Remarks
ADMINISTRATOR SAMANTHA POWER: Thank you so much, Michael [Schiffer]. Well, the true main event will be when we hear from our new leader. And looking forward to that, above all, I want to thank Ambassador [Robert] Godec, particularly for really deepening the welcome to Michael [Ronning] by mentioning Tanya, and Sasha, and Soren.
This really is a family commitment. This is a family that has put service first, which I'll come to in greater detail. But Tanya, let me say a special tribute to you. You know, we work here at USAID to create a one workforce mindset, team USAID is part of Team America. It's rare I get the chance to sit down with somebody who's been a civil servant, an ISC, and a foreign servant, and has contributed so much at great personal sacrifice for USAID and its mission. So really special thanks to you. Soren, you should be really proud of both of your parents.
Michael, thanks for your leadership, and for really being so immersed in the details of what's happening at Missions around the world, especially one as complex as this one. And one where I think the potential for growth and impact is as great as any I think we see around the world. We're in great – very fortunate to be able to work with Ambassador Godec, who in posting after posting throughout his career, I think has found a way to work hand in glove with USAID to really help us get the most out of the programming and the policy work that we do together.
I want to thank all of Michael's friends and colleagues who are joining us from all over the world. Again, we'd encourage you to turn on your cameras if you can bear to do so, either this early or this late, wherever you are. But we have colleagues joining from Uganda, from Laos, from Burma.
I've already thanked Tanya, I also want to thank Soren for rolling with it over these years. Soren was giving me an advanced preview of Inside Out 2 – really important because it's very high up my agenda with my two kids. And thank you for that, future film critic or pilot, not clear. Want to thank Michael's parents, Ron and Marie, who are tuning in online, and I think Sasha is with us calling in from Vietnam where as you heard, he is following in his father's footsteps, parents. But following in the footsteps of a family commitment to service.
Michael grew up in the small town of Litchfield, Minnesota, which we may be seeing on screen – is that Litchfield? No, they're in a different part of – a different small town. But he grew up in the small town of Litchfield, population 6,600. This was home to much of his mother Marie’s family. She had been raised on a farm, and her family had often struggled to scrape together a living. And though she and Michael's father, Ron were able to create a better and more comfortable life for their children, Marie made sure that Michael and his brother were aware of their good fortune and used it to better the lives of others.
Michael listened – even at a very young age, it was clear where he was heading. When he was six years old, he brought home a cat he had found living on his family’s land, and the cat promptly had a litter of twelve kittens right on Michael’s bed. But, so invested was Michael in making sure that his new kittens found good homes that he appointed himself a one-man adoption agency, carefully screening and vetting each potential family for the qualities he deemed necessary to take care of kittens. I’m told that there are still families licking their wounds, nursing their wounds, all these years later having been rejected by Michael’s scrutiny.
In his father, a military man, Michael had an early model of just what it meant to serve. In middle school, he had a life-sized cardboard cutout of a National Guard soldier standing sentry in his bedroom.
So Michael was primed for service – but his desire to serve internationally first stemmed from a trip to Norway the summer after he graduated high school. Enamored by stories about his Norwegian ancestors, he lived with a Norwegian family in the northern fjords and worked on the family farm. After returning home, he majored in international relations at the University of Minnesota – and then, he went onto join the Peace Corps. He was sent to teach in a tiny town in rural Latvia – but his wife Tanya recalls him always saying he learned more than he taught – a recurring theme in the way that Michael has approached his travels. By the end of the program, Michael’s Latvian was so good that he gave a speech at the closing ceremony, fully in Latvian and in front of the Ambassador and the Foreign Minister.
Michael served in Latvia just five years after the withdrawal of the last Soviet troops, so he also got to witness firsthand Latvia’s transition from a Soviet Union to being an independent democracy. His host family at the time was mixed – an ethnic Latvian married to an ethnic Russian – which provided Michael with a fascinating lens into the unity that these new nations would seek to forge. He would go on to dedicate much of his career to helping strengthen democratic governance in countries around the world.
As much as Michael listened and learned during his time in Latvia, he also left his own mark on Latvian communities. I've had a chance to do many of these swearing-ins, probably the best privilege of my job, this may be the coolest thing that I'm gonna get to share at any of the swearing-ins. I may have said that once or twice, but this is really unbelievably cool. So, several months into Michael's service, he joined a Latvian reggae band called Hospitāļu iela as a drummer. While he was there, the band released a song that became the #1 song on Latvian iTunes, and Michael quickly became a kind of celebrity, both in his tiny host village and in the streets of Riga. For the curious listener, Hospitāļu iela’s music can be found on iTunes and Spotify to this day! Soren, what do you think? You didn’t know you had this, like, cool drummer dad. Cool!
Unfortunately for the Latvian reggae scene, Michael ultimately shelved his dreams of becoming a professional musician in favor of a career in the Foreign Service. In the summer of 2005, he arrived at USAID as an international development intern, this would be the start of a nearly 20-year career with the Agency that has taken him all over the world – to the West Bank and Gaza, Uganda, Iraq, Afghanistan, Burma, and of course most recently to Laos as our Country Representative. Everywhere he has worked, whether by coordinating humanitarian aid or strengthening democratic governance, he’s helped protect human rights so that communities can safely and freely chart their own futures.
