools, hospitals, museums, philanthropies, and foundations have joined with local chapters to lead their communities forward. Adding to the North–South partnerships that ground Partners’ history, institutional linkages spark new partnerships that have powerful impact and lives of their own. To the extent that Partners of the Americas’ volunteer network links to local institution, the power of partnership grows exponentially.

The majority of Partners’ local volunteers are alumni of the school, and they forge strong ties for the chapter.

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Leadership, Networks, and MissionFrom 1970 forward, the staff of Partners of the Americas in Washington was charged with supporting and strengthening its volunteer network. Staffers’ immediate task was to help build working relationships that would make the chapter-based model functional. To this end, they facilitated communication and travel, assisted with project logistics, connected volunteers with resources, and sought funding to make it all happen. In the short term, the model demonstrated much promise. Inter-American collaboration came easy because the logic of the pairings worked; it connected communities with shared interests and experiences and created clear avenues for engagement. A spirit of volunteerism continued to define the era, and that helped to fuel activity as well. Humanitarian responses to poverty and natural disaster were also powerful in drawing distant partners together.

For the long term, however, the goal of sustaining partnerships would not be as easy. Leadership was needed at all levels of the organization: to coordinate and implement projects, organize and direct chapters, build and expand networks, and guide the Washington staff. With a grant from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation in 1980, the Partners International Office in Washington took a more direct approach to cultivating leadership. A new fellowship program paid tremendous dividends in strengthening partnerships, building networks, and increasing Partners’ capacity to change lives.

The Kellogg Fellowships in International Development

For two decades, the Kellogg Foundation provided generous support to cultivate leaders who accelerated and diversified inter-American partnerships. Organized by Partners of the Americas, the Kellogg Fellowships in International Development gathered groups of young professionals from across the Americas and fostered their capacity to solve problems. Education was an important element of the program, which brought fellows together three times a year for two-week seminars. In locations throughout the hemisphere, fellows examined the infrastructure of international development, compared theories and practices, and observed models in action. They also explored the complex dynamics of inter-American relations and gained comfort maneuvering within them. As a capstone to their fellowship experience, each participant formulated and piloted a project to address a local need. Upon completion of the program, fellows had new knowledge and skills, but just as significant were the new networks of professional contacts they had built.

Connecting individuals and organizations that share common interest is a critical stage in community development projects, and Partners’ chapter-based model was formulated to facilitate such contacts. By design, North–South networking became the fuel to spark productive partnerships, and it has been doing so for 50 years. Yet, while building networks had always been important in Partners’ mission, it gained new priority through the Kellogg Kellogg Fellows in International Development program and through Partners’ emerging role as a development agency.

The connection between the Kellogg Foundation and Partners of the Americas was established through Dr. Norm Brown. In the 1970s, Brown was then Michigan State Director for 4-H and an agriculture professor at Michigan State University. Involved in youth education and development initiatives since the start of the 20th century, 4-H had an enormous network of chapters across Michigan and throughout the rural United States. Brown’s professional pursuits and personal passions matched well with the activities of the Michigan-Belize Partners, and he soon joined the Michigan group as a volunteer.

The benefits of Brown’s energies and the utility of his network of contacts (in academia, agriculture, and civic organizations) were tremendous for the Michigan-Belize Partners. Through his efforts at building partnerships, he created a 4-H network in Belize and later extended it to the Dominican Republic. He also convinced the Michigan-based Kellogg Foundation to start a fellowship program that would cultivate leadership among Partners’ volunteers. Brown, who two decades later served as president of Partners of the Americas in Washington, directed the fellowship program during it first years. He was a master at connecting individuals, institutions, organizations, and government agencies, and thus, Partners began to place greater resources into broadening its professional networks.

Four hundred individuals completed the Kellogg Fellows in International Development program over two decades with new groupings beginning every other year. For the 40 individuals in each group—20 from Latin America and 20 from the United States—the program required a tremendous commitment of time. Nominated through local chapters, and selected by an independent committee, fellows brought wide-ranging experience to the program. In their young careers, some were educators, scientists, lawyers, medical and health professionals, artists, and politicians. They came from diverse cultures and spoke different languages, and at the outset they seemed to have little in common. Yet, to chapters that nominated them, all had demonstrated leadership skills or tremendous potential for them. And as they came together for their first group seminars, another commonality quickly became obvious: all had deep interest in solving problems in their communities. Still, while they collectively had passion to serve and desire to help change lives, most did not know how to go about doing it.

A key priority of the Kellogg Fellowships was cultivating new leadership for Partners’ volunteer network, and the program met and exceeded this goal. With new confidence, knowledge, and connections, many fellows assumed active roles in local chapters. They took leadership positions, organized new projects, and connected volunteers to the networks and resources of international development. On completion of her fellowship, Danielle Saint-Lot strengthened her chapter in Haiti by professionalizing its practices and

making it a legal entity. She was energized and empowered to serve, and her volunteer efforts were focused around rural development. At the same time, the fellowship informed her professional career. The contacts she made and strategies she learned were useful in her work coordinating NGO efforts at decreasing poverty in Haiti. Fellow Alex Truesdell, who headed the Adaptive Device Center at the Perkins School for the Blind outside Boston, worked with the Massachusetts-Antioquia Partners to share her successful program. Building on her fellowship, she connected with schools in Colombia and across the globe, and she extended her functional model for designing adaptive technology for the disabled. Through their efforts, Truesdell, Saint-Lot, and hundreds of fellows brought new direction and new leadership to chapters.

Other fellows were less active in the chapters, but they became important members of an extended network of professionals with whom Partners has often since collaborated. Many of these fellows started new projects within the community and government agencies that employed them; some others founded independent organizations that addressed community needs. Combined, the Kellogg Fellows alumni, whether inside or outside chapters, created schools for children and adults with disabilities, neighborhood health clinics, HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns, substance abuse treatment centers, and environmental conservation projects. Initiatives they implemented, committees they formed, and NGOs they partnered with provided job training for disadvantaged women, recreational outlets for teenagers at risk, leadership development and scholarship opportunities for youth, and recycling programs that changed both the look and outlook of neighborhoods. Hundreds of projects, large and small, resulted from the fellowships. Some have continued for decades, and many have expanded beyond their original scope. In cultivating leadership, the Kellogg Fellowships strengthened the chapter-based model, built new networks of development professionals, and changed the landscape of communities throughout the Americas.

Hundreds of projects, large and small, resulted from the fellowships.

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Passion and Leadership

Before she became a volunteer, Dr. Denise Decker was aware of Partners of the Americas through her work for USAID. A speaker of English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, her communication skills made her a valued employee in the agency’s Office of Disaster Relief. She remembers gradually learning about the activities of two local chapters; the U.S. capital is paired with Brasilia and Virginia is paired with Santa Catarina in Southern Brazil. Over time, she would become an active member of both. Her early interest in volunteering with the Washington, DC Chapter was driven in part by a desire to use her language background. She has always appreciated opportunities to converse in Portuguese, a language she had taught herself to speak. In initially joining the group, however, she also was attracted to the Partners’ model because it allowed volunteers to discover and pursue their passions. After volunteering for several years, Decker was nominated for a Kellogg Fellowship. In 1994, she broke new ground as the first blind woman to participate in the program.

