Former director talks about her rise to head of the U.S. international development agency, the successful COVID-19 evacuation of volunteers in 2020, and the importance of building community and trust.
Photo: Jody Olsen makes a point during her UMBrella Speaker Series event at the SMC Campus Center on Oct. 31. (Photo by Matthew D’Agostino)
Jody K. Olsen, PhD, MSW ’72, thought she had a good chance of becoming director of the Peace Corps when the job was open in 2006, having served the agency as a volunteer originally and in four senior positions during her career. But the Bush administration chose someone else.
“Given that I had been a Peace Corps volunteer and was deputy director for four years and had already been through Senate confirmation, I thought I was perfect,” Olsen told a University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) audience during an UMBrella Speaker Series event Oct. 31 at the SMC Campus Center. “I thought the administration would choose me, and I went to the White House for a meeting. They said, ‘Yes, we really do want a director who was a Peace Corps volunteer, and we’ll get back to you.’ So I was feeling very smart and confident.”
(See photo gallery below.)
Instead, President George W. Bush nominated Ronald Tschetter, an investment executive who also was a former Peace Corps volunteer but not someone whom Olsen knew. Having been passed over, Olsen had a decision to make on how to proceed, and she chose to be magnanimous.
“I wrote Ron an email 10 minutes after I found out he got the job. It said: ‘Welcome. Congratulations. You probably know that I wanted that job, but I want to tell you that I’m here for you in every way that I can be here for you, and I am going to serve with you — and for you — in all the ways you ask me to serve.’
“I thought to myself, ‘I need to push send on this email,’ because this is not about me, it’s about the Peace Corps. I wanted the agency to be OK, and I needed to make it OK right now, right in the beginning with the new director. Ron came on, he was great, and we became good friends. I honored what I said to Ron, and this shows that you have to be the best that you can be, in whatever you are doing, and that’s what I’ve always tried to adhere to.”
The crowd of 150-plus got to hear this and other stories about Olsen’s distinguished career, many of which are chronicled in her new book, “A Million Miles: My Peace Corps Journey.” The first 100 attendees received a free copy of the 315-page book, and she took time to sign them one by one after the hourlong discussion and question-and-answer session.
The event was co-sponsored by UMBrella (UMB Roundtable on Empowerment in Leadership and Leveraging Aspirations) and the Center for Global Engagement (CGE), which was fitting because Olsen is a founding member of UMBrella and a former director and current senior fellow of CGE, as well as a former visiting professor at the University of Maryland School of Social Work (UMSSW), where she received her Master of Social Work degree in 1972.
Considering her UMB ties, there was a lot of love in the Elm Ballrooms, and Olsen returned the sentiment, saying, “I feel like I’ve come home, and I love you all. You are bringing back all those fabulous memories from the eight wonderful years I had here.”
Building Community and Trust
After opening remarks by Jennifer B. Litchman, MA, senior vice president for external relations and chair and founder of UMBrella, UMB President Bruce E. Jarrell, MD, FACS, introduced the guest of honor and led the conversation with Olsen, whose patience eventually paid off when she was nominated to be Peace Corps director after an eight-year stint at UMB (2010-2018).
She had served as Peace Corps deputy director until 2009, including eight months as acting director, before joining UMB as a visiting professor at UMSSW and director of the then-Center for Global Education Initiatives. In 2018, the Trump administration nominated Olsen to lead the Peace Corps and she did so until January 2021, guiding it through a complex evacuation of 7,000 volunteers during the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020.
“It was the most difficult and saddest decision I’ve made in my life, but it had to be done,” Olsen said, detailing how the decision was made to bring all volunteers back to the United States as the pandemic worsened. “I am the 20th director. I was given this treasure with a history of 250,000 volunteers who have served in 142 countries. We have been changed. Countries have been changed. Communities have been changed. And at this moment, I have to bring it all to a halt, and thousands of lives are going to be affected.”
Olsen said that six decades of building community and trust contributed to the nine-day evacuation in which all the volunteers arrived home safely.
“You’re a community — you know each other, you care for each other, and you trust each other,” she said. “When we decided to evacuate, the families we’d helped said, ‘We’ll pack lunches for the volunteers as they get taxis to go to the capital city.’ Schools said, ‘We’ll do little ceremonies for you before you go.’ Thousands of people all over the world supported our volunteers in traveling to capital cities, getting on planes, and finding charters. Ethiopian Airlines rerouted its whole southern African route to bring the Peace Corps volunteers home. Why? Sixty years of trust, partnership, and caring. They were there for us when we needed them.”
Eastern European Impact
Jarrell asked Olsen to discuss a chapter in her book, “And the Wall Came Tumbling Down,” which chronicled the time from 1989 to 1992 when Eastern European countries began their difficult transition to democracy and the Berlin Wall fell. She recounted her experiences as the Peace Corps expanded its reach to Eastern Europe, detailing the challenges the agency faced in fostering democracy and doing community development work in the former Soviet-bloc nations.
She at first was skeptical of going to Europe because the Peace Corps had only worked in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, but she said visits to Hungary, Poland, and Romania proved to be eye-opening. Olsen said she and the Peace Corps director at the time, Paul Coverdell, arrived in Poland in October 1989, a month before the wall came down and when the country “was basically 2 weeks old.” The deputy minister of education told them he had been waiting for the Peace Corps to arrive and said he wanted its volunteers to help his countrymen learn English.
“Paul said, ‘Yes, we can do that,’ ” Olsen said. “The deputy minister said to us, ‘Don’t remember us as we are right now, because it’s not who we really are. We are better than this.’ And then he said, ‘People from other organizations have come here these last two months and promised help, but they have not delivered. I expect you to deliver.’ That really affected me. So we went to work, and the first 70 volunteers arrived the following June.”
Olsen said she and Coverdell returned to Poland a year and a half later for meetings with government officials, and the deputy minister raised his hand to speak before one meeting and pointed to a large map of Poland that showed 13 centers where citizens could learn English.
“He said, ‘Look, these centers are up and running, and they are training us in English.’ Then he turned to Paul and myself and said, ‘Because of that visit 18 months ago, you gave me the courage to build these centers, to begin to teach this country English,’ ” Olsen said. “And Paul, who never cried, had tears in his eyes.”
Olsen also spoke about meeting the mayor of a town in Poland who for the first time had the authority to make decisions but needed help in building a local government, and she recalled how watching a country learning how to be a democracy affected a Peace Corps volunteer.
“For this mayor, all of the decisions were no longer coming from Warsaw,” Olsen said. “The mayor needed to learn how to have private businesses and how to record land, because now the people actually owned land. They needed to have yellow pages. They now had the authority to be a community, making their own decisions and having their own private ways of working.
“And one of our Peace Corps volunteers said, ‘I took democracy for granted. I took my community for granted in the United States. I just assumed all these things happened everywhere, and I come here and discover none of this has been happening, that this community and me, working together, we are creating a real community that can thrive.’ ”
Learn more about Olsen’s book, “A Thousand Miles: My Peace Corps Journey.”