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Name: Richard, Anne
Current Position: Previous Assistant Secretary

The federal agency responsible for helping refugees around the world either through assistance to international and non-governmental organizations or by admitting them to the United States will soon have a new leader with years of experience at the Department of State. Anne C. Richard was nominated by President Obama on November 4, 2011, to be Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration and confirmed by the Senate on March 29, 2012.

 
Born in May 1960, in her junior year of high school, Richard was a Rotary High School Exchange Student to Austria for 1976-1977. She went on to earn a B.S. in Foreign Service at Georgetown University in 1982 and an M.A. in Public Policy at the University of Chicago in 1984. 
 
Richard started her career in public service as a presidential management intern immediately after receiving her M.A., although she left the U.S. to be a fellow of the Robert Bosch Foundation in Germany from 1985 to 1986. Upon returning stateside, she took a job as a budget examiner in the Office of Management and Budget, where she worked until May 1990, when she began a longtime relationship with the State Department Office of Resources, Plans and Policy, where she served as an Advisor from May 1990 to October 1993.
 
From October 1993 to January 1995, Richard was an International Affairs Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations and was part of the team that created the International Crisis Group. Returning to the State Department in January 1995, she served as a Senior Adviser in the Office of Resources, Plans and Policy until August 1997, when she jumped ship to the Peace Corps, of which she was deputy chief financial officer until March 1999. For her third stint at the Office of Resources, Plans and Policy, Richard served as director from March 1999 to January 2001, and as such was the chief adviser for budget and planning for Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
 
After George W. Bush was inaugurated as president in 2001, Richard left government service and moved to Paris, where she wrote and consulted about international aid for think tanks, the private sector, and international organizations, including the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). She joined the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in 2004 as a lobbyist, leading the IRC’s relations with the executive branch, Congress, and the NGO community. She also met with senior UN and government officials and visited refugees and IRC staff in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Thailand, Burma/Myanmar, Jordan, Syria, Liberia, Kenya, South Sudan, Uganda, Sudan, and Haiti.
 
Richard is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the boards of the Henry L. Stimson Center and the US Global Leadership Coalition. She has been a non-resident fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations since 2003. She is the author of Fighting Terrorist Financing: Transatlantic Cooperation and International Institutions (2006).
 
She is married to William K. Davis, formerly Director of the United Nations Information Center in Washington, DC; they have two children, Ellie and Max, and live in Bethesda, Maryland. A Democrat, since 2000 Richard has contributed $9,000 to Democratic causes and candidates, including $4,500 to former Admiral Joe Sestak’s House and Senate campaigns in Pennsylvania, $750 to John Kerry’s 2004 Presidential campaign, and $1,000 to Hillary Clinton in 2007.
 
Rating America’s Africa Agenda (by Anne C. Richard, The Globalist)
The “DFID Model”: Lessons for the U.S. (by Anne C. Richard and George Rupp)
Articles by Anne C. Richard (Huffington Post)
 
 
 
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