Paige Alexander: 0:00
President Carter has a wonderful statement that he makes that he says I do whatever I can, wherever I can, whenever I can, for as long as I can, with whatever I have to try to make a difference, and I think that’s a motto that people should live by. What keeps me going is the fact that this is the right thing to do at the right time, regardless of it’s you know one side or the other, but you have to have the facts to do it.
Bishop Wright: 0:40
Good morning everyone. This is For People with Bishop Rob Wright, and today’s special guest extra special guest is Paige Alexander, ceo, chief Executive Officer of the Carter Center since 2020. Paige welcome.
Paige Alexander: 0:56
Thank you, it’s a pleasure to be here. I’m looking forward to our conversation.
Bishop Wright: 1:01
Awfully glad to have you here. We were together not long ago with a bunch of faith leaders from across lots of different denominations and faiths, to both to talk about inviting people to vote, to making their voices known, but also about not being disagreeable, even as we have legitimate disagreements. So a great extension of the work of the Carter Center. You’ve got a distinguished history in this kind of wonderful work, and so tell us a little bit about what prepares you to do this work.
Paige Alexander: 1:42
Well, you know, I grew up in Atlanta and I grew up in a very politically and civic active family Miles and Elaine Alexander. My parents moved here in the late 50s and my mom came from Boston and was sort of an independent and one of the things they wanted to see when they moved to the New South was the changes that they hoped for, and so they got very active in political campaigns. My mom ran Maynard Jackson’s campaign, my dad was an all-case lawyer. They just got very active and I grew up with that. I grew up with John Lewis at my table and Andy Young, and these were my parents’ friends, and so it’s not a surprise that this draw back to Atlanta after 35 years of working around the world in public service and nonprofit brought me back to Atlanta to head up the Carter Center. It just seemed like a perfect bookend to my career.
Bishop Wright: 2:41
Sure. So we know Jimmy Carter, we love Jimmy Carter and Rosalind Carter. I mean my gosh from the White House to pictures with a hammer in overalls, you know, showing us about how to live a life of moral leadership Just had his 100th birthday. I think people know that and we’re grateful for his example. And though he’s lived a good long life, we know that at some point he will go. We won’t have him for a lot longer and that makes us sad and yet it leaves behind an incredible legacy. I wonder for people listening, refresh for us. What is the mission of the Carter Center? What gets you up every day?
Paige Alexander: 3:37
What are you delivering? Sure? Well, when President and Rosalind Carter started the Carter Center in 1982, it was because they had seen the world and they wanted to continue participating in it, and some of what they saw at the White House was when they went to the end of the road in Africa or Asia. They saw people who were very similar to the people that they grew up with in a town of 600 people in Plains, georgia. It was the same village, and what they started seeing were that people were lacking basic human rights the ability to vote, and then it became a health issue. They saw people with guinea worm, with blinding eye diseases, and so the Carter Center was founded as a place that could be like Camp David and bring people together to resolve conflict, to talk about human rights, to work on democracy. But health also became a basic human right, and so now our two North Stars are global health and ending neglected tropical diseases. As President Carter says, there are no neglected diseases, there are only neglected people and human rights and conflict resolution. And so we do that for 40 years abroad. We’ve always worked internationally.
Paige Alexander: 4:52
Then, when I came in in 2020, I’d been living in Europe, and when I landed here on June 1st 2020, we were in the middle of a global pandemic. It was the weekend after the murder of George Floyd, and we had a president of the United States who was tear gassing Lafayette Square on TV when I got to my parents’ house and I thought how can we do this work abroad if we’re not willing to look in our own backyard? And that’s now led to a set of domestic programs, democracy programs so when we’re in Venezuela doing election monitoring, we’re now in Fulton County doing election monitoring, and the conflict resolution work we do in Sudan and Mali, we now do in Arizona and North Carolina, and so it’s been this growth because President Carter wanted to be flexible. He wanted to go where the need was, and he made a lot of principled but unpopular decisions during his term as president, and so sometimes we get involved in places that are questionable but nobody else is working in them, and we want to bring that type of conversation to the table.
Bishop Wright: 6:01
You know, I love this sentence the Carter Center, as it is transitioned from an organization that was founder led to one that is guided by its founders principles, right, so so if you had to distill those just sort of concisely, what are the? What are the founding principles here? And founders principles?