In the West Bank and Gaza, he served nearly four years as USAID’s Humanitarian Coordinator for Gaza, where he helped negotiate with Israeli officials to open critical humanitarian access points during the late-2008 conflict there. In Uganda, he established some of USAID’s first partnerships with LGBTQI+ organizations, training them to be more effective advocates for their communities and supporting their efforts to protect LGBTQI+ communities from discrimination, prosecution, and violence. In Burma, where he arrived less than a year after the Mission opened, he was a vocal advocate for increased humanitarian assistance for Rohingya displaced persons, as well as for more support for Burmese civil society activists who were fighting for a more democratic future.
And in Laos, where he served as Country Representative for the last four years, Michael proved himself as an effective trust- and community-builder – an impressive achievement given the troubled history between the United States and Laos. Lao communities, Michael knew, needed to see that the United States was a responsive, effective, and consistent partner in helping them address their most urgent needs.
So, when USAID began coordinating the delivery of millions of free COVID-19 vaccines to communities around the world, Michael worked directly with the Department of Defense to procure mobile refrigeration units that could safely transport thousands of vaccines to Laos’s most remote, underserved communities. He’s helped to expand access to textbooks for children and to procure bednets and treatment for malaria. And he’s led efforts to train Lao government officials on building greater transparency and accountability into their work.
That’s not to mention the creative ways that Michael has cultivated relationships with Lao officials. In a perfect example, what I very much agree, is the power of sports diplomacy. He even used a shared love of basketball to win a coveted invite to an informal Lao government basketball league. According to one of Michael’s colleagues, building these against a backdrop of relations that have been strained over the years was a testament to Michael’s ability to build trust and to bring people together – always recognizing that relationships are the foundation to national collaboration and partnership.
That ability was evident, of course, on his own teams, as well. His colleagues remember Michael as a terrific manager and a fierce advocate for his staff – especially for the Foreign Service Nationals with whom he has been privileged to work with in various postings. In Laos and in Burma, Michael appointed FSNs as subject matter experts and government liaisons; one colleague remembers that he would never go to a senior level meeting without insisting an FSN colleague join him. In Burma specifically, FSNs led much of the Mission’s engagement with civil society activists – an especially scrutinized and critical portfolio in the runup to the 2015 elections. And among all of his staff, he was known as a manager that followed the lead of the members of his team. One former managee, now a manager herself, has a sticker on her computer to this day that says “WWMD – What Would Michael Do?” – I had to read this again, because when I see WMD, I usually think about something else – that continues to guide her interactions with her team.
But colleagues also remember how Michael built community and brought people together during difficult, emotional times. In Uganda, for example, when the Mission’s advocacy for LGBTQI+ communities caused tension among more conservative members of the team – including Michael’s own administrative assistant, who actually resigned in protest – Michael led several open dialogues with the entire staff focused on reconciling differences while also standing up for every individual’s right to be their most authentic selves without fear of persecution or violence. And in Laos, where communities were locked down for more than 24 months after the onset of the pandemic, Michael would go house to house delivering care packages and thank you notes to his staff, and personally scheduling check-ins with nearly every member of the Mission to make sure everyone was safe and healthy. “He always wanted to reach out to people,” recalls his colleague Juno. “He really wanted to make sure people were okay.”
Michael’s ability to bring people together is going to serve him well, as you've heard from Michael Schiffer, in his new role heading up the Regional Development Mission for Asia, where his job will be bringing diverse groups of people and diverse range of people together across countries to address challenges that cross borders and cultures. RDMA’s main priorities are addressing urgent transboundary issues like combating human trafficking and fighting air pollution. But RDMA’s job is also to support regional infrastructure that will help partner governments facilitate these partnerships on their own – including by supporting emerging bilateral donor countries like Thailand, and strengthening regional organizations like the Mekong River Commission and, of course, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN.
In the last three years, the Mission has supported regional partners who’ve made real progress on a plethora of shared challenges – and this has helped facilitate greater collaboration between other partner governments to build on that progress. Today, regional organizations and local partners are working to better manage and preserve Pacific coral reefs, to protect the Mekong River – I know Tanya brings a great interest in that from her time in Vietnam – and to provide online training courses in business growth and digital transformation for small- and medium-sized businesses across Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
But today, as Michael takes the reins, transboundary challenges remain urgent – with the potential to grow. Human traffickers, long focused on exploiting poor women and children across Southeast Asia and the Pacific, are now luring middle-class urbanites into abusive scam centers with promises of well-paying jobs – and then forcing them to perpetuate financial scams that cost the global economy more than a billion dollars a year, for example. Toxic haze caused by slash and burn farming practices is being pushed across land, seas, and borders – a phenomenon that may worsen with the climate crisis causing shifts in weather patterns.
Tackling such challenges effectively will require nations to work together – to recognize and act upon their shared interests, and to collaborate with one another to eliminate these problems. And to facilitate these kinds of regional partnerships, RDMA will require a leader who can build trust no matter the circumstances, and who knows how to leverage USAID’s power to facilitate the partnerships that can bring about real progress.
It’s no exaggeration to say that Michael is perfectly tailored and perfectly experienced to take up this mantle with his regional expertise, with his team building chops, with the respect and loyalty and energy that he galvanizes in his colleagues, and with a family that will support him and join, again, in his dedication to make a profound difference. I know that he will represent us well in Bangkok and across the region.
And with that, it's my pleasure to congratulate Michael but also to invite him and his family up here to be sworn in as our next leader of RDMA.
Thank you so much!