Partners of the Americas has a long history of supporting individuals with disabilities, and Decker was aware of that history through her work with USAID. She was confident that Partners would be a welcoming environment because it had led efforts to support disabled populations “before it was popular to do so.” Since joining, she has found it to be a place where her voice is “heard,” and she notes that for the disabled “that doesn’t happen in all organizations.” With the knowledge and the connections she acquired through the fellowship, and with the encouragement and support of her local chapters, she became a leader who advances opportunity for those with disabilities. Decker’s experience as a fellow led to projects helping disabled communities in both Brazil and the United States. Collaborating with others, she offered workshops and cofounded a Brazilian learning center that has trained hundreds of volunteers. Significantly, her innovative approach to training enlists disabled individuals as teachers. As such, she seeks to empower those who have often been marginalized. She cultivates new leadership.

During her travels to Kellogg Fellowship seminars, Decker was always accompanied by Quadrant, her guide dog. In a period when such

animals were not common in Latin America, the pair educated a curious public. In Brazil, Quadrant became a minor celebrity and his photo graced the cover of a local newspaper. Decker loved the attention because it provided an opportunity for learning. Subsequently, she wrote Canine Angel: Quadrant’s Story. The book, which details how service animals can be integrated into daily living, was translated into Portuguese (free of charge) by a Brazilian university. To people across the Americas, it is available in written and voice-recorded form, and it is distributed free to those with disability.

Leadership and the Evolving Model

Partners of the Americas has had a long-term presence in northern and southern communities for half a century, and its longevity is not a fluke. From the 1960s forward, its chapter-based model grounded inter-American collaboration in local realities. Community members and not outsiders know best the problems they faced, so Partners’ model relied heavily on local assessment of realities and needs. It paired chapters to build collaborative relationships and created critical mass for getting things done. And it supported emerging leaders.

While local grounding and long-term presence account for much of Partners’ longevity, the model constantly evolved. Over time, cultivation of leadership and building of networks became essential strategies for sustaining effective partnership, and the Kellogg Fellowships program was instrumental in this process. Over the program’s 20-year run, fellows energized chapters, partnerships, communities, and civic organizations through new initiatives. They became new leaders who directed projects and forwarded solutions. Just as significant, the fellowship program also positioned the conscious cultivation of leadership as a new priority for Partners of the Americas. From the start of the fellowship and in the 15 years since it has ended, Partners has not left leadership development to chance. Following the lead of its chapters and building on the Kellogg experience, Partners has been more aggressive in cultivating leaders. Indeed, it makes cultivation of leadership a central component of each of its projects.

Additionally, Partners’ experience with the Kellogg Fellowships revealed another important avenue for strengthening the model: there was great utility to building broad networks of development professionals with which Partners’ chapters, partnerships, and staff could collaborate. For at least two decades, paired chapters had been building their own collaborative relationship with universities, civic institutions, government agencies, and NGOs. They constructed linkages to civic institutions with whom they shared vision, mission, and resolve. Through these collaborations, they built networks for solving problems and changing lives. As a result of the Kellogg Fellowships, organizational focus on networking accelerated. Fellows built professional connections and used them to create productive partnerships, and their efforts underscored both the value and the untapped potential of broad networks. Particularly as a communications revolution was then getting under way, it became clear that new and more diverse networks were beginning to influence inter-American relations. While Partners’ commitment to its chapter-based model had not diminished, it was beginning to define partnership in broader terms. The mission remained the same, but the model was evolving. Leadership development and network building were now priorities. Partners of the Americas was continuing to adapt with the times.

Don Sebastian and the Leadership VoidIn Brazil, they tell the story of Don Sebastian, who disappeared in battle in 1578. Sebastian was the king of Portugal (and its colony of Brazil), and his absence from the throne caused great anguish among his subjects. Yet, without a body as proof, many refused to accept the reality of his death. They were convinced that he would one day return—that he would reappear to lead the kingdom once again. Sebastian was a popular monarch, and many, who never gave up hope, eagerly awaited him. But those who waited were waiting for a lifetime. While a variety of imposters would appear and make claim to the throne in an attempt to fill the leadership void, Don Sebastian was never seen again.

Directed by private citizens who know local conditions first-hand, and drawing support from partnered chapters and collaborative networks, Partners’ people-to-people model has empowered generations of volunteers to effect change. When it was first introduced throughout the Americas, Partners’ approach often represented a significant departure from tradition. It advised citizens to act to solve their own problems. It rejected Sebastianismo (or waiting endlessly for government leadership to appear) in all its forms. It encouraged individuals to assume leadership roles and tackle the problems in the neighborhoods, towns, and cities where they lived. On its 50th anniversary, Partners of the Americas continues to counsel citizens across the hemisphere to avoid the pitfall of Sebastianismo. Those who wait for government to solve their problems may be waiting for a lifetime.

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Youthfulness in PernambucoGrowing up in the State of Pernambuco on Brazil’s northeastern coast, Tiberio Monteiro regular-ly passed the headquarters for the local chapter of Partners of the Americas. Coming and going from school in the capital city of Recife, Monteiro had only vague notions of the activities that went on in the building, but he was very curious about its architectural style. The modest house was unlike any other houses in the area.

There were no high walls to block views of the property, and this left the front garden open and accessible to the street. The design encouraged passers-by to glance and ponder, and a neat pathway welcomed them to the front door. Most unusual, that door was framed by a small portico with two large columns. Very rare in the area, such columns were reminiscent of an architectural style that was common in the U.S. South and in the State of Georgia.

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Before Monteiro’s birth and continuing since in Pernambuco, thousands of locals have been impacted by the work of Partners of the Americas. At the community level, lives have been changed in small and not so small ways. Around the themes of education, leadership, and youth, and in such diverse areas as sport, emergency preparedness, and artistic exchange, the local volunteers and their Georgian partners have had an active agenda for decades. By any measure, their impact has been great. But in the past and present, Partners’ activities have not been well known among the general population. Historically, volunteerism draws few headlines, even where powerful inter-American partnerships improve quality of life. Thus, it was not surprising that a young Monteiro knew little of the work that volunteers had been doing for decades. And he was hardly alone. By intent, Partners’ volunteers have not sought spotlights. They have been too busy with professional careers and family lives to waste their generous volunteer hours on self-promotion. With limited time and equally limited resources, they have committed to the mission and set about carrying it out. Characteristically, volunteers tightly focus on tasks at hand.

When the Pernambuco Chapter was founded in 1968, members envisioned it as an effective force for local change and were particularly enthusiastic for collaboration with their partners in Georgia in the realm of education. Across the mid-century decades, in Brazil and throughout Latin America, demand for educational services had been rapidly increasing among citizens. Although classrooms and resources could not come quickly enough to meet high demand from all social sectors, faith in the power of education to transform society was much in evidence. As new classrooms appeared for the youth of the nation, the rising middle class benefitted more than the impoverished majority; still, many saw new educational and training programs as a means to overcome challenges and unleash personal and national potential. Whether educational programs would be formal or informal, traditional or alternative, private or community-based, Brazilians increasingly recognized them as the key to their futures. In and around Recife, partnership with Georgia was most welcomed in part because it would bring new educational opportunities.

