Events

Mr. AARON WILLIAMS
Peace Corps Director
and
Mr. WILLIAM (STACY) RHODES
Chief of Staff of the Peace Corps

"The Peace Corps Today"

Tuesday, July 20, 2010 at noon

Mr. Aaron Williams has pursued a career in the development and implementation of worldwide assistance programs. He was a vice president for International Business Development with RTI International. He was previously a senior manager at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), where he attained the rank of Career Minister in the U.S. Senior Foreign Service. He also served as executive vice president of the International Youth Foundation.

As USAID Mission Director in South Africa, Mr. Williams led a billion dollar foreign assistance program during President Nelson Mandela’s administration. In addition, he has extensive experience in the design and management of assistance programs in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. He was awarded the USAID Distinguished Career Service Award, and was twice awarded the Presidential Award for Distinguished Service.

He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and he was a member of the USAID Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid. He served on the Obama-Biden transition team, the advisory board of the Ron Brown Scholar Program, the board of directors of CARE, and the boards of the Institute for Sustainable Communities, the Pan American Development Foundation, and the National Peace Corps Association.

Mr. Williams served as a Peace Corps Volunteer from 1967 to 1970, first in a training program for rural school teachers in the small town of Monte Plata, Dominican Republic, and then extended his service for a third year to work as a professor of teaching methods at the Universidad Catolica Madre y Maestra in Santiago.

Mr. Stacy Rhodes brings four decades of international development experience to the Peace Corps. Most recently, he served in highly responsible positions at the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), Save the Children, and the Institute of International Education (IIE). At MCC, he was initially the managing director for Latin America and subsequently for compact development in all eligible countries. As director of HIV/AIDS programs at Save the Children, Mr. Rhodes established and supervised a new program addressing the impacts of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on children and youth, especially in Africa. As IIE’s vice president for global development programs, Mr. Rhodes directed and monitored development training and professional capacity-building programs.

From 1978 to 2001, Mr. Rhodes was a career foreign service officer at the U.S. Agency for International Development. He served as mission director in South Africa (1998–2001) and for Guatemala and Central American programs (1994–98). During his distinguished USAID career, he also directed the Office of Central American Affairs in the Latin American and Caribbean Bureau and served in Haiti, Morocco, and Nepal. Earlier in his career, Mr. Rhodes also served as an attorney at the Department of State and in private practice at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver and Kampelman.

Mr. Rhodes served as a Peace Corps Volunteer from 1968 to 1970, on the Bolivian Altiplano, at 13,000 feet in the Andes. He worked on community development and agriculture issues with local farmers.