Washington, DC
ADMINISTRATOR SAMANTHA POWER: So Cindy [Huang] and Jake [Sullivan] apparently met in Debate Club at Yale. And, as Cindy I guess says, “we were definitely not the cool kids.” So it is actually sweet and kind of poignant to imagine what those not-so-cool kids at debate club freshman year at Yale would say to their future selves, if we had told you then, the roles you’d be in. It’s pretty awesome.
And, of course, we wouldn’t be here but for Cindy’s remarkable parents. Their resilience, their determination, Marilyn and Steel Huang, incredible story which I’ll come right back to. Cindy is reliant every day on her thought partner and life partner Andrew [Mayock], who is also an incredible public servant, having served in multiple roles across the government, but is now our entire government’s Chief Sustainability Officer. Could there be a more important role at this time, talk about a decisive decade, and just the sheer size of the federal government and our ability to change norms, to change incentives by moving quickly to adapt, and to mitigate our emissions.
It was thrilling to be able to work with Andrew – Paloma [Adams-Allen] is not here – on the big electric vehicle launch here at USAID not so long ago, and that’s really just the beginning of what Andrew and his team are setting in motion, so thank you for your service, and thank you for loaning Cindy, and to your whole family, for loaning Cindy back to the government. Deputy Chief Sustainability Officers, Ella and Tai, thank you for giving us so much of your mom’s time, you’re incredible supporters of her and it is because of you that she is doing this work, so thank you for being on Team Mom. We are really grateful. We have some of Cindy and Andrew’s family who are beaming in as well, including Cindy’s sister Emmy and her family, and we’re just grateful to all of you for being, always, in Cindy’s corner.
So back to Steel and Marilan, Cindy’s parents. I gather that Cindy’s commitment to helping others really comes from you, and the spirit you have brought to your household, since you came to this country. It started with her parents. During the Chinese Revolution of 1949, Steel and Marilan fled from China to Taiwan, and they immigrated to the United States in the 1970s as graduate students. Cindy was born in Cincinnati, the city that, unusually, inspired her name. Cindy’s mom works as a social worker, so comes to this country and gives of herself to her community, and her dad is contributing in profound ways as a mathematician at Bell Labs. So thank you as well for the contributions you’ve made to this country, not least, giving us Cindy.
So from the beginning, Cindy loved to read – and this is becoming a recurring theme at these ceremonies, we had a ceremony last week where someone’s childhood reading was Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, I think that was in third grade and used against the parents actually, but books that left their mark on Cindy were stories like Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, which follows Sadako Sasaki’s struggle with leukemia from the radiation of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima; and of course Night, Elie Wiesel’s landmark memoir of living through the horrors of the Holocaust.
Once, in middle school, Cindy asked her dad, Steel, how we could prevent tragedies like these. And Steel answered Cindy with just one word, “Compassion.” Compassion.
Cindy truly lived that guidance, making compassion more than a sentiment, but an act, a habit, a motivation, a way of living. She raised funds for local causes with her school’s service club; she drove groceries to elderly people who could not go shopping themselves; she filed paperwork and cleaned patient rooms at the local hospital – all while finishing high school not in four years, but in three.
At Yale, she worked with genocide scholar Ben Kiernan to collect documents about the Cambodian Genocide so that its horrors would not be forgotten. Cindy realized that making those documents available to the public on a website could help them in that mission – and, being Cindy, she got to work learning HTML so she could code it herself. And I, personally, as a genocide scholar remember when that website went up, and what an incredible contribution it was, not knowing that one day I’d get to work with the person behind it.
As Cindy started her career and began figuring out how she was going to put compassion into practice through her own work, she kept wrestling with seemingly opposing approaches to driving change.
Typically, there are the thinkers who shape the strategies that will drive faster progress, and the doers who execute that strategy on the ground. There are the people who drive change from the outside, exerting pressure on institutions to improve, holding them accountable, and the people who work on the inside, driving the evolution that they want to see from within. There are the people who focus on empowering individuals, on the one hand, and the people who focus on transforming systems, on the other. But Cindy has flatly rejected choosing between these opposing poles, which are often pitted against one another.
She chose to study anthropology, the most human-centered of the social sciences – which, as one of her anthropologist friends points out, is an “individual-level endeavor.” But she also pursued policy, working on a “systems-level.” As her friend put it, “Somewhere between the two, empathy and attention to the human often gets lost. But Cindy never loses her care for the person and for their story.”
Throughout her career, Cindy has shown an extraordinary ability to master differing approaches – excelling as both a thinker and a doer, working from the outside then coming in, to work from the inside, holding the power of individual people and the constraints of the systems they operate within in her mind all at once. And this is just so unusual, and so exceptional.
Take a cause that’s very near to Cindy’s heart, particularly given her own family history, supporting refugees and migrants. As a Policy Fellow at the Center for Global Development, Cindy led important analyses of how development groups, institutions like USAID, can improve the lives of refugees and migrants, helping them access labor markets to build new lives while supporting local communities.
At the same time she was doing that, she worked with team members to found the Refugee Advocacy Lab, helping lift up the voices of refugees and build a group of diverse champions for people forced to leave their homes.
