Author - John Coyne

  Elizabeth Gore (Bolivia 2003-05) serves as President and Chairwoman of the Board for Hello Alice, the first-ever artificial intelligence platform for business owners. Hello Alice helps all business owners find the right path to launch and grow. As a social enterprise, Alice is open to all entrepreneurs and prioritizes services for women, underrepresented founders and veterans. Elizabeth previously served as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Dell Technologies, where she drove initiatives to support Dell’s goals around helping small and medium businesses scale and prosper, fueling the expansion of global entrepreneurship. Elizabeth personally advises the growth of purpose-driven companies, such as ride share commuting company Scoop, and is an investing Limited Partner with the Portfolia fund. In addition, Elizabeth is part owner in Gore Family Vineyards in Sonoma County. She is the Emeritus Chair of the United Nations Foundation’s Global Entrepreneurs Council and previously served as the first-ever Entrepreneur in Residence for the . . .

CELEBRATE SIX DECADES IN THAILAND By Khaosod English April 7, 2023 8:54 am On April 3, 2023, U.S. Ambassador Robert F. Godec and Peace Corps Director Carol Spahn swear-in 49 Peace Corps Trainees at Songphanburi Hotel, Suphanburi Province. In Thailand, Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) serve with their Thai counterparts in two sectors: Education, and Youth in Development. Volunteers live in local communities across the country, learn the Thai language, and share American culture with their communities during their two-year assignments. More than 5,500 Peace Corps Volunteers have served in Thailand since 1962. The swearing-in ceremony is conducted in conjunction with the 60th anniversary celebration of Peace Corps Thailand (the 60th anniversary celebration was supposed to happen last year but is delayed due to the pandemic). With U.S. Ambassador Robert F. Godec, Peace Corps Director Carol Spahn, Director-General Ureerat Charoentoh of the Thailand International Cooperation Agency, Royal Thai Government Officials, local . . .

UH Hilo political scientist Su-Mi Lee compiles biographies from Peace Corp volunteers with ties to Hawai‘i Island Posted on April 5, 2023 by Staff The project is significant to UH Hilo because Hawai‘i Island was chosen as a primary training location for thousands of Peace Corps volunteers in the 1960s and the university’s precursor—UH-Hilo Branch—contributed greatly to the training program. A local group involved in promoting acknowledgement of returned Peace Corps volunteers to Hawai‘i Island stand for a group photo at a plaque erected on the UH Hilo campus to commemorate John F. Kennedy who began the Peace Corps program. In the group are Hawai‘i County Mayor Mitch Roth (center) with Assistant Professor of Political Science Su-Mi Lee (fifth from left), returned Peace Corps volunteers, Rotary club members, a librarian from UH Hilo’s Mookini Library, and students including Lee’s student assistant Nikki Jicha (fourth from left). (Courtesy photo) By Susan Enright A political . . .

Women’s Economic Empowerment and the Peace Corps – A Conversation with Jody Olsen, Former Peace Corps Director Interviewed Held on March 8, 2019 Edited for this blog Dr. Olsen served as a volunteer in Tunisia in the late 1960s, and she held various leadership positions throughout the agency in the ’80s, the ’90s, and 2000s. And between that time she spent time as a visiting professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore School of Social Work, as well as the director of the university’s Global Education Initiatives. The  moderator is CSIS Senior Associate Nina Easton chair of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women International Summit and the co-chair of the Fortune Global Forum. Nina Easton: OK, hands up: How many former Peace Corps volunteers do we have here? Ooh. (Cheers, applause.) OK. (Applause.) And, Jody, thank you for your service. Jody Olsen: Well, thank you. Nina Easton: I warned you that we . . .

African artist’s work benefits Sierra Leone The story of Africa Yes is really the story of the remarkable village of Gbeworbu (BEH-wuh-boo), which hosted Peace Corps Volunteer Steve Cameron from 1989 to 1991. The partnership that resulted has withstood the intervention of a brutal civil war and thirteen years of separation. The villagers continue to demonstrate their resilience, determination, and work ethic as they rebuild and move forward. The first project that grew out of the partnership between Steve and his hosts was a Village Health Worker program to provide low-cost basic medicines and medical advice from the book Where There is No Doctor. This was begun at the request of the villagers themselves — Steve’s primary project was outside the village, supervising a water project in a nearby town. Other villages heard about the program and asked to participate. Eventually, there were 14 villages in the area with Village Health . . .