Just a few years before the partnership was initiated, a military coup established dictatorship in Brazil and diminished citizens’ voices in

governance. This strike against democracy occurred in Cold War context and lasted for over two decades. The new military rulers strategically justified their actions as anti-communism, and this blunted Washington’s criticism of the coup and allowed U.S. aid to flow. While promising modernity and quick return to civilian rule, a succession of military presidents ruled with heavy hands for more than two decades. Significantly, dictatorship met tremendous resistance from a new generation of students; Brazilian youth, especially university students, were newly empowered by the nation’s expanding education system. In clashes with the military, they offered a range of alternative visions for national development and governance.

During these turbulent years, chapters of Partners of the Americas flourished across Brazil, and in historical perspective, it is clear that Partners offered a powerful outlet for citizen activism at the community level. Against the pessimistic turn in national politics, local optimism prevailed. With the assistance of Georgians and Partners’ broad network of collaborators (especially USAID), the Pernambuco Chapter encouraged participatory citizenship as national leaders discouraged it. The headquarter house in Recife, known locally as Casa Georgia, was built during these years. Land was donated to the chapter by the city, and the house was constructed with community support.

High levels of activity marked the first decades of the Pernambuco Chapter, and relationships with Georgians were established via planeloads of teachers, farmers, musicians, and business people. In Georgia, that chapter annually chartered a plane, filled it to capacity, and flew it to Recife; participants enjoyed 10-day visits to Brazil’s Northeast and this included homestays that resulted in new friendships and partnership projects. Upon arrival in Brazil, the chartered plane was immediately reloaded with locals, who traveled to the North to visit Georgia during the same 10-day period. While the program was for adults, and the ages of the travelers ranged considerably, all participants radiated “young” energy: willingness to fly off on an adventure, stay in the homes of people they did not know, take a chance on friendship, and be optimists. Jimmy Carter, then governor of Georgia, offered enthusiastic support for these exchanges. When he later assumed the U.S. Presidency, Carter assisted the Georgia

Partners in expanding their exchange model. The exchange program soon became an independent organization, the Friendship Force, which has since expanded across the globe to more than 60 countries and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The history of the Friendship Force, with its origins in the first days of the Georgia and Pernambuco partnership, is a testament to the potential of public–private collaboration and the power of people-to-people partnerships.

Across Latin America, the second half of the 20th century saw explosive population growth, and as new generations confronted old challenges, much of the collaboration between inter-American partnerships revolved around youth. As Brazil’s population has tripled over Partners’ 50 years, the work of volunteers, like the nation’s age demographic, has skewed toward youth. Planes full of adults aside, the Pernambuco-Georgia partnership has always focused directly and indirectly on youth issues. They have explicitly recognized the power of young people to lead generational change. As such, they actively engaged with Partners’ PREP and PATH programs to bring disabled youth in from society’s margins. They supported art projects and cultural exchanges in partnerships with schools and universities. They built programs around soccer, swimming, tennis, and basketball, and they sent young professionals to be Kellogg Fellows. In both Pernambuco and Georgia, they aggressively built university linkages to support youth programs as well as to spark new initiatives to address public health and educational challenges of children. Reflecting a historical pattern of Partners’ model, such linkages not only supported chapter-based programs but sparked independent collaborations that have had productive lives of their own. Like the chartered planes that became the Friendship Force, many new and independent community organizations, NGOs, educational and health programs, and youth empowerment initiatives began in the orbit of the Pernambuco-Georgia Partners.

By the time Tiberio Monteiro learned about the work of the Pernambuco-Georgia partnership and could place the house with the Georgian columns in wider context, he was a young career professional in the first century of a new millennium. After studying law in a local university and receiving a master’s degree in international development in Pennsylvania, he accidently connected to Partners

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in an entirely modern way: an email from the local chapter that encouraged proposals for small project grants had been misdirected to him. It was serendipity. The young professor who was analyzing the role of NGOs in Brazilian development connected with the Pernambuco Chapter and soon helped it to address a challenge that all volunteer organizations face—how to sustain membership.

After more than 30 years, the membership of the local chapter was aging. And while the skills and experience of long-serving volunteers had always been fundamental to success, finding the next generation of leaders was necessary. Monteiro soon brought a group of his students to the house with the curious columns. Under his guidance, they analyzed the chapter and made recommendations for sustaining its mission. In carrying out the plan, Monteiro assumed a leadership role within the chapter. Much had changed in Brazil, in the Americas, and across the globe since the late 1960s, so he professionalized operations and established the chapter as a legal NGO. Like their counterparts throughout the hemisphere, the Pernambuco Partners had always been adapting to the times, and their future-focused programming had facilitated local communities in doing the same. Thus, far from a departure with tradition, Monteiro’s efforts at reorganization played out on the continuum of adaptation that had made the chapter-based model so successful for decades.

Helping the volunteer organization to find its modern identity,

Monteiro launched new events to connect to local and international organizations, institutions, and nonprofit groups that worked in community development. Bringing “new blood” and youthful perspective into the chapter was a goal, but his plan did not turn away from the long-term membership. To the contrary, it recharged that membership by bringing back inactive volunteers. Monteiro even created a new consulting board that was formed by older members with decades of experience, knowledge, and connections. Keeping the work of the chapter locally grounded and reenergizing relationships that had sustained Partners’ long-term presence in Pernambuco, Monteiro cultivated new leadership, built broader networks for collaboration, and encouraged new forms of partnership. As volunteers had been doing since the first inter-American partnerships had formed, he was fostering the evolution of Partners’ model.

Viewed in the context of Partners of the Americas’ 50 years of people-to-people diplomacy, Pernambuco’s experiences reveal the centrality of youth to the organizational mission. Taking a long-term approach, Partners’ programs focus less on immediate solutions and more on generational change. As such, programming is often directly but always indirectly focused on youth and their challenges. Reaching out to youth through educational and leadership programs is a priority because long-term change can only be sustained when generations are committed to it. Youth also have an important role to play in leadership of chapters and partnerships; without engaging the next generation, volunteerism cannot be sustained. But while youthful energy, optimism, and adventurous spirit drive Partners’ work, these qualities are not purely a function of age. Indeed, they are qualities that are often found in volunteers who departed from youth decades ago. In Partners’ long history, retired professionals, who join as new volunteers, have been just as likely as youth to move chapters and partnerships in new and modern directions. Significantly, they have been just as likely to recognize those new opportunities and realities that have fostered the evolution of Partners’ successful model.