Paige Alexander: 6:21
Well, the tagline that we have which I think is really sums it up nicely we wage peace, we fight disease and we build hope. And so those three elements of what the founders wanted to what we’re doing as we grow, you know, those are the walls that we wage peace, fight disease and build hope. And so we don’t go off and do education programs, we don’t do humanitarian you know programs. We work in the areas that we know how to work on with the people that we’ve been working with for decades now.
Bishop Wright: 7:04
So let me have you put your CEO hat on and sort of administrative hat on. So how many boots on the ground do we have at the Carter Center? What’s the annual budget? How’s all that? Look, take us down to the room.
Paige Alexander: 7:16
Sure Down to the nuts and bolts. So we have almost 300 staff here in Atlanta and we have 3,500 staff overseas. So those are boots on the ground. They are villagers at the end of the road. That are Guinea worm ambassadors that work with the village leaders, the village elders, to make sure that the educational piece of for trachoma, blinding eye disease, for example, we have something called the safe strategy, that we do surgery, we give antibiotics, we have facial cleanliness and we have environmental concerns like having the latrine built and so those type of programs that we run, all to make sure people do not end up with a blinding eye disease.
Paige Alexander: 8:05
It takes a lot of people and 99.99% of them are non-American and are not third country nationals. They are all local. So when COVID shut many nonprofits down, it didn’t shut us down because everybody was already in the field, they were living in their villages and so that was a big change. Our budget is about $180 million a year. That does not include the wonderful gifts that we get from Merck and Pfizer for some of these antibiotics that are needed for river blindness, lymphatic filariasis and trachoma, and that’s another 300 million a year. But those are gifted and we’re very appreciative to the public-private partnership we have with the pharmaceutical companies for those.
Bishop Wright: 8:55
Absolutely. I mean that’s formidable. What you’ve outlined is formidable. I mean that’s getting the work done. And yet one piece of work is making peace or trying to facilitate peace, trying to be peace workers. So talk a little bit about that. What’s the peace work? Particularly in our own country here, because I imagine lots of countries around the world are pointing to us right now and saying, well, you’re talking a good game abroad, but your nation is divided, volatile in many ways in terms of the inflammatory conversation and comments that we’re having back and forth in this politically divided season. So tell me about the peace work.
Paige Alexander: 9:41
Well, so President Carter and the Carter Center has always looked to pursue peace rather than issuing a moral judgment. So when we’re having conversations in Sudan, trying to broker an agreement to allow health workers to get into an endemic area, sitting down with warlords on both sides, is important that we’ve not called one group of terrorists because they’re not going to sit down with us. So sometimes you have to have conversations with difficult players, but it is part of our raison d’etre is to get people to the table together to have the conversations.
Paige Alexander: 10:21
So, doing that overseas is the same thing as dealing with the polarization we have here now in the US. Bringing people together because we have more in common than we realize and finding that commonality will eventually get us to conversations that can hopefully open the door that we can respect each other in ways that we’ve always been able to have political differences. It’s just gotten so fraught now that how do you find that commonality, and I think that’s what we are doing here in the States now?
Bishop Wright: 11:01
Even if the challenges are a bit different. At least they seem more inflamed than any time that I can remember in my 60 years. Are there new tactics that you’re employing? Are there new ways in, or are we just staying steady with the things we know that work?
Paige Alexander: 11:20
Well, I think it’s become very difficult with social media because people end up in their own echo chambers and what attracts people is the most exciting thing that they see on social media and then that goes viral.
Paige Alexander: 11:35
Important part of what we try to do we do this overseas with election integrity.
Paige Alexander: 11:50
People walk into elections hey, it’s going to be stolen.
Paige Alexander: 11:52
I know it’s going to be stolen, but if you have an international observer in there who says we observed X number of polls, y number of places and we didn’t find any difficulty, or you do a hand recount after, these are things that should build on the integrity of an election, and so a lot of those issues in particular are being done here in Georgia as we speak with.