True North Editions : Bill Owens : 50th Anniversary Suburbia Collection “This is our second annual Fourth of July block party. This year thirty-three families came for beer, barbequed chicken, corn on the cob, potato salad, green salad, macaroni salad, and watermelon. After eating and drinking we staged our parade and fireworks.” © Bill Owens – Courtesy True North Editions / Scott Nichols Gallery Suburbia by Bill Owens (Jamaica 1964-66): this book marked the history of photography! It is fifty years old and a portfolio including 30 of his images has just been republished. Bill Owens and True North Editions celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the seminal book, Suburbia with this limited edition portfolio, Bill Owens — 50th Anniversary Suburbia Collection. The portfolio was created with the intent of placement in institutional collections, and is available through Scott Nichols Gallery. This portfolio is comprised of 36 remastered photographs from Suburbia, selected for . . .

Colin Rule Receives D’Alemberte-Raven Award from ABA Dispute Resolution Section! By JIM MELAMED March 27, 2023 Colin Rule (Eritrea 1995-97), CEO of Mediate.com and ODR.com, has been announced as the 2023 recipient of the D’Alemberte/Raven Award from the American Bar Association Dispute Resolution Section. Colin will be recognized at the May 11th Award Ceremony at the 25th annual ABA DR Spring Conference in Las Vegas. This D’Alemberte Raven Award award honors Talbot D’Alemberte and Robert D. Raven, who each held the unique position of being both ABA Presidents and Chairs of either the ABA Section of Dispute Resolution or its predecessor ABA Special Committee. Resourceful Internet Solutions, Inc., and Mediate.com were founded in 1995 by John Helie and Jim Melamed. Jim Melamed served as CEO of Mediate.com for 25 years until Colin succeeded Jim as CEO in June 2020. Rule returned to Mediate.com where he served as the company’s first General Manager in 1999! Rule spun . . .

Is True Love Possible? Readers Are Turning to This 1990s Novel for Answers. March 29, 2023 in News Katherine Champagne had never heard of “Mating,” the award-winning novel by Norman Rush, until one afternoon in 2020, when she popped into a random room on Clubhouse in the early days of that social media app. “It was me and a group of true strangers talking about books we liked,” said Ms. Champagne, 35, who lives in Queens and works at a start-up. A woman recommended the novel without giving anyone in the chat room much to go on. “She was just straight up like, ‘This is the best book I’ve ever read,’” Ms. Champagne recalled. César Acevedo, a bartender in Brooklyn, bought “Mating” within 24 hours of seeing a tweet posted in December by John Phipps, the fiction editor of the literary magazine The Fence. In the tweet, Mr. Phipps said he was . . .

God, President Kennedy, and Me by Tina Martin (Tonga 1969-71) A version of this appears in the anthology Even the Smallest Crab Has Teeth, 2011. I remember what I was doing on November 22, 1963 even before I heard that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Praying. Not just because I was chairman of Religious Emphasis Week at Columbia High School but because there was a beauty contest that night and, if it were God’s will, I was willing to win it. So I kept checking in with God, letting Him know that He was on my mind, and I sure hoped I was on His. I didn’t want Him to fix the contest. That wouldn’t be fair. I just wanted Him to help me do justice to whatever God-given beauty I might have so that I could honor the Future Teachers of America Club I was representing and serve as . . .

Back in the mid-sixties when I was an APCD in Ethiopia, a year after my tour as a PCV secondary school English teacher in Addis Ababa, I did a lot of flying on Ethiopia’s Airlines small fleet of single engine prop planes, piloted by young French guys all new to the Empire. It was difficult flying, even in the best of weather, over the vast terranes and high plateaus, and across the Semien and Bale Mountains, the Danakil Depression, where you would feel the fierce winds, and always had to land the small propeller plane on a narrow dirt runways in the middle of nowhere. Still, it was breathtaking to sail across endless kilometers and see tiny tukul houses dotting the hills as if they were nothing more than birthmarks on the African landscape. I was seeing Africa up-close and personal. It was my own special view of the vastness . . .