Programs for Youth Immediately after World War II in the first days of the Cold War, the birth of the Fulbright program signaled continuing U.S. enthusiasm for cultural exchange. Though OIAA had then been dismantled, it had in the course of the war established cultural diplomacy and people-to-people programs as important to U.S. foreign relations. Together with continuing federal support for BNCs and American Schools Abroad, the passage of the Fulbright legislation indicated that the cultural turn in foreign affairs was not temporary. As the Fulbright exchange program evolved, it moved scholars, teachers, and high school students into the United States and sent Americans abroad. By the 1950s, additional programs were started through public–private partnerships. Youth for Understanding was founded to engage youth in Germany’s post-war recovery; the program, which later was expanded to the world, brought German students to the United States to help develop binational trust within the younger generation. Subsequently, as the Iron Curtain marked more distinct cultural boundaries in Europe and communism spread in East Asia, President Eisenhower inspired the People-to-People Student Ambassador program and started his Sister Cities initiative. From the 1950s forward, people-to-people diplomacy grew as both the Department of State and USIA funded cultural exchanges that sent U.S. musicians, artists, theater groups, dance troupes, and sports teams on global tours.

Beginning in the early 1970s, the Department of State extended education and culture grants to Partners of the Americas. The funding covered transportation costs that moved volunteers between partnered chapters, and for over four decades that support has continued. It has been expanded to provide seed money for small projects that develop within chapters and to create collaborative activities that strengthen partnerships. As a requirement of the Department of State’s travel grants, visitors have always stayed in the homes of local volunteers. Indeed, in all chapter-based travel, Partners builds people-to-people contacts not in hotels and restaurants but in kitchens, living rooms, on front porches, and in neighborhood streets. Homestays are a mainstay of Partners’ approach to cultural exchange, and in collaboration with the Department of State, this builds mutual

understanding and working relationships for the long term. While the Department of State’s Education and Culture Grants have most often gone to adults, participants have frequently been educators who work with youth. The grants have also supported teacher-in-residence and artist-in-residence exchanges. These programs have been specifically designed to reach out to youth, and they have been coordinated with local educational and cultural institutions; in Latin America, BNCs often serve as hosts.

Cultural Exchanges: Broadening Horizons for University Youth

Partners’ long history with university exchanges grew directly out of relationships between its chapters. Arkansas’ volunteers have been especially successful in bringing students from the eastern lowlands of Bolivia into its university system. Inspired by Senator Fulbright, Arkansas’ educators embraced international education in the 1940s, and their schools and universities aggressively pursued connections with the world. Therefore, by 1965, when the Arkansas-Eastern Bolivia partnership formed, higher education exchange was an immediate and logical theme for partnership activities. There, as in Kansas and dozens of other chapter states, volunteers made enrollment in U.S. universities feasible for generations of Latin American youth. Thus alumni from the University of Arkansas (U of A) are plentiful in Bolivia, and Razorback logos are found on sweatshirts and bumper stickers from Santa Cruz to Sucre. Those alumni join thousands of other university graduates from Latin America—like the more than 1,000 Salvadorans who have studied at Louisiana State University through the efforts of the Louisiana-Salvador partnership—in spreading mutual understanding throughout the hemisphere.

University exchanges have constituted a tremendous base for productive inter-American partnership and have fostered greater trust in bilateral relations. Over two generations past, the impact of these exchanges on both formal diplomatic and informal people-to-people collaboration has been high, and it is reinforced with each cycle of new graduates. Historically, chapters and their university partners have garnered much support from the public and private sectors to fund their exchange programs. Convinced of the benefits

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of introducing cultural diversity within their state’s university systems, legislatures across the United States have regularly approved in-state tuition rates for incoming students from partnership countries. Businesses and governments in Latin America have also been supportive. In the early 1980s, for example, the philanthropic division of the Atlantic-Richfield Oil Company in Brazil provided scholarships to subsidize students interested in studying engineering and environmental sciences in the United States.

In the last two decades, foreign exchange programs for U.S. high school and university students have become big business. While some are operated for profit and quality of programs varies greatly, interested youth now have a wide range of options for study abroad. Increasing participation rates in foreign exchange bode well for future U.S. relations with the world, but relatively few U.S. students choose to study in Latin America. At a moment, when Latinos represent an increasing percentage of the U.S. population and account for more than half of the total U.S. population growth over the last decade, the benefits of increasing North–South student exchange are multiple. Thus, Partners is now leading the effort to increase such exchange through the Obama administration’s 100,000 Strong in the Americas initiative. Presently, university enrollees from Asian countries outnumber Latin American and Caribbean students in U.S. universities by a factor of 10, and more students from Vietnam study in the United States than students from Mexico. With long-term institutional linkages everywhere in the region, Partners is clearly in a unique position to deliver on the goal of reinvigorating North-to-South and South-to-North movements among students.

Multiple historical factors account for the geographic imbalance that characterizes inter-American educational exchange. Most significant, the United States became the world leader in higher education during the last century because its universities developed programs in science, social science, and technology that addressed modern challenges. As compared to traditional programs of higher education in Europe and Latin America that catered to the career paths of the elite, U.S. universities offered more flexible programs of study that met practical needs. Thus, a movement of Latin Americans into the United States higher education began in the World War II era.

Subsequently, as Latin American education systems experienced rapid growth during the late 20th century, demand for quality programs was always greater than supply. Satisfying demand, the United States has remained a primary destination for some Latin American students. Yet, in recent decades, as quality educational options have expanded in Latin America, tuition costs in U.S. universities have skyrocketed. Combined, these developments have stunted South-to-North student migrations and will likely, over the long run, negatively impact levels of mutual understanding within the Americas. Of equal concern is the limited enrollment of U.S. students in Latin American institutions. Though Partners has been successfully channeling some U.S. students into Latin American universities for decades, North-to-South movement of students is minimal; the relatively low priority second-language acquisition has had in U.S. secondary schools along with concerns over political instability and violence in the region explain this. As Partners works to establish new trends through the 100,000 Strong initiative, new emphasis on Spanish in U.S. schools, improved Latin American economies, and increased political stability in the region have opened the doors of possibility for greater balance in university-level inter-American student exchange.

Partners’ High School Generations

Beginning in the 1960s, Partners’ university-level student exchanges grew organically from institutional linkages chapters built with faculty. Similarly, high school exchanges were an outgrowth of efforts by educators that embraced people-to-people collaboration. The Maryland-Rio de Janeiro Partners, with early ties to public schools in metropolitan Baltimore, ran a highly successful exchange program during its first decade. Almost 500 high school students participated, and bucking the developing trend, they sent many more students to the South than came to the North. Other chapters joined these efforts and established their own youth exchanges in partnership with schools, educators, and local community organizations. Many other chapters expressed interest in exchanges but struggled with how best to structure them; plans for sending minors to distant lands were certainly more challenging than exchanges of university students and faculty. Supporting early efforts, Partners’ professional

staff collaborated with Youth for Understanding to offer workshops and encouraged networking in this realm. With collaborative encouragement and support, active programs quickly emerged.

