News About Former Ford Foundation Staff
Cristina Eguizabal is the new Costa Rican ambassador to Italy.
She was appointed to the position in October and assumed her duties in Rome on December 1.
Ms. Eguizabal worked at the Foundation for 12 years, from 1997 to 2007, initially as a program officer in the Latin America and Caribbean program. She also worked in the Human Rights and International Cooperation unit and the Mexico City office, where she worked on peace and social issues. Her portfolio in Mexico included grants on peace, security and regional cooperation in Latin America, the Caribbean and the Western Hemisphere in general.
After she left Ford she became the director of the Latin American and Caribbean Center (LACC) at Florida International University in Miami. She was its third director and the first from outside the university’s own faculty.
Her work there, according to an LACC statement when she was hired in 2007, was “to boost the center’s work in Mexico and Brazil, the region’s two largest countries and economies, by collaborating with institutions and establishing research projects in those nations….”
While directing the LACC she also was a professor in international relations at the university, and later was the director of graduate programs at the University of Costa Rica.
Ms. Eguizabal, who earned a doctorate from the University of Paris-Sorbonne Nouvelle, also was a board member and vice chair of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), an advocacy group for human rights in the Americas, and treasurer of the Latin American Studies Association.
An article on the changing relationship between the United States and Cuba that she wrote for this newsletter, “U.S.-LatinAmerica-Cuba: A Sixty-Five-Year Love-Hate Triangle”, appeared in the Spring 2015 issue.
William J. Rust, who worked in the Foundation’s Office of Reports, later called the Office of Communications, from 1985 to 1991, has written a study of America’s early involvement in Southeast Asia, Eisenhower and Cambodia: Diplomacy, Covert Actions, and the Origins of the Second Indochina War.
The book is scheduled for publication by the University Press of Kentucky this spring.
Early praise includes a recommendation by the author John Prados, who has written Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War and says of Rust’s book that it “clearly advances our knowledge of Eisenhower and Kennedy actions on Cambodia. No student of the Vietnam war can afford to miss Eisenhower and Cambodia.”
Rust has written two other books on the recent history of the region, making it “his purpose,” said Prados, “to dig deep for explanations of the origins of the American war in Southeast Asia. In Eisenhower and Cambodia Rust shines a penetrating light on the murkiest corner of all, the impact of American actions on the neutralist nation of Cambodia and its Prince Norodom Sihanouk.”
His other books are Before the Quagmire: American Intervention in Laos, 1953-1961 and So Much to Lose: John F. Kennedy and American Policy in Laos, both of which were named Outstanding Academic Titles by Choice magazine, a publication of the American Library Association.
In a review of the Kennedy book for H-Net, a 100,000-member international organization of scholars and teachers, Jessica Elkind, a professor of history at San Francisco State University, said: “Anyone seriously interested in U.S. foreign relations during the Cold War, and especially American involvement in Southeast Asia and the origins of the Vietnam War, cannot afford to ignore this fascinating book.”
Terry McGovern, who was a senior program officer in Ford’s Gender Rights and Equity Program from 2006 to 2012, is the co-editor of a book documenting the “modern history of the global women’s history”.
The book, Women and Girls Rising: Progress and Resistance Around the World, “interrogates where and why progress has met resistance and been slowed, and examines a still unfinished agenda for change in national and international policy arenas….This book creates a clear and forceful narrative about women’s agency and the central relevance of women’s rights movements to global and national policy-making.”
Early reviews have been positive, including one by the feminist activist Gloria Steinem, who wrote, “It is essential that we create a new normal….and that is what the dedicated and talented women and men whose voices are represented in this book are doing every day. The book is a treasure because it tells their stories.”
Dr. Paul Farmer, a professor of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School and co-founder of Partners in Health, which provides high-quality health care in resource-poor areas in this country and abroad, says the book is “humane and instructive, a data-driven but never arid defense of the feminism needed to promote social justice in a world in need. Read this book and see a vibrant and global movement placing women and girls at the center of agendas for health and human rights—and for social and economic progress that doesn’t wreck our fragile and beautiful planet.”
McGovern, a professor of population and family health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, co-edited the book with Ellen Chesler, a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and director of its Women and Girls Rising Program.
The book has been published by the Routledge press as part of its Global Institutions series.
Alan Feinstein is the new executive director of AMINEF, the American Indonesian Exchange Foundation, an organization that administers the Fulbright program in Indonesia.
Feinstein worked at major international grant-making organizations for 21 years, starting at Ford where he was a program officer in the Jakarta office from1987 to 1994. He has held positions as well with the Japan Foundation in Tokyo, the Toyota Foundation in Tokyo and the Rockefeller Foundation in Bangkok.
He left Rockefeller in 2008 to be an independent consultant, book editor and translator, based in Bangkok. He also was a consultant during this period to UNESCO and the World Bank, where he oversaw a pilot project on “creative communities” in Indonesia and advised the bank on developing local philanthropy projects there. In 2009-10 he was a Nippon Foundation Asian Public Intellectuals Senior Fellow.
Feinstein has a bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University and did graduate work in ethno-musicology at Wesleyan and the University of Michigan, where he received a Fulbright Hays Dissertation Fellowship in 1984 to carry out ethnographic field research on performing arts in Central Java and earned his doctorate.
He has lectured in music, social science and Indonesian studies at several universities in this country and in Asia, edited books for Silkworm Books in Thailand, and edited or written many books and articles on the region.
Sharon Alpert, formerly vice president for programs and strategic initiatives at the Surdna Foundation, has been named president of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, a family foundation based in New York that is “focused on building a socially and economically just society”.
She is the first woman to head Cummings and fourth president in its 25-year history.
Alpert began her career in philanthropy at Ford, where she worked on initiatives that dealt with inequality in housing, employment and environmental opportunities. She helped shape policies dealing with the interconnectedness of environmental and health issues.
She also worked for the Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation, supporting efforts in affordable housing, energy efficiency and environmental health; the Washington Office on Environmental Justice; and the Natural Resources Defense Council, serving as a liaison to the Sustainable Communities Task Force of the President’s Council on Sustainable Development.
She joined Surdna in 2004 as a program officer and rose to become director of its Sustainable Environments Program, working to improve lives through investing in innovative solutions to environmental problems. While there she worked with leaders from the non-profit and private sectors to help the White House create Recovery Through Retrofit, a stimulus program designed to increase the energy efficiency of homes and create green jobs.
The daughters of Peter Gubser have dedicated a Palestinian pre-school and teacher-training center in memory of their father, who died in 2010.
The transformation of the school was made possible by a $60,000 grant from the Peter Gubser Fund, consistent with his stated belief that “The big picture may be slow to change, but to the person receiving a textbook, the future is immediately better.”
Peter, a co-founder of the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations and president of American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA) for 29 years until his death, had worked at Ford in Lebanon and Jordan in the early years of his life-long work aiding Palestinian communities throughout the Middle East.
A special fund was created through ANERA to rehabilitate the school as part of its Early Childhood Development program, and to use the school as part of a teacher-training project. It’s in the Al Tireh neighborhood of Ramallah, a Palestinian city in the West Bank area about ten miles north of Jerusalem.
“This program helps develop young children’s growing minds and also prepare young teachers for a changing world,” said Peter’s daughter, Christie, an elementary school teacher. “It felt like a really good match to what was important to our father.”
“The projects he worked on were very varied,” said his other daughter, Sasha, a doctor, “but the ones that stood out to us were focused on education. He truly believed that education acts like a backbone to support a persons’ potential.”
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