E-mail a friendAaron S. Williams
airdate October 12, 2009
This year, Aaron S. Williams became the 18th director of the Peace Corps. He is only the fourth director in Corps history to have also been a volunteer, serving in the Dominican Republic and Santiago. After, he became the Corps' minority recruitment coordinator and project evaluation officer in his Chicago hometown. He was previously EVP of the International Youth Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development's mission director in South Africa. Fluent in Spanish, Williams has an MBA from the University of Wisconsin.
Peace Corps volunteer-turned-director discusses the profile of a typical volunteer. (1:46)
Full Interview (10:31)
Aaron S. Williams
Tavis: Just a few years after President Kennedy challenged America's youth to embark on a first-of-its-kind global volunteer program, Aaron S. Williams joined the Peace Corps. Like so many who came before him and for that matter after him the Peace Corps would have a profound impact on his life.
Forty years after his own experiences, Aaron S. Williams is now the director of the Peace Corps and is hoping to fulfill an Obama campaign promise to double the ranks of the corps by 2011. Mr. Williams, an honor to have you on the program.
Aaron S. Williams: Thank you so much, it's a pleasure to be here with you today.
Tavis: Congrats on your assignment.
Williams: Well, thank you. It's a dream job.
Tavis: Yeah, I'm sure it is a dream job. I guess you could never have imagined when you signed up as a kid that you'd be running this agency one day.
Williams: I never imagined growing up on the South Side of Chicago that one day I would be the head of the Peace Corps. Well, I never imagined I would join the Peace Corps. When I decided to consider joining the Peace Corps only two people really thought it was a good idea - my mother, God bless her soul, and my best friend, Harry Simmons, who said, "This is a good idea, you should do this."
Tavis: Why were you interested in the first place? What got your attention?
Williams: Well, I studied geography and I was starting to teach in Chicago, and I just thought I wanted to see the outside world. I wanted to learn more about beyond the borders of the South Side of Chicago. I'd heard Kennedy's speeches, I had talked to a recruiter from the Peace Corps, and I said, "This is an interesting chance for me to learn a language, learn about another culture, to travel," and so I took my first airplane trip when I joined the Peace Corps.
Tavis: Tell me about your early experiences.
Williams: My early experiences in the Peace Corps were marvelous. First of all, I got there and my Spanish was a little broken, wasn't smooth.
Tavis: You went where (unintelligible)?
Williams: I went to the Dominican Republic.
Tavis: To DR, okay.
Williams: I was in a small town north of Santo Domingo, the capital, and I had taught in a rural teacher training program. I had 50 teachers that I was responsible for. Here I was, a 20-year-old kid out of Chicago responsible for helping these teachers number one, gain a high school education, and number two, help them improve their teaching techniques.
So I visited them, I rode motorcycles, I rode horses, I walked, and I bonded with these teachers and I said, "My God, what an awesome responsibility. These people are depending on me to deliver on something they need to improve their lives." So it was an incredible opportunity to have this kind of an experience.
Tavis: What made you stay, though, after that first experience?
Williams: Oh, I decided that this was something I wanted to do and I really enjoyed being in the Foreign Service. I enjoyed learning and speaking a new culture. I met my wife in the Dominican Republic, so that's always obviously a major reason for staying on.
So I continued after that, after I did - I worked in business for a while but I eventually did come back and joined USAID. I was a Foreign Service officer for 22 years. So it's been a wonderful career and now here I am at this point and very appreciative and thankful that President Obama has appointed me to be the head of the Peace Corps. It's a marvelous time to be the head of the Peace Corps.
Tavis: When you got the call, tell me about it and what you made of his invitation to lead the program.
Williams: Well first of all I've always been a careful observer and a follower of the Peace Corps. I've always had ex-Peace Corps volunteers working for me; I've worked with them around the world. So I knew that because of his call to service this would be a wonderful time to be a part of the Peace Corps leadership. So when I got the call, when I was asked would I be interested, I was just delighted and I thought, what better thing could happen to me after a long career?
I never thought I'd be at this point in my career, to have the opportunity to be back at the Peace Corps; to come home, so to speak.
Tavis: How has the work of the Peace Corps changed over the years, starting when you first joined up?
Williams: I think what has changed is that volunteers now are technologically savvy. They come into the Peace Corps with all kinds of gear - gear we probably couldn't even give them - and they get into the field and they're blogging, they have cell phone communications, the connectivity is amazing. But at the same time, one thing really hasn't changed and that is their dedication and their desire to serve.
I just came back from my first trip overseas to take a look at Peace Corps operations in the Dominican Republic, of course, and Nicaragua. I'm traveling with volunteers to remote sites and I see the same kinds of things I saw when I was in the Peace Corps - they're still adhering to the three goals of the Peace Corps: To provide trained people in the countries where we are willing to serve, number two, to explain to people about how Americans feel on a one-to-one basis, and how they view the world, and then number three, to bring it all back home when you come back to explain to Americans what your experience has been and how you see the world.
So that has continued, and they're doing marvelous work, working in HIV/AIDS and education and small business advisory service - really magnificent work.
Tavis: How global is the program now?
Williams: Right now we're in 74 countries. We have about 7,500 volunteers worldwide and we're on all the continents.
Tavis: The goal that Kennedy first said was to put 100,000 people, 100,000 Peace Corps volunteers around the globe. The number you just told me was what?