The partnership between Oregon and Costa Rica has been built around a commitment to bilingual education. High school exchanges between the partnered chapters began when a Spanish teacher traveled to the Costa Rica Chapter in 1965. Over the last half-century, almost 1,000 students have participated in these exchanges and an estimated 20,000 students, families, teachers, and community members have been directly impacted. Lengths of stay have varied over the decades, and the program has adapted to changing realities. With the collective involvement of over 100 Oregon schools, the program has always been grounded by educational objectives. Southbound Oregonians, for example, have usually been students of Spanish, and the program balances language-learning goals with adventure of travel. In Costa Rica, visiting students often teach lessons on the culture and history of Oregon. And they do it in Spanish! Prior to departure, participants undergo a formal orientation process, which, reflecting Partners’ enthusiasm for and effective use of networks, is run by alumni of the exchange program. Over the years, success in one type of exchange has had a multiplying effect within the partnership. Most recently, the Art to Heart exchange moves artists in both directions. Host chapters arrange art exhibitions and sales of artists’ works, and profits have been donated to benefit projects that provide wheelchairs for children and books for community libraries. With the generous support of local organizations that value inter-American exchanges, Oregon-Costa Rica Partners added a Sister Schools program and an exchange for gardeners.

In the last two decades, in line with the growth of the Internet, English has become the second language of the globe. (Ironically, this has occurred just as the Spanish language has made great inroads in the United States, which is now second only to Mexico in total number of Spanish speakers.) Across Latin America, English language learning now has high priority, and ministries of education have set ambitious goals for bilingualism. Colombia’s national apprenticeship and training agency, SENA, has recently turned

to Partners of the Americas for assistance in building its language teaching capacity. With decades of experience in Costa Rica, the educators of the Oregon Chapter are now working directly with SENA to construct a functional volunteer-based, language teaching program. Thus, the Oregon-Costa Rica partnership, with a long tradition of fostering bilingualism among youth, is now offering expertise to a third nation. The collaborative effort is supported with a grant from 100,000 Strong, and partnership between the chapter and the agency holds potential to increase movement of university students between Colombia and the United States.

Through its Youth Ambassador program, the partnership between Indiana and Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil) has also been remarkably productive. For more than two decades, the chapters have organized annual exchanges of high school students that have built deep international friendships that benefit participating communities and schools. The program is explicitly designed to cultivate leadership skills, but dedicated volunteers in the North and the South also credit it with strengthening the local chapters and reinforcing Partners’ mission. The ambassadors are expected to represent their region and their nation honorably, so volunteers take the task of preparing students for travel very seriously. In appreciation for the opportunity they are given when selected for the program, all participants are required to volunteer in a chapter project. This gives them important perspective on inter-American cooperation, informs their exchange experiences, and exposes them to the potential of partnership. The well-designed and thoughtfully implemented program has had wider influence as well. Adapting the Indiana-Rio Grande do Sul model, the Department of State has developed its own Youth Ambassador programs; one that brings together youth from countries across the Americas while the other sends disadvantaged youth from the United States on overseas exchanges. Both programs are implemented by Partners of the Americas, and exchange alumni have been active participants in the international youth conferences that Partners organizes. Two new networks, the International Youth Ambassadors Network and Red2021, have come out of recent conferences, and they are already fostering new forms of youth partnership.

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Diversity and Exchange

Historically, government concern for the welfare of youth increased as women gained greater voices in managing society. As the global women’s movement strengthened across the 1970s, it drew the interest of social scientists and civic organizations to gender-based challenges, and new concern for children and families was an important result. When the United Nations declared 1979 to be the International Year of the Child and President Carter created a complementary commission in the United States, new funding opportunities developed in the public and private sectors. Importantly, Partners’ long-term commitment to youth programming was not a product of this new funding. Indeed, partnered chapters had been developing their own child-focused health, nutrition, and education programs for years. But as new avenues of funding provided opportunities to support and expand the work of the chapters, Partners’ staff in Washington focused on funneling the new resources to them.

In 1985, the theme of Partner’s annual convention, which brought together volunteers from across the network, was “Youth Get the Americas Together.” Convention attendees reflected on best practices for engaging youth and specifically recommended stronger outreach to bring diversity to youth exchange programs. Students and young adults from low-income communities became a new target group, and toward diversifying its exchange demographic, Partners collaborated with the Reagan administration’s International Youth Exchange initiative. With or without government grants, however, locally grounded volunteers had always looked for opportunities to provide all youth with access to cultural exchange. In this regard, minimizing the costs of participation was a priority from the start. Youth exchanges are expensive to operate, and even with Partners homestay model, transportation costs can limit participation along class lines. This remains a challenge that government funding and private donations can help to alleviate, but in their absence, Partners’ volunteers work at local solutions. Their efforts helped make hip-hop exchanges between youth in Colombia, Massachusetts, and Florida, joint youth orchestra performances of Southern Brazilians and Indianans, and countless other youth programs more accessible to all.

Members of the DC-Brasilia partnership have always sought opportunities to connect with the less-affluent communities that constitute large populations around their respective national capitals. In neighborhoods where economic, educational, and cultural resources are more limited, partnerships have sponsored programs for youth who live with the high risk of missed opportunity. Through the Ambassadors of Hope program, which started as a capstone project to a Kellogg Fellowship, volunteers have welcomed low-income high school students into foreign exchange. Raising the initial funds to implement the program was a challenge, and it continues to be, but small groups of youth have traveled in both directions between the United States and Brazil, and the impact is clear. Students, some of whom have never had the opportunity to travel beyond their own neighborhoods—never mind travel abroad—now visualize expanding horizons. Based on their experiences, participants are now connected to networks of possibility, and they express new optimism for their futures. All alumni of the program have enrolled in college, and one serves on the board of the Brasilia Chapter.

Among Partners’ volunteers and professional staff, and within its broad network, those who traveled widely or traveled abroad as youth and young adults are a majority. With their parents or as military families, through high school exchanges and university semesters abroad, on church-based missions or humanitarian relief projects, and especially through the Peace Corps, the collective group that is Partners has cultivated personal experience with and great enthusiasm for people-to-people exchange. Partners sees travel as an exercise in learning and self-discovery that can be particularly empowering for youth.

Empowering Youth

Partners’ youth development programs have also focused on employment and career skills. Expanding 4-H’s network into Central America and the Caribbean during the 1970s, Partners encouraged youth to collaborate and broaden their agricultural skills. Throughout the 1980s, chapters continued to focus on employment training in existing disability programs, and the professional staff in Washington aggressively sought new resources for initiatives for 15–25-year-olds. In Antioquia during the 1990s, the local chapter partnered with SENA; it trained young, unemployed but aspiring entrepreneurs and offered micro-credit for their small start-up businesses. Many chapters offered similar programs tailored to local conditions, and toward their objectives they drew upon the full range of resources available to them. Often, resources were limited, but enthusiasm was not. In the municipality of Alegrete in Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil), a simple $700 seed grant from Partners of the Americas sparked a program for disadvantaged teenage girls. Courses draw young women off the streets and back into classrooms, where they receive training and learn a variety of income-generating skills. Based on its success, the program now draws support from a range of donors in Brazil’s private and public sectors.

