Carrie Hessler-Radelet, meeting here with a Peace Corps volunteer and
community members in West Africa, said a partnership with
food-and-beverage giant Mondelez International will help modernize the
volunteer experience. Photo: Peace Corps
Earlier this spring, the Peace Corps
announced its second corporate partnership, with Mondelez
International, a food-and-beverage company previously part of Kraft
Foods, to train young entrepreneurs in the Domincan Republic’s cocoa
supply chain.
According to acting Peace Corps Director Carrier Hessler-Radelet,
this type of partnership represents the future of Peace Corps: working
in partnership with other organizations.
Peace Corps already works with Coca-Cola, through the Water and Development Alliance, a partnership involving the U S. Agency for International Development that aims to improve water and sanitation conditions for local communities in the developing world.
Hessler-Radelet, along with Corey Griffin, associate director of the
Peace Corps’ Office of Strategic Partnerships, talked with Devex Impact
about how partnership is modernizing the volunteer experience and what
Peace Corps brings to the partnership table.
What’s most exciting for you about the Mondelez partnership?
Carrie Hessler-Radelet: I have long been a proponent
of public-private partnerships, having come from the private sector
myself. The private sector has taken an increasingly important role in
development. Other government agencies, especially USAID, are promoting
public-private partnerships, and the Obama administration is deeply
committed to it as well. So it seems like a logical thing for Peace
Corps to do. Partnership is our strategy going forward across the board.
Our mission has always been to help host countries to achieve their
development goals, and the private sector and non-profit partners play
an important role in those local agendas. The added value of Peace Corps
is that we are at the last mile, working with local communities in 77
countries around the world.
What’s especially exciting to me about this new partnership is that
it’s one of the first to go operational. It focuses on entrepreneurship
and building the skills of young people to realize their dreams, which
plays right to the core of Peace Corps’ work. It’s our sweet spot,
because our volunteers—many of whom are young – really connect with
young people.
I also love the innovation that’s part of this: the entrepreneurship
training, and engaging local entrepreneurs to help young people develop
their business plans through contests. It’s a fantastic model that’s
happening in our own country as well. To be able to take something
that’s cutting edge here in our country and apply it to a developing
country setting along with a corporate partner is an exciting first step
for Peace Corps.
Corey Griffin: The other piece is financial literacy
offered through the partnership, which helps move young people from
concept to opportunity. It’s about local capacity building and creating a
culture of entrepreneurship in the Dominican Republican. A large
multinational like Mondelez brings a myriad of resources, and the Peace
Corps brings what it does well on the ground, which is operating through
our through volunteers and providing the face-to-face interaction with
the communities.
How do partnerships fit into the traditional model of Peace Corps, of a single volunteer working alone in a village?
Hessler-Radelet: The way we’re working is changing, because the world is changing.
The iconic view of the Peace Corps is a volunteer working
independently in a village. But what’s happening now is our countries
themselves are interconnected, with strong development agendas that go
down all the way to the village level. Since we’re there at the
invitation of the host countries and the villages, we have to show how
our volunteers are fitting in with their development goals.
What that means is our volunteers are no longer working in isolation.
We’re part of a larger development program in each country that
involves a myriad number of partners, including corporate and NGO
partners. And of course we work very closely with local and national
government.
Partnership is a strategy we are using to change our business model.
We are still volunteers working at the community level at the request of
our countries, speaking the language, living as a member of community –
that does not change. But what is changing is that our volunteers are
not working in isolation, we’re part of a network. We’re using
partnerships – and technology – to link us up with the rest of the
world.
How is technology changing the way Peace Corps operates?
Our volunteers are very tech-savvy, and they bring their own
technology with them. Ninety-eight percent have cell phones, most have
laptops, and some have tablets. Volunteers are using available
technology to help promote development change in their local
communities.
The bandwidth of our countries in changing dramatically too. A
fiber-optic cable was just laid along the coast of West Africa, which is
going to make all the difference in those countries. A similar cable
was laid a few years ago across East Africa, and it’s made an enormous
difference. I know I can get a better cell phone signal anywhere Liberia
than I can going over the Roosevelt Bridge [in Washington D.C.]
Peace Corps is committed to using the tools available to us open
source. We use Skype and Google Plus, Twitter, all the social media
platforms. Very soon we will have a new knowledge-management platform,
called PC Live, which will enable us to communicate with all of our
staff and volunteers around the world and enable them to communicate
with each other. It’s been pilot-tested in various countries, and it
will allow us to create communities of practice.
Has Peace Corps incorporated partnerships into volunteer training?