Paige Alexander: 12:17
You know, one of the things that was put into place in 2020 was a risk-limiting audit to allow a hand recount and invite people in, invite partisan observers in, invite the public in to watch the ballots be counted again, and it’s supposed to give people the sense of security that, okay, the election happened, they’re not little men in the machine changing the vote and there is going to be a hand recount, and so announcing the hand recount before the election was very important in 2020. And now it’s written into Georgia law and a lot of states do this, and I think that it’s hard to disprove a negative is the biggest problem we’re finding. So the only way to fight that is by truth and visuals of reality, and so I think that’s the biggest key that we have now. Social media is a negative, but it can be a positive if it is putting out accurate information.
Bishop Wright: 13:46
people say is that we live in a beyond fact world now, and because the echo chambers have become so airtight, um, there’s a real resistance to any new factoids, um, and it really makes, uh, people like your work really, really difficult. So so here’s the question I love to ask when I meet people like you and I’m fortunate enough to meet people like you, so you’ve got big work and a long road right to make progress.
Bishop Wright: 14:11
So how do you keep yourself going? Because what happens to some people when these are the giants that they choose to fight, so to speak you know inequity in health, you know peacemaking in the world is that they succumb to despair or cynicism. And you know my experience of you are not those two things right? I mean, folks can’t see you right now, but you’ve got a bright smile on an early morning. You seem like you’re ready to go, and that’s been my experience of you when I was at the Carter Center. So how are you sustaining yourself with this difficult work?
Paige Alexander: 14:54
Well, I certainly picked a field that I’m not going to work myself out of a job in my lifetime. But I’ll tell you President Carter has a wonderful statement that he makes that he says I do whatever I can wherever I can, whenever I can, for as long as I can, with whatever I have to try to make a difference, and I think that’s a motto that people should live by. I’m privileged to live in a country that gives me all of this freedom to have a job that allows me to share my experiences, and I realize that every day. And so what keeps me going is the fact that this is the right thing to do at the right time, and making those decisions to be involved is a decision. I mean, I could bury my head in the sand, anyone could bury their head in the sand, anyone could bury their head in the sand, and during a political season, sometimes that feels like the right thing to do.
Paige Alexander: 15:49
Yeah, sure, it’s too much coming at you, but you know people have to stay and I don’t want to use, you know, words that indicate negativity, but people have to stay and fight. You have to believe in what you’re doing is going to make a difference, regardless of it’s. You know one side or the other, but you have to have the facts to do it, and so I feel like making sure people are knowledgeable about what the facts are and knowledgeable about their ability to access everything from health to education to a ballot box are part of what I have and I’ve been blessed to have, and it’s what I want others in the world to have.
Bishop Wright: 16:32
Yeah, listening to you, I’m reminded of a couple of things I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately, and that is how to hold boldness and gentleness together, right? And that aggression is not the same thing as strength.
Paige Alexander: 16:49
Very, very true. There’s a nuance that people sometimes lose because we’ve become very binary you pick one side and you go with it, and if it’s aggressiveness, you go with it, as opposed to recognizing there’s a nuance there that it’s strength to show, and part of being strong is knowing what size weight you’re picking up. It’s not just you know carrying your message forward, it’s understanding and knowing what the message is.
Bishop Wright: 17:17
Jimmy Carter has been and is a pretty outspoken Christian, someone for whom faith has mattered an awful lot, you know, impressively continued to teach Bible study, you know, for many, many years in his church church I think, that he grew up in. You know, what’s interesting about watching him and the work of the Carter Center is that, even though it has this founding DNA, so to speak, it finds itself alongside of lots of kinds of people who believe in particular ways or no way, in particular, and so say a word or two about that, about how you embody this kind of broad and deep Christian faith in the work of the center.
Paige Alexander: 18:15
Well, you know, president Carter was the most religious president in my lifetime, certainly and he was guided by faith but never projected that upon others.
Paige Alexander: 18:21
And I think that that is one of the other guiding North Star spaces, uh, spaces that I I try to occupy. And I’ll be our first conversation. Well, our last face-to-face conversation. He said to me it was his 98th birthday and he said, uh, you’re going to church. I was down in Plains. He said you’re going to church today, right, that’s like you remember, I’m Jewish, right? And he goes, we’re going to church today, right. And I thought, wow, his hearing’s really going. So I said it again and he said I said, you’re going to church today. I was like, oh yes, I’m going to church today. I mean, he wanted me to appreciate Maranatha Baptist Church the way he appreciated it and he wanted to make sure that, you know, everybody has this opportunity, which is why he taught Sunday school and did the sermons for so long down there and people would line up at six o’clock in the morning to be able to get in, because his words were valuable, regardless of whether it was Judeo-Christian, muslim. It was a sense of a grounding, guiding light for him.