Williams: Seventy-five hundred.
Tavis: Seventy-five hundred. We're not close to 100,000 yet.
Williams: Yeah. I think that a couple of things. First of all, we're going to look for ways to grow the Peace Corps. That's one of my principle objectives, that's one of the things that President Obama wants us to do, and we plan to do that. The other thing I can tell you is that this year our applications are up 18 percent. We've got 15,000 applicants for 4,000 positions.
Tavis: Because of Obama, I suspect?
Williams: That's a big part of it, there's no doubt about it. And also, Americans are willing to serve. There's no doubt about that. So we see volunteers from all walks of life or people from all walks of life who want to be volunteers.
Tavis: What's been the challenge in growing to that 100,000 number, and I ask that because I know, and you're the director so you know better than I do, that part of what critics will cite in Congress, indeed, when they don't want to give you the funding that you ask for, is that we're at 7,500. We've been doing this for a while now, the goal was 100,000, we're nowhere near that.
So maybe this isn't the best way to spend our money in this kind of outreach. Your response to that is what? When a senator or a congressman says that to you in budget hearings, you say what?
Williams: Well, one of the things that we benefit from in the Peace Corps is that we have tremendous bipartisan support on Capitol Hill. We have four returned Peace Corps volunteers in the House and Senator Chris Dodd is a returned Peace Corps volunteer in the Senate.
I find there's a lot of support for the Peace Corps to grow. Hopefully we'll get additional funds, we intend to grow. We've got plenty of Americans who want to volunteer. And I think now in this shrinking world, now is the time for us to have this one-on-one humanitarian outreach to the rest of the world, and the world is ready for that.
Tavis: I can imagine as I traveled the world during the Bush years that being the face of America for those eight years, a little bit more difficult than it is now in the Obama years being the face of America, but I raise that to ask what is the challenge of a Peace Corps volunteer when they're trying to not be political. These are volunteers and their job is not to - you're not in the policy arena, but they're representing a country that may not be well-liked in a certain part of the world.
Tavis: I think volunteers have always faced that in different countries around the world, no matter who's president, and I think what volunteers do and how they really cross that bridge is because they work in the community. They live side-by-side with people. They demonstrate every day that they're committed.
They've left their homes in America; they've dedicated 27 months of their lives to working in villages around the world in cities, helping people make a better life for themselves and their children. I think that always turns the corner.
Tavis: Has the profile of a volunteer changed over the years?
Williams: I would say basically no, because right now about 80 percent of our volunteers are still recent college graduates, many of them liberal arts. We train them in certain areas, whether they work in education or small business advisory services or HIV/AIDS and health programs - it hasn't really changed.
But at the same time, the Peace Corps is open to every - to all ages. There's a wonderful woman, 85 years old, named Muriel in Morocco. She's serving as a health educator in a small village in Morocco, doing all kinds of things - teaching kids how to -
Tavis: Eighty-five.
Williams: Eight-five years old. Can you imagine? One of the things I plan to do is to visit Morocco just so I can see Muriel. (Laughter) I've got to see Muriel.
Tavis: The one that we know President Obama did as a candidate was to bring a broad swath of diverse persons into his campaign. When you suggested earlier that the applications are up in part because of the excitement around his call to service and pledging to grow the Peace Corps, what do you know about the diversity of your corps? The ethnic diversity.
Williams: Well, diversity is a challenge. It was a challenge when I was a Peace Corps volunteer; it continues to be a challenge for us. But I am committed to doing something about this. First of all, when I came back from the Peace Corps, when I returned from the Dominican Republic, I was a minority recruiter working out of the Chicago office, and I reached out to the historically Black colleges and universities. I know you've done a lot of work there yourself.
I want to make sure that every American has the opportunity to consider serving overseas in the Peace Corps, and so we're going to reach out to Hispanics serving institutions, to historically Black universities and colleges - wherever we can find minorities who are interested in serving in the Peace Corps, we're going to reach out to them. I'm determined to make that one of my priorities.
Tavis: I'm trying to see if there's a parallel here. As an African American, obviously, I understand - I have seven younger brothers and I understand - 27, 28 nieces and nephews. So I understand the reticence that some certainly families of color have about wanting their son, daughter, niece or nephew to sign up to go overseas somewhere in an area where there's no guarantee they're going to come back home safely - Afghanistan, Iraq, you name it.
The Peace Corps doesn't put you in harm's way to that degree, so I'm trying to figure out why - what the challenge is to getting a diverse crowd of volunteers in the Peace Corps.
Williams: I think it's the fact that many African American families, I can speak for my own family, I was the first person to graduate from college in my family, and so that's why only one person - my mother said, "This is a great idea. Take advantage of this opportunity." I think we need to provide people with the opportunity to take advantage of this.
Also, another thing that's important about it is that it's a way to really build a future career. You develop leadership skills, you develop language skills. In this global marketplace these are all skills that are going to be very useful in terms of future career development.
Tavis: Well, I'm glad to have you on, glad that you're in the position. When I saw the announcement, I said, "We got to get that brother on the program."
Williams: Well, thank you for having me.
Tavis: So congrats. I'm glad to have you on.
Williams: I really appreciate having the chance to talk to you.
Tavis: No, it's my honor.
Williams: You do so much in so many ways.
Tavis: You are very kind, I appreciate that. Aaron S. Williams, the new head of the Peace Corps.
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