Washington, DC
ADMINISTRATOR SAMANTHA POWER: We really have a full house. Nobody was going to let the holidays get in the way of celebrating this great achievement. Thanks, as well, to those who are gathering, virtually here. Really delighted to have you with us as well. I was saying to Shannon [Green] that I thought we might have a higher ratio virtual than in person – we probably do – which gives an indication of just how many people have chosen to celebrate Shannon.
I want to start by recognizing Shannon's family, who have joined, the screen, online. Shannon's father, Michael [Yates] and her two sisters, Jennifer and Andrea. And here in the room we have Shannon's mother, Marty [Yates], Shannon's husband, Sean [Addison], and her three kids, Hazel, Carter, and Grady. And we're really thrilled to have you with us. I know Sean that it has felt like in these last years that maybe you have not three kids, but four kids – the Anti-Corruption Task Force child that Shannon birthed. But just in our short meeting before coming in here, I can just see the incredible support that Shannon has received from home. Sean, as Shannon was making the decision to put herself in the running for the position of running the bureau, Sean's confidence, his knowledge, his willingness to endure the ups and downs of the stresses associated with first putting the bureau in a position to be a bureau and then enduring the process of actually coming to be chosen for this job. Sean is also in what has been described here, as a dad band. But you know, I was thinking about dad band and how pejorative that is. The Rolling Stones are a dad band – a grand dad band. So, I don't think that tells us much. But I gather you do play 80s and 90s hits. I think that next year’s DRG holiday party, we're gonna have to splurge.
So in terms of Shannon's backstory, the funnest part of these occasions. She was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and raised in the same place that I was raised for high school, in my case but in her case, for much of her life – the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia. She was always apparently very, very social, which will shock you to hear, cultivating groups of friends bringing them together. She switched high schools at one point as she was growing up. And not only did she maintain the two friend groups, she insisted that they be friends with each other. And Sean, in fact, was in one of these friend groups. We'll come back to Sean in just a minute, Carter and Grady get ready. Shannon was studious, and she was driven. She was a star student. She was class president her senior year of high school. Her friend Brooke Stearns Lawson remembers that in AP English, Shannon would not sit with these alleged friends, it was more important for her to learn. So when they were sitting on one side of the room, she was absolutely firm that in order not to be distracted, she had to sit on the other side of the room. And again, her friends remember her just sitting eyes laser focused, ready to learn – which she has done in her whole life and her whole career.
Growing up in Atlanta, and again, I know this firsthand, the fight for social justice is an ubiquitous part of the landscape. And ongoing injustice makes that still the case. But the historical legacy that you live and breathe in Georgia can be very, very inspiring. Shannon was not only surrounded by the soaring buildings of Atlanta but also by the soaring legacies of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., Shirley Franklin, James Forman, and John Lewis. She also was influenced by the immortal image of, so called Tank Man, some of you remember in Tiananmen Square, a single individual with his grocery bags, standing up for himself, for the effort to expand freedom in China right before a tank and daring the tank to move. She was deeply moved by the courage of students in Beijing, who were putting their lives on the line to try to obtain the ability to speak and gather freely. She enrolled at UGA, the University of Georgia, to study political science and history. Went on to earn a Master's in international peace and conflict resolution from American University right here. And during these years, she fell in love twice.
The first was when she realized it was time that she stopped setting Sean up with other people and maybe just set him up with herself. That was the most important foundational moment there. And the second was when she decided – and this is always really clear when you engage with Shannon – with such certainty that she wanted to pursue a life and a career in promoting and seeking to bring about the protection of human rights and the advancement of democracy.
She began her career, and gosh I can't tell you how many of these ceremonies start with ‘she began her career as a Presidential Management Fellow' – such a wonderful program. But in launching new graduates into public service by letting them try out positions at different government agencies, Shannon being Shannon was unusual in that she knew she wanted to work at USAID from the very beginning. Just to give knowledge, self knowledge, knowledge about the landscape as well, in which democracy and human rights are being promoted by the U.S. government. She got a chance to join USAID’s Asia and Near East Bureau, that’s what it was called at the time, point, Near East. And soon the dream opportunity came up, which was a job in the Democracy and Governance Office, the precursor, a smaller precursor to the bureau that Shannon now leads.