Partners’ youth empowerment programs have also aimed to cultivate leaders who foster a sense of community among disengaged peers. In this regard, a very successful program began in Antioquia with just that intent. Project Adventure, which continues today independently of the chapter, targeted disadvantaged youth in Medellín. It was based on a model that had developed outside Boston, and partnership with Massachusetts brought it to Colombia. In the 1990s, chaos at the hands of violent drug cartels reigned in neighborhoods throughout Medellín, and the program reclaimed sanity one youth at a time. It brought them outside their urban neighborhoods into the mountains surrounding the city. Employing experiential learning, it built community, fostered trust, and helped young people to recognize their mutual interdependence. It empowered youth to lead their local communities, starting with their circles of friends, out of very dark times.

In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, curbing the inter-American drug war became a new priority of U.S. foreign policy. For four decades, anti-communist objectives and a strategy of containment had framed U.S. relations with the world, but suddenly that imperative was no more. It would be another decade before the tragedy of September 11, 2001 elevated antiterrorism as the top priority, but in the interim, a range of inter-American issues received increased attention from Washington; the illegal drug trade was one. In a renewed War on Drugs in the 1990s, resources went toward interdiction (on the seas and at the national borders) and eradication of coca crops in the Andes. At the same time, more government grants were available to organizations dealing with drug education.

Alcohol- and drug-prevention programs had been some of the earliest projects initiated among chapters and partnerships. Responding to local crises, they grew in volume with the inter-American drug trade from the 1970s forward. Partners’ model worked well in connecting medical professionals, therapists, and educators in efforts to help individuals and their families, who faced addiction directly or indirectly. In urban and rural communities on both American continents, drug abuse took a devastating toll on lives and on livelihoods. And the violence and corruption associated with the illegal trade left entire communities with debilitating leadership voids. As incubators of solutions to community challenges, many chapters worked on drug abuse prevention and education programs with youth as their principal foci.

A second U.S. foreign policy priority after the Cold War was strengthening civil society and reinforcing democracy in Latin America. Many nations in the region had recently transitioned back to democracy, and others were beginning the process. After having previously supported various non-democratic (and strongly anti-communist) regimes, the U.S. government had lost credibility with politically engaged youth from the Southern Cone to the Caribbean. In contrast, the credibility of Partners of the Americas remained high; it was recognized for what it was—an apolitical and locally grounded organization that had consistently worked to strengthen democratic tradition at the community level. Thus did Partners gain more opportunities to implement U.S. government-funded youth exchanges and leadership and training programs after the Cold War.

In neighborhoods where economic, educational, and cultural resources are more limited, partnerships have sponsored programs for youth who live with the high risk of missed opportunity.

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Sport as a Development Strategy

Love of sport is a common experience that bridges cultural divides within the Americas and around the world. After U.S. cultural diplomacy began in the 1940s and throughout the first decades of the Cold War, formal exchanges built around sport were always popular at home and abroad. Following sports programming models of Rockefeller’s OIAA, the Department of State and USIA funded sport programs beginning in the 1950s. Subsequently, when President Kennedy’s new inter-American partnerships formed a decade later, sport became a popular theme for collaborations between chapters. Driven by the Cold War imperative, funding for athletic exchanges was readily available in those days, and Partners’ staff worked with public and private donors to build youth programs around basketball, baseball, and especially soccer.

During the 1970s, Partners developed its Inter-American Sports Exchange. With crucial support from Coca-Cola and various U.S. sports equipment manufacturers, including Converse, Wilson, and Voit, the program continued for 20 years. Gary Neeleman, who then led the Utah Chapter, organized the program for Partners. A United Press International journalist, Neeleman had lived in Brazil during the 1960s and had noted growing enthusiasm for basketball. Yet, having reported on the Pan American Games in Sao Paulo in 1963, where he saw U.S. teams dominate much of the competition, he also recognized a lack of coaching and player development programs in Latin America. Through the Inter-American Sports Exchange, Neeleman helped to move hundreds of coaches among chapter cities to teach clinics at the community level. The general pattern was to bring soccer coaches from Latin America to the North and basketball coaches from the United States to the South. Teams of both types moved in each direction. Comparatively, and reflecting the cultural geography of sport, baseball coaches and teams moved between the United States and the Caribbean basin.

Though it was barely even a marginal sport in the United States, soccer was then growing in popularity and the attendance at U.S. clinics sponsored through Partners demonstrated just that. Brazilian coaches taught U.S. children new skills even without a common

language; Frank Longo, the soccer coach at Quincy College in Illinois, noted during a 1973 clinic, “translation was a minor problem until coaches took out a soccer ball.” Emotions, gestures, and smiles were as effective as language on the field. Interestingly, the clinics also focused on teaching U.S. adults who willingly served as coaches for a sport they had never played. In the early 1980s, Partners’ Sports Education program extended the clinic program across the United States, and more than 45,000 youth, both girls and boys, participated. Through the decades, partnered chapters also arranged their own exchanges around the sports of their choice. Volunteers found that sports exchanges usually brought more attention to the work of their partnerships than any other type of program.

On fields and courts, the unique power of sports became clear to those in Partners’ network: it brought distant cultures together, cultivated teamwork and leadership skills among youth, and built a sense of community among players and spectators. As Partners of the Americas evolved with the times and began to compete for and implement larger development projects, its long experience facilitating sports exchanges led it in new directions.

At a conference sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in 2000, Brazilian soccer star Pelé participated in a panel discussion with bank officials and former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Pelé questioned why so few development projects engaged young people, and he suggested it would be effective to do so through sport. IDB analyzed the possibilities and became interested in using sport to teach employment skills among marginalized youth. Teamwork, communication, discipline, and respect were all skills that are learned through various sports and could transfer into employment. Intrigued, the bank reached out to Partners of the Americas for assistance in developing a program.

IDB soon offered Partners a $3.6 million contract to operate a sport-based development initiative, and it asked for a commitment to raise $2.4 million in matching funds. The contract was passionately debated among the professional staff of Partners of the Americas. The organization had been implementing sizeable development projects like Farmer-to-Farmer for almost a decade, and there was little doubt

among leadership and staff that it could successfully formulate and carry out the IDB project. Yet, in agreeing to raise such a large sum in matching funds, Partners would need to reposition itself more formally as a competitive development agency. Subsequently, in agreeing to do so, Partners took the next step in its evolution.

A Ganar (Vencer in Brazil) began in 2005 with programs in Ecuador, Brazil, and Uruguay. It was soon extended to Colombia. With a director in Washington, country directors, and small staffs in the field, the program uses soccer to build employment skills and assist

youth with transition into jobs. Play on the field is reinforced by lessons in the classroom and workforce training. Job placement has been the ultimate goal. Support from the Nike Foundation helped Partners meet its original fundraising obligation; it also extended the life of the program in Brazil, where it funded a separate women’s program, Vencedora. As A Ganar proved successful in training thousands of youth, new grants from USAID and new funds from IDB allowed the program to spread into a total of 18 countries in Central America, the Caribbean, and South America.

