Remarks by Peter Bell Upon Receiving the Julia Vadala Taft Award for Outstanding Leadership
InterAction Gala Dinner
June 3, 2010

I feel doubly honored to receive the Julia Vadala Taft Award for Leadership.

First, I am pleased to be linked again with Julia. She and I first collaborated more than 30 years ago. I was Deputy Under Secretary for Health, Education and Welfare, overseeing programs supporting the resettlement of refugees in this country. Julia was the senior aide to the US Coordinator for Refugees. It was then that I first experienced her passionate commitment to the cause of refugees. Julia’s energy and drive were boundless. She was ready to go literally to the ends of the earth to relieve the suffering and save the lives of people in crisis.

And I am especially honored to receive this award in the company of all of you. All of us share a core set of values and commitments:

--We share a belief in the dignity inherent in each and every human being.

--We share Julia’s belief in the importance of relieving suffering and saving lives in times of crisis.

--We share an understanding, shaped by experience, that what makes people most vulnerable to disasters is extreme poverty.

--And we share a dedication to ending extreme poverty and supporting the empowerment of people to exercise greater control over decisions importantly affecting their lives.

But we have enormous challenges before us:

--First, in our heart of hearts, we know that our short-term development projects seldom obtain the larger, long-term impacts to which we aspire.

--Second, we know that we are often in practice more accountable to our institutional donors than we are to the people with whom we work in poor communities. Yet these are the very people we want to empower.

--Third, we recognize that our cause is larger than any one of our NGOs or even all of us put together. Partnership has become our watchword. But reaching out even to one another—embracing the shared mission of relief and development NGOs — can be challenging. And we must also learn how to build alliances with human rights and environmental organizations, universities and corporations.

--Fourth, in this time of war, we are told that to muster political support for development we must mesh it with diplomatic and defense policy. But we all know down deep that ending extreme poverty should be a strategic objective of this country in its own right.

I could go on, but what I want to stress is that we are in a time that calls for leadership up and down and all across our organizations. All of you are or can be leaders. Leaders:

--who will knit together principle and pragmatism,

--who are not afraid to stick your necks out,

--who are at your best when the challenges are toughest,

--who will be inspired by the idealism and effectiveness of those around you and by the struggle of people in poor communities for a better life,

--who will seek excellence and support others to perform beyond expectations -- and beyond conventional boundaries,

--and who will model in yourselves and your organizations the changes you seek in the world.

You must continue to demand a lot of yourselves, but that does not mean that you should beat up on yourselves. In these tough times, in which there is far too much intolerance, injustice and insecurity, you and your organizations remain a beacon of hope for a better world.

Thank you for this award. And more importantly, thank you for all that you do to make the world better.