And later, she worked to drive change on those issues within the system, stepping up as the Director of the office of Refugee Resettlement at the Department of Health and Human Services. At HHS, she helped organize shelter and care for nearly 200,000 unaccompanied children. Former colleague Rick Barton says, “For Cindy, there is no isolation of policy from practitioners. She finds local partners, and she develops critical relationships.”
You heard Jake describe Cindy’s abilities to master these opposing approaches to change on other fronts, too – as he put it, her “combination of idealism and pragmatism,” as he put it again, of “public sector experience and private sector expertise.” At the Millenium Challenge Corporation, she worked to bring some key insights from the private sector on incentive and investment structures into development work. As she led a $2 billion-program portfolio working across sectors like agriculture, education, health, and community development, she worked with public and private partners to pilot new approaches like social impact bonds and pay-for-results contracts that incentivize outcomes instead of promises. And these are tools now that are much more widespread than they were at the time, thanks to Cindy’s leadership.
Through it all, she has brought an infectious, and I rarely use this word, sunniness to everything, and everyone. In the early 2010s, while working at the State Department, she helped manage the interagency team creating the new Feed the Future Program, working to gather consensus on policy design and directing the early stages of implementation. She often came to USAID in those days – and was such a bright presence here that former Administrator Raj Shah asked the former Head of the Bureau of Food Security, “who is that woman who is always smiling?!” I think a lot of people, especially as we have a lot of people returning to the office in recent days, are asking the same question. Always beaming? Always smiling, all the time.
Well, one person who took to that smile, was Andrew, who met Cindy on the Feed the Future effort, thank God for the Feed the Future effort, right kids? The best form of interagency collaboration.
Cindy, it’s really hard to find words to thank you for coming back to the U.S. government, to USAID. Your knowledge, your experience, your uncanny instincts about how to navigate in this town, in this government, with other donors, just make you just such a perfect person to take on this new position as Director of the Policy Office. And not just the Director of it, but the builder of it, the shaper of it, the designer of it, in many respects, building on Michele’s [Sumilas] great work.
So last year we did announce organizational changes which included the creation of this new office. The office, we are already seeing, is helping us engage with other agencies on key national security priorities, but it’s also helping us step away from the day-to-day, and make sure that we are actually developing a vision, a reform vision, but also a tactical vision, for how we meet really distinct development and humanitarian challenges. I mean every humanitarian and development challenge is distinct, but this confluence of forces right now, as Jake alluded to, really makes this moment immensely challenging to our workforce, and to our partners, and our partners out in the field and in the countries where we work, it’s super super challenging, but it is also a design moment – a redesign moment. It is a time to look at the tools in the toolbox and ask ourselves, are these still fitting the purpose, or do they need to be revamped?
We have unprecedented refugee and migrant flows stemming not only from conflict, but now climate-related changes; we have nearly 70 countries at risk of defaulting on their loans; we have worsening natural disasters which render even the word “shock” a little bit suspect in today’s parlance because if a shock happens again and again does it still count as a shock, or are we in a world of, oxymoronically, chronic shocks? But these are the kinds of questions that we have to make time to grapple with in the day-to-day, to be able to inform the work that our teams are doing, drinking from a firehose out in the world. This is no small charge, for a single individual who is building the airplane as she is flying it, but as former colleague Erin Collinson says, “Cindy is a problem-solver. She does not spook easily.”
As these problem sets facing us become more complex, they also cut across agencies and sectors, and we need someone like Cindy to harness expertise from every corner – and that is what she is doing. Bringing the best minds and ideas together to create new approaches and tools to be implemented by our Missions and our other teams here at USAID. So, I don’t spook easily either, I also don’t get blown away all that easily, but I’m actually blown away by what Cindy has achieved, and set in motion, here at USAID including, as Dennis [Vega] indicated, just the ability to recruit such extraordinarily talented people from within the agency and from outside.
We are seeing exceptional collaboration within USAID because of Cindy’s one-team approach. We are seeing a huge amount of excitement at other agencies about the rigor and the vision that USAID, and the curiosity and the openness, frankly, that USAID is bringing to the most vexing challenges of our time. And other institutions, other donors, are going to be benefiting as well from really exceptional infusions of rigor, wisdom, and ideas. And ideas are urgently needed as we know, given that our tools, it’s fair to say, are not keeping up at the moment.
When Cindy was researching Uyghur culture for her dissertation, two Uyghur friends, Ayshe and Nurgul, were looking for a Uyghur name for Cindy. And over a meal of vegetables, mutton, and pomegranate seeds, they decided on Zuhre – which means “bright, beautiful star.” Ayshe said that she hoped that Cindy might become a bright star in times of darkness, who helps people find their way.
Cindy, at this critical inflection point, I am thrilled that we will be guided by your profound compassion, by your ability to navigate complexity and contradiction, to drive rapid change, and your smiling face reminding us that there is always hope in the darkness. Thank you for taking this on, thanks to your whole family for loaning us Cindy, to perform really what is an essential task – not only for USAID, not only for our country, but for the world. Which is to lead this Policy Office. Thank you so much.