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Evolution: The Organization in Its Youth On the road to its golden anniversary, Partners passed through its own organizational youth. While it had a clear mission from the start, and developed an enormous network of dedicated volunteers rather quickly, it could not realize its full potential until it found its footing and developed organizational structure. Many new and well-intentioned initiatives never reach a stage of organizational maturity because they fail to achieve critical mass; they never find a formula for converting interest and enthusiasm into productive and sustainable action. And many efforts at international collaboration collapse when political moments pass. In contrast, Partners outlived the political moment that was the Alliance for Progress and has subsequently outlasted the Cold War by 25 years. It reached critical mass by finding a formula for success and continually refining it as the organization matured. As it reaches the half-century mark, volunteers and impacted communities across the Americas express hope that Partners continues for 5-times-50 years more. But as history counsels, this will only happen if the organization continues to evolve with the times.

As an organization, Partners of the Americas was decentralized by design. As structured by Jim Boren, local assessment of needs was the starting point for programming. With each chapter functioning as an independent organization, voluntarily partnering with another chapter, and affiliating with the broader Partners’ network, the model was never intended to operate from the top-down. Instead, the work of the organization builds from the local level. Support to address local needs flows through relationships among partnered chapters and through connections to collaborators within a larger network. Frequently, support comes from Partners’ professional staff in Washington.

Just as the chapter-based model has evolved, so too has the organizational structure that supports it. What is now formally known as Partners, Inc. is based in Washington and administered by a professional staff and a pair of boards. As an entity, Partners, Inc. originally emerged under the leadership of Alan Rubin and NAPA’s executive committee. Together, they built up the Washington staff

and created an inter-American board of directors as a balance to NAPA’s board, which was exclusively U.S.-membered. That second board was composed of representatives from chapters in Central and South America and the Caribbean, and it was created in response to demands from the South that they have a role in guiding the organization. Southern volunteers wanted true partnership with the North, and they insisted that organizational reality match organizational rhetoric.

The southern chapters all benefitted from the North-to-South resource flows that characterized early activity, but in order for partnership to truly flourish, southern voices needed to be heard at the organizational level. By 1993, the separate regional boards were merged into one with representatives of both northern and southern chapters. Tiberio Monteiro from Pernambuco and Erik Brand from Minnesota, for example, are current members of that board. Under board guidance, the staff of Partners, Inc. is charged with: supporting chapter-based partnerships; forming new and innovative forms of partnership with agencies, institutions, and organizations; connecting volunteers and collaborators with resources; competing for development contracts; implementing programs in local context; and building professional networks. Additionally, an international advisory board now exists, and it brings together a group of business, government, and institutional leaders with wide global experience. They advise Partners’ president, officers, and board.

Partners, Inc. now functions under the organizational umbrella of the Partners of the Americas Foundation. This foundation receives, manages, and distributes funds to strengthen partnerships and advance the mission. It began with an interesting donation in the early 1970s from Howard Hughes’ Summa Corporation. From Utah, Gary Neeleman had approached the executives of the corporation to ask for assistance in delivering emergency relief and other resources to Latin America. Impressed with the efforts of volunteers in Texas and Wisconsin to help Peru and Nicaragua recover from devastating earthquakes, Summa agreed to donate a large airplane to Partners. The intention was to make the logistics of emergency relief flights easier, but Partners had no capacity to fly and maintain an aircraft. Instead, it enthusiastically agreed to accept the profits from the sale

of the plane, and it created the Partners of the Americas Foundation to hold the $265,000 donation as the seed of an endowment and a rainy day fund. That fund has quadrupled since the sale of the plane. Drawing on the interest, the foundation’s board makes a variety of grants to the chapters each year. As unrestricted donations have become increasingly rare in the very competitive funding environment, these small grants play a crucial role in strengthening partnership. As Partners, Inc. has emerged as a full-scale development agency and implements large initiatives like 100,000 Strong in the Americas, A Ganar, and Farmer-to-Farmer, the foundation provides legal mechanisms for managing and distributing contract funds.

Decentralized organizational structure has always allowed volunteers great flexibility in responding to local needs. Chapters find support for initiatives through their partnerships, linkages to local institutions, and access to Partners’ wider network. Still, while material and human resources might flow across national borders, the work of the chapters remains locally grounded. Thus, the identity of the organization is framed in local context. Volunteers and the people they serve define Partners through the work it does in their own communities, and they claim the organization as their own. Over the decades, as organizational structure developed in Washington, northern and southern volunteers have referred collectively to Partners, Inc. and the foundation by varying names. Some call it Partners International, Partners Washington, or Partners headquarters. Most volunteers, however, simply call it Partners (or Partners of the Americas) as a network that they are proudly in partnership with. They distinguish their local organization by location; they are the Pernambuco Partners, Wisconsin Partners or Antioquia Partners, who are part of the larger network called Partners.

Partners’ decentralized network structure has produced a range of effective partnerships that empower people to solve problems in their own communities. That volunteers can claim ownership of Partners and are actually encouraged to do so are strengths of an organizational culture that has helped to sustain volunteerism for decades. Still, a decentralized structure and a dispersed identity present challenges in the more competitive funding environment that has developed since the end of the Cold War. From the standpoint of organizational

branding—and especially toward fostering recognition of Partners’ accomplishments among potential donors and grant collaborators—a more uniform identity would have much greater utility. So, too, would explicit efforts by volunteers to publicize and shed spotlights on their activities.

Decades of Change

Between the 1960s and the present, the march of time has brought significant change to the way partnerships functioned. Perhaps most striking, changes in communication technologies have cleared pathways for more regular communication within the broad network. Partners has always engaged with new communication technology to build working relationships and bridge great distances. Until almost the end of the last century, the high costs of international calling limited the use of telephones between paired chapters; dependability of service in some southern regions was also a factor that diminished communication in real time. Instead, people relied on postal service

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and letter writing to build working relationships. When accessible, they used ham radios: for decades from his home in Maine, Ernie Bracy gave countless volunteer hours sending and receiving messages between U.S. and Latin American chapters. When fax machines became widely available in the 1980s, volunteers enthusiastically embraced them as the tremendous modern tool that they were. Soon, however, email introduced cheap and instant communication, and live conversation via Internet-based video channels was not far behind. Volunteers were quick to embrace each of these changes.

In Latin America, socioeconomic developments introduced powerful changes just as Partners was establishing its hemispheric presence. Concurrent with the spread of the chapter-based model, educational expansion was explosive, and sizeable middle classes appeared in the region for the first time. Economies diversified, and demands for labor fluctuated as national industries were privatized. Urbanization proceeded at a whirlwind pace, and city living became the new Latin American norm. Combined, these dynamic changes created serious challenges for local communities, and the search for solutions fueled new and expanding inter-American partnerships. Through these decades of change, advances in technology and both scientific and human knowledge produced high optimism among volunteers that problems could be overcome. Solutions existed. They simply needed to be found.

