Clifford Brown on Trust, Fragile Democracies, and the True Cost of Dismantling Foreign Aid

Clifford Brown graduated with honors from Whitman in Economics in 1972, having started in late 1967 but also having taken one year off between his sophomore and junior years. During that year, he worked for the Northern Pacific Railway, as a deckhand on a tugboat on the Columbia river, and as a clerk/typist on an USG oceanographic ship (of the Environmental Science Services Administration (ESSA), NOAA’s predecessor agency) that travelled from Seattle to Tahiti and various ports in South America. The latter experience prompted a lifelong interest in both international affairs and foreign languages. During his senior year, he thus applied for and won a Thomas Watson Fellowship. That allowed him to spend a full year in Latin America, in Central America and in Chile during the time leading up to the 1973 coup which overthrew Salvador Allende. He also learned Spanish well during that year, and would later become professionally fluent in Russian and French.He attended law school at UCLA from 1973 to 1976, and he was the Managing Editor of the Law Review in 1975/1976. He eventually also became a partner of Ervin, Cohen & Jessup in Beverly Hills, California. He had practiced corporate law for over a decade when his involvement in a large Chapter 11 bankruptcy case ended in 1986. He applied for a job with the U.S. Agency for International Development and literally took a 2/3 pay-cut to go into the public sector and start a career in foreign aid. The next 28 years allowed him to live in 11 countries. His last career position was that of a Senior Foreign Service Officer, serving as Mission Director for Guinea and Sierra Leone. He then was offered a [plum] position with USAID, teaching economics at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces in 2009. Partly because even Nobel Prize winning economists disagreed as to what had caused the Great Financial Crisis, he opted instead to retire from USAID and practice law in Richland, Washington. His major achievement in Richland, and his proudest moment, was helping to establish My Friends Place, a licensed shelter for homeless teenagers which is still thriving to this day.Small town law was not what he expected, so he rejoined USAID as a contractor in Peru in 2013. He served in a variety of positions in the Peru Mission for over three years, happily saw two twin daughters born in Lima in 2014, and returned to Maryland in late 2016 where he continues to consult periodically with contractors interested in USAID work. He also took a job for one year with the Rule of Law Initiative of the American Bar Association, covering programs in West Africa. It got his French back in shape. [His Kyrgyz wife does that for his Russian.]Want to be a guest on Voices That Propel Us: Stories of Justice, Action, and Community? Send Danise Sugita a message on PodMatch, here: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/1763751693205864f9876416e