Paige Alexander: 19:26
And again, didn’t project it off into other people. He just wanted people to feel grounded in some faith, and so that’s where we are. We’re not a faith-based organization, but we don’t run away from those conversations with religious leaders. We want and need to have them, because in many cases they do run a village, sometimes they run an entire government, and those are, you know, people of faith, are people of faith, and it doesn’t matter what faith.
Bishop Wright: 19:56
I work with Jonathan Reckford, who is the executive director of Habitat for Humanity International, as you well know, and of course it was President Carter who really helped us to get to know Habitat in really wonderful ways. And at Habitat’s founding, jonathan tells me they have this wonderful phrase that they use to try to articulate what you just have articulated, and that is our Christian faith is our center, but it’s not our border. Faith is our center but it’s not our border. And for me that is the measure of a deep and abiding faith, whether it’s Muslim or Jewish or Christian or Baha’i or Sikh or whatever it is. And that is does your life with the divine.
Bishop Wright: 20:45
Surprised that a man and a wife we shouldn’t forget Rosalyn and her significant contribution to all of it, to everything that kind of a faith where it may be their personal center, but it’s not a border and it doesn’t block relationships. In fact it enhances it. And we saw that on the ground. They talk about the theology of the hammer at Habitat for Humanity, which is how about we build something together and then let’s have a chat. I think that’s the way to go.
Paige Alexander: 21:21
And that’s absolutely the way to go. I mean the Jewish faith. We have something called Tikkun Olam, which is repair the world, and every faith has that, as you know, has something like that as a guiding principle, and with Habitat, the concept that people get together to build a house for somebody else. That is a lot of what we do in our conflict resolution programs at the Carter Center. We bring people together to have conversations that are not necessarily political. They are something about the community. I mean, you don’t need someone from Atlanta trying to tell someone in rural North Carolina about elections. You need the people in rural North Carolina to talk about what they care about in their community, why elections are important, and then, are these elections being run properly? Like? You get to that conversation by community discussion and by sitting with your neighbor, not by imposing things, and so I do think that that is where President and Rosalind Carter came from was. They weren’t going to impose it, but they made it clear where the values were.
Bishop Wright: 22:26
Yeah, I love it. I love it. Well, as we sort of finish up here, I wonder what you want to tell the audience about the Carter Center. I mean, how can they get involved? How could they make donations? I mean, I was just in Minneapolis where Habitat built 148 homes on a restored golf course. It was a golf course that had fallen into disrepair and was sold to Habitat and they put up 140, some odd homes in honor of President Carter’s 100th birthday. So, in closing, what do people need to know? How can they get involved? How can they contribute?
Paige Alexander: 23:11
You know, going into our website, the cartercenterorg, you can see the various pieces of work that we do, and there’s usually not been an opportunity for people to get involved unless they wanted to go overseas and observe an election.
Paige Alexander: 23:29
Now we have the opportunity that we’re doing. We are doing a lot in the US, but our goal is still to help the people at the end of the road, the most vulnerable people, working where others don’t work and not duplicating the efforts of others. And so a lot of our work comes because we can rely on our field offices and those boots on the ground, as you mentioned, to carry out that work. And so, you know, a donation goes so much further because it’s not used to pay Atlanta overhead, it’s used to pay the people in the field. And so, if anyone has questions, there’s an active area on the website that people can go to and ask questions about how to get involved. But, honestly, it’s our partners on the ground, it’s the partners of the ministries of health in all of these countries who need that kind of help and who are looking for that technical assistance that we bring, and those are our real partners and those are the ones who we’re supporting, paige, thank you, and those are our real partners and those are the ones who we’re supporting.
Bishop Wright: 24:30
Paige, thank you, and thank you for pledging yourself to this good work and to being a peacemaker. Holy Scripture says beautiful are the feet of those who proclaim the gospel of peace, and so we thank God for you and for the Carter Center. Thanks again.
Paige Alexander: 24:48
Thanks, bishop, appreciate being here to talk about it.