Political change also came quickly. When Bill Reese assumed the presidency of Partners of the Americas in 1988, the Cold War was grinding to a halt. As the U.S. foreign policy imperative, anti-communism quickly lost currency as the Soviet Bloc was dismantled from within, the Berlin Wall was permanently breached, and the once-powerful Soviet Union imploded. The sudden change produced periods of uncertainty for U.S. foreign policy,

and fluctuating priorities impacted funding for international development. Many Latin American nations had endured periods of military and authoritarian rule during the Cold War, and that had stunted participatory citizenship and polarized national politics. As anti-communism evaporated as a core theme in government-to-government diplomacy, regimes that had not previously done so were pressured by their citizens to return to elective politics.

By the early 1990s, Partners’ model of people-to-people diplomacy had been effective for more than a quarter-century, and Reese believed it could be replicated in other regions of the world. Taking the long view, as those in Partners’ network have learned to do, he offered to collaborate with the Department of State toward building people-to-people partnerships within the former Soviet Union. Almost immediately after that empire collapsed, the Department of State begun building binational institutional relationships between hospitals, universities, and other civic organizations. The approach, however, lacked a chapter-based structure in which local volunteers could build critical mass for community change. The Department of State was understandably focused on the chaotic situation at hand, and it preferred to put its energies into projects with immediate effect. While it was searching for options that would model participatory citizenship and strengthen civic organizations, it was, then, unwilling to spend the time needed to make Partners’ model functional on the edges of the former Soviet empire. Given the history that has unfolded in that region over the last two decades, and recognizing the potential that long-term people-to-people programs have demonstrated in the Americas, many see that decision as shortsighted.

Since the events of September 11, 2001, a wide cultural chasm between U.S. and Middle Eastern cultures has come into sharper focus. Against a backdrop of terrorist violence and formal warfare, the extent to which people-to-people relationships might begin to resolve tensions and minimize conflict can only be speculated. But, 50 years of inter-American collaboration clearly evidence the power of partnership to redirect and redefine bilateral relations. With support from both public and private donors, productive people-to-people relationships can be built for the long term. The history of Partners of the Americas evidences precisely that.

Beyond its Youth: Partners of the Americas at 50For five decades, Partners of the Americas—through volunteer chapters and inter-American partnerships, through the broad networks it has cultivated, and through its increasing work as a development agency—has helped to define U.S.-Latin American relationships in local context. Elevating the people-to-people approach to diplomacy, it empowers individuals to take the lead in community development and supports them in the process. Connecting engaged citizens with those who share their passions and can provide guidance, expertise, or a helping hand, it supports local solutions to problems that have plagued generations or have appeared with time. At the center of Partners’ approach is confidence that local citizens can successfully drive their own development agendas: that they best know local realities, and given tools, can be very effective at strengthening their own communities. Valuing local assessment of local needs, Partners has built networks of support to connect extant and emerging community leaders with resources, in both human and material form. Connecting people across international but also intracommunity borders, it encourages and empowers individuals to serve in the capacity for which they are best suited.

There are arrays of challenges that undermine effective community development projects. And many well-intentioned initiatives, implemented by well-funded and credible international organizations, fail in never overcoming them. Certainly, Partners has had its share of such failures, but analyzed against history, they are skewed to the early decades and were a function of the learning curve. With the benefit of five decades working across borders, cultivating community leadership, developing networks of volunteers and experts, and demonstrating through long-term presence a commitment to local development, Partners has enjoyed greater success than most in overcoming such obstacles. Steering clear of the debilitating roadblocks of international, national, and local politics, for example, has never been easy, yet apolitical activism has been a tenet of Partners’ philosophy on the ground. Bridging cultural divides and language barriers within its transnational networks of

volunteers has required a commitment to funding travel, which brings partnered chapters into regular contact. Sustaining enthusiasm for volunteerism demands constant effort, but Partners’ success in this area results from its local grounding; with long-term presence in the communities it serves, it responds to local needs and local volunteers drive its programming. Because chapters and partnerships experience regular leadership changes, Partners proactively seeks development funds to support training programs for emerging leaders. And in the broader realm of funding, it has adapted to the changing interests, objectives, and requirements of its important donor base.

Partners has cultivated high levels of citizen diplomacy across the hemisphere which underscores an important aspect of inter-American (and international relations) that is infrequently recognized in public perception: cross-border activities of private citizens build international relationships and ground bilateral relations. The Brazilian-U.S. relationship, for example, is broader and more complex than that between the governments in Brasilia and Washington, and the same is true of bilateral relations throughout the hemisphere. Diplomatic politics alone do not define relations between peoples and nations. Yet this reality is lost on many. Analysts of international relations, from journalists to academics, have long privileged government-to-government diplomacy as the essence of bilateral relations. The meetings of presidents and prime ministers, foreign secretaries and secretaries of state, and other diplomatic negotiators get more notice than collaborations among private citizens. Government-level controversy and debate displace bilateral, citizen-driven collaboration in news headlines and scholarly publications, and in its absence people-to-people diplomacy is dismissed as marginal. However, history shows that such diplomacy has the potential to improve government-to-government relations, expand the agenda of formal diplomacy, and strengthen democratic tradition through participatory citizenship.

Partners of the Americas’ 50 years of supporting partnerships and building networks demonstrate that people-to-people diplomacy has been far from marginal to inter-American relations. Its impact has been significant, and it can be measured in various ways: through

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high-volume and sustained volunteerism at the chapter level; in the decades-long collaborative relationships it has maintained with educational and cultural institutions at home and abroad; by the positive impacts that are recounted by countless individuals, community leaders, and local observers; and, significantly, through the tremendous goodwill that Latin Americans—participants, observers, and beneficiaries of Partners’ projects—extend to the citizens of the United States.

The 50th anniversary of Partners of the Americas presents the opportunity to highlight the significance of people-to-people diplomacy in 20th-century U.S.-Latin American relations. It provides an opening to reclaim such diplomacy from the margins of history, to articulate its significant contributions to inter-American relations, and to reinsert it into the public consciousness—and, thus, inform public debates about the value of foreign aid and effective approaches to foreign policy.

Partners’ History Project

Toward commemorating its five decades of volunteerism and service, and toward informing its future directions, Partners of the Americas is engaged in an ongoing project to document the histories of its chapters, partnerships and networks.

This publication, which is part of that process, draws on Partners’ institutional archives and more than 100 interviews with volunteers, staff members, and project participants from across the hemisphere. These interviews and the hundreds more to follow will form an accessible oral history archive that evidences the significant role of the citizen as diplomat. Thus,

“beyond commemoration, the 50th anniversary of Partners presents the opportunity to highlight the significance of people-to-people diplomacy in 20th-century U.S.-Latin American relations. It provides an opening to reclaim such diplomacy from the margins of history, to articulate its significant contributions to inter-American relations, and to reinsert it into the public consciousness—and, thus, inform public debates about the value of foreign aid and effective approaches to foreign policy. “

About the Author

Dave Corcoran lives in Boston, where he teaches university history courses and operates Corcoran Historical Consulting. With a Ph.D. in Latin American history, he has lived and worked in various cities across the United States and Latin America.

Dr. Corcoran’s academic specialty is the history of Inter-American relations, and his research explores the growth of people-to-people collaboration within the Americas and the evolution of U.S. cultural diplomacy.

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