Carrie Hessler-Radelet: We are right now in the
middle of the biggest reform we’ve ever undertaken in the history of
Peace Corps. A big part of that is our “Focus In/Train Up” training
initiative, which is designed to equip our volunteers to do what they do
best, which is to deliver excellence in development at the community
level.
They still receive the language and the cross-cultural training, but
the difference is now we’re delivering technical training linked to the
development work of others through partnership. In all of our six
sectors, we are partnering with corporate partners, NGO partners,
university partners, to ensure that we are delivering the best possible
training for our volunteers.
One of the best examples is our malaria program. We have a malaria
boot camp that’s been funded through a partnership with the President’s
Malaria Initiative and various other NGOs like like Malaria No More.
The bootcamp brings staff and volunteers from all over Africa to
participate in an intensive training. We use Skype to beam in some of
the world’s leading experts in malaria from the [Center for Disease
Control], the World Health Organization and PMI. It prepares our
volunteers to deliver interventions in malaria in their communities that
are proven through evidence to achieve greatest development impact.
The Mondelez partnership is another good example. We’ve worked with
them to create “Build Your Dreams,” the program that the young people in
the Dominican Republic will participate in. It’s also part of a youth
entrepreneurship module we use to train our volunteers.
This state-of-the-art training is equipping volunteers for careers in
development, diplomacy or even business. When our volunteers come back
after their two-year experience, they have already been exposed to
development work, and they’ve been working in partnership with other
organizations.
Is the idea that the volunteer experience can help launch a career a new one?
Hessler-Radelet: It’s absolutely a career path, and
it’s becoming more that way for sure. The nonprofit and development
community has been aware of this, but increasingly the corporate world
is realizing that returned volunteers have the kind of skills they want.
We’ve had discussions with corporates about our training programs, and
they are interested in training their corporate managers in how to work
internationally.
There’s nobody who’s more globally competent than a returned Peace
Corps volunteer. They are committed, flexible, and they’ve shown they
can handle tough situations. They have language skills, experience at
managing cross-cultural teams, a strong understanding of how communities
in developing countries work, and a good sense of the opportunities and
obstacles in their host countries.
Griffin: The agreement with Mondelez is an ideal
scenario. They have a business challenge, and there is a Peace Corps
volunteer on the ground helping them with that challenge. The returned
Peace Corps volunteer will have a knowledge base and skill set of
interest to those corporations.
How is your network of returned volunteers responding to these partnership initiatives?
Hessler-Radelet: We have a strong network of
returned volunteers who feel passionately that Peace Corps transformed
their lives. Some are skeptic about partnering, especially with the
corporate sector, because that wasn’t their experience. But once they
see it in action, they understand how important it is, and how we’re
able to leverage the resources of others to achieve greater impact. Our
younger volunteers, those coming right out to college, they get it,
because partnership has been a way of life for them.
We are careful about our brand. Many of our staff people, including
me, are returned volunteers, and we feel great responsibility to make
sure we are doing it right. But we are confident that partnership is an
important strategy for us going ahead in the future. We can deliver
results at the community level that are just not possible if we hadn’t
worked together. It’s good for both partners, and we want to do more of
these.
Griffin: It’s also good for the community. Mondelez
is addressing the need to ensure there is a crop of young farmers who
are carrying on cocoa cultivation. So for Mondelez, it addresses a
business need. For the community, it helps the local economy. As much as
it helps the Peace Corps with what we are trying to do and helps
Mondelez with a business challenge, it’s also benefiting the community.
That’s the nexus that is really the value of partnership.
Is the Peace Corps building up new internal capabilities to partner with corporations and other organizations?
Hessler-Radelet: The biggest step was creating our
Office of Strategic Partnerships, which has been up and running for
about a year. We are structuring ourselves so we can make strategic
partnerships a much more important part of our work.
As a federal agency, we needed to review our legislation and see what
we are allowed to do under the law. That’s taken time. Every time we
have an agreement, it makes it easier the next time. We’re taking
examples from USAID and the White House and other federal agencies who
have embraced public-private partnership, and we’ve been able to learn
from their experiences.
Griffin: We’ve seen others take notice of the work
we’re doing at the Peace Corps. There is a bit of an awakening, because
all the federal agencies are thinking about ways to do public-private
partnerships. The Peace Corps has cut its teeth, learning how to do
corporate-sector engagement, and I’m hoping we can grow that portfolio
over time.
The White House will be powerful convener in helping us think about
how we work with these organizations and corporations more
systematically, so that we’re not all reaching out differently. The
White House Homeland Security Partnership Council, which brings together
19 agencies, has issued a set of guidelines for federal agencies for
creating offices of strategic partnerships. That’s helping a great deal.
Sumber: Internasional development (Adrea Useem)
Sign up here with your email
ConversionConversion EmoticonEmoticon