During her time at the Democracy and Governance Office at USAID, she had a front row seat to what it meant to stand with local partners and frontline actors in times of tumult. She joined – you can say – this at any point over the last 20 years, I guess, but at a time when the space for civil society was rapidly being closed. Governments were jailing human rights defenders after again, remember the hope and the promise of the immediate post cold war periods. And this was sort of an inflection point, that we're still living with these trends today. The jailing of human rights defenders, the silencing, harassing, and torturing of citizens who are standing up for their rights. But what Shannon has always been most struck by, I think maybe it’s her fuel, in doing this very, very difficult work is that people just kept standing up and demanding their rights nonetheless. And, you know, she viewing our job as one a great privilege, to be in a position to try to find ways to support people who are taking such risks on behalf of things that, by-and-large, we are able to take for granted.
So Shannon, apparently, in addition to loving performers and dad bands, also loves rap. Apparently, one of her favorite artists is Tupac Shakur. And one of his poems, The Rose That Grew From Concrete, is one that offers inspiration to Shannon and tells you a little bit about her mindset. So Tupac writes about a rose that grows through a crack in the pavement, thriving despite the concrete all around. And Tupac ends the poem with this line, “long live the rose that grew from the concrete when no one else even cared.” So again, Shannon and her team every day, finding ways to provide care and support for these roses all around the world that are growing amid the concrete – citizens standing up for change against the odds.
During her time at the National Security Council, which is when I first saw Shannon in action, she worked for my colleague and friend, Ben Rhodes, and launched the so-called Stand with Civil Society agenda. And this was an initiative across the U.S. government where we harnessed U.S. government leveraging resources to support civil society leaders in the face of, again, what was becoming a precipitous decline in the operating environment for their work. She didn't just launch the high-level strategy, she built programs that directly got changemakers the training, the resources, and networks that they needed to be effective in the face of these really strong headwinds.
Shannon also expanded the Young African Leaders Initiative to Southeast Asia and Latin America. The legacy of course of those programs lives on – such an important initiative. She describes how it is a continual source of joy for her to travel the world and to meet government ministers, successful entrepreneurs, influential civil society leaders, and have them out themselves as former YALI alumni and for her to think to herself, it actually worked.
Because these networks really all credit the relationships, and the exposures that the resources, networking – as pivotal in their own journeys to positions of even greater influence.
Shannon is, at heart, a builder. She has an incredible knack for building teams and organizations. When Shannon joined the Center for Civilians in Conflict – many of you know CIVIC – she found herself directing programs for a team that was displaying incredible courage, often, including prior leadership, putting themselves in harm's way to advocate for and protect civilians in conflict zones. Despite that incredible work, it was vastly under-resourced. The CIVIC had no human resources department, little monitoring and evaluation, a fraction of the resources that they needed to achieve this incredibly important mission of trying to ensure that civilians were protected in conflict. Shannon endeavored to address not just one but all of these problems – she strengthened empirical measurement across CIVIC’s programming, she established personnel standards, she worked to meet funding requirements, and elevated the work of the staff in the field. By the time she left, CIVIC had doubled both its budget and its staff, and expanded its protection programming to include additional conflict zones, including Yemen, the Sahel, and East Africa.
When I first started at USAID several years ago, nearly three years ago, I knew Shannon was the absolute perfect person to execute one of the President's, one of mine, one of our team's first priorities in taking office. And that was building out our brand new Anti-Corruption Task Force.
I often say corruption is development in reverse, undermining public trust and sapping resources that we know we need to advance every other development priority we care about. Anti-corruption work has always been done here, at USAID, but often has been buried within the bureaucracy. It was sometimes one of many priorities sitting within bureaus that had broader mandates. And, of course, it was forced, like so many important issue areas, to compete for very scarce expertise, scarce resources. So we needed someone who could come in with that ambition, that conviction, with a recognition that resources were part of the answer, but not the only answer to understanding the interagency and understood how to make people want what you want – soft power. And so Shannon set out to make fighting corruption a cross agency priority, building ambitious and innovative programs that really helped us make a dent in this very pervasive global challenge.
Shannon not only directed the development of USAID's first ever anti-corruption policy, but she helped communicate to colleagues across the agency how each of them could play an important role in driving this agenda forward. Her team has created flagship programs that all of us love talking about, because they are so compelling, specific, in some cases, life saving. My favorite example, as many of you know is Reporter Shield, which is an insurance program that protects journalists who are increasingly, not only being arrested, not only being targeted with violence, but increasingly sued – because the structural advantage that well resourced oligarchs, or governments have against these plucky journalists we'd like to support, makes them recognize that you don't even have to get to violence to actually put these incredibly entrepreneurial truth seekers out of business. And so this insurance fund gives us a chance to not only signal to them that we have their backs, but actually have their backs. So they are in a position to fend off frivolous lawsuits and continue the important work they're doing. This is just one example of the fresh thinking that Shannon has brought to this agency, to the U.S. government, and frankly, to the world of democracy and governance, and very specifically the anti-corruption realm.
One of the things that strikes me as well – I kind of alluded to this a little bit – is it's often not easy to be the human rights person in the room or to be the anti-corruption person in the room. I was a senior director at the NSC in a human rights role. I used to say that we always feel like the skunk at the lawn party when we show up. And what is really noteworthy I think about Shannon is it just doesn't seem to bother her at all. And I don't know if that's she's oblivious that you’re being the skunk, or just doesn't care, but I think it's really, really effective, the kind of calm confidence that she projects on behalf of her agenda and the space that she both believes the issue should occupy, and the space that she is willing to claim for these principles. And so she has brought really new life to the fight against corruption and now, thrillingly, gets to bring the task force into the Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance Bureau, with this new anti-corruption center that Melissa is doing a tremendous job of leading.
So autocrats around the world are getting more sophisticated with digital repression, disinformation – in Ukraine actual missile and artillery fire. At the same time, Shannon and I talk about a lot. This last year was the smallest net gain for the autocrats and abusers in nearly 20 years. So it's true that democracy is still declining slightly more quickly than reformers are making inroads. But we are really this close to leveling the playing field and actually fairly close, I think, for us to actually see democracy growing and some of these setbacks reversed.
And that is not happening by accident. It is happening in part because of the tremendous work that the team here in the DRG, part of USAID before it became a bureau, that worked that they had been doing the work that the anti corruption Task Force has done.
The new DRG Bureau is going to lead our efforts to respond to global attacks on democracy, help get citizens the backing that they deserve. The expanded leadership team is going to oversee several new efforts, and again drive the work that we have been doing to make sure that those democratic performers actually are able to take advantage of those windows of opportunity that we know from the last 20 years can be very, very fleeting. Protecting journalists on the frontlines, promoting people-centered justice, addressing kleptocracy and corruption still, and bolstering inclusive governance that advances the public interest.
There's also economic governance – work and public financial management work – that is incredibly important as well, to our whole shared conception of how democracy needs to be promoted in this new era, which is it needs to show as well that it can deliver economic returns to citizens and so that ability to mobilize taxes and desludge bureaucracy is incredibly important.
That's quite a to do list on top of raising three children and attending dad band concerts. But I can't just think of anyone better than Shannon to lift up those who are seeking to advance freedom, justice, and rule of law in their communities. To lift up the team of people who have labored at USAID, often for a long time, to try to get more resources, more attention to these issues. I can't wait to see you Shannon continuing to nurture those roses that are growing in the concrete around the world and reverse the tide – help us reverse the tide that had been going for too long.
So thank you, above all, to Carter, to Grady, to Hazel, to Sean, to your mom and dad, and your extended family who have supported you and given you this calm confidence to do hard things. We’re really lucky you chose to do those hard things at USAID. Thank you for loaning us Shannon. Shannon, thank you for taking on this monumental task which we know you are ideally suited to do. Thank you.