At a moment of inequality and division, who is advancing the vanguard of economic and social progress to bolster under-served communities? Whose work is fostering the inclusive growth that ensures every individual thrives? Who will set the ambitious standards that mobilize whole industries, challenging their peers to reach new altitudes of social impact? 

In 2026, Impact Next — an editorial flagship series from NationSwell — will spotlight the standard-bearing corporate social responsibility and impact leaders, entrepreneurs, experts, and philanthropists whose catalytic work has the potential to shape the landscape of progress amid urgent need for social and economic action.

For this installment, NationSwell interviewed Paige Alexander, CEO of The Carter Center, about what it means to lead an institution shaped so deeply by its founders; how The Carter Center is carrying its global health and peacebuilding legacy into a new era; and how to source and refine more durable forms of hope. Here’s what she had to say:

Raymond Hutchison: You’ve mentioned before that you transitioned to The Carter Center from an organization that was founder-led to one that is guided by its founder’s principles. What was it like working with or for Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter, and how has that experience impacted you as a leader?

Alexander, The Carter Center: I had the benefit of coming back in 2020, right in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even though President and Mrs. Carter had spent one week every month up here in Atlanta for 35 years, the pandemic meant that I had to go down to Plains, Georgia every month to meet with them, and that was a great opportunity. 

They were in their own home, a very simple, ranch-style house, and you were two and a half hours away from Atlanta, so really not only outside the Beltway of Washington, but truly in Middle America in many ways.

To listen to their stories, and to have the opportunity to understand how what they saw at the end of the road in Mali and Sudan was similar to what they saw at the end of the road in rural Georgia, in terms of helping people, was really meaningful.

For me, it was also an opportunity to kick the tires on a couple of issues that came up in my first few years. The 2020 election was teeing up, and I felt like we had to work domestically if we were going to be credible overseas in all the elections we were supporting there. President Carter went along with the idea that we could start doing domestic work, and that was a pretty big shift. But he also knew that we had to go where we needed most and where we had something unique to offer.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, I called him and said, ‘We’ve got to do something,’ and he said, ‘There are people in the neighborhood who will take care of Ukraine. We need to be where the neglected people are — dealing with neglected tropical diseases at the end of the road. That’s where people aren’t paying attention,’ he said, ‘and that’s where we should be.’

So I got a very good sense from him of what his North Star was, and that allowed me to recognize where this organization had to go in order to continue to be founder-inspired, even though it wasn’t founder-led.

Hutchison, NationSwell: What is the “North Star” of your leadership style? What is it about the way that you lead in the space that makes you an effective leader?

Alexander, The Carter Center: It’s hard for international NGOs to build legitimacy, and when one does, it’s usually because of things like inclusion, transparency, accountability — all the buzzwords that let people know you’re not going anywhere. 

So for me to come in and think I was going to have a brand-new North Star didn’t feel right, particularly when we had all of these preexisting commitments we needed to honor: eradicating Guinea worm, eliminating other neglected tropical diseases, staying true to human rights… my North Star became very much aligned with theirs.

And I knew that because in all of the work I had done— whether it was in the federal government or with other nonprofits — what people understand, respect, and trust are the people who go to the end of the road with them to complete something, not someone who’s coming in to do a project. So in the end, it was pretty easy to adapt my North Star to theirs.

Hutchison, NationSwell: My impression is that you’re on the road quite a bit. When it comes to social impact, what does proximity mean to you, and how does that influence you as a leader?

Alexander, The Carter Center: Proximity is important — I feel that it defines us. We’re more than 3000  people, and 99% of our staff in the field are local. We don’t have a lot of American or third-country nationals as our chiefs of party, so they don’t always get a lot of overlap with management, per se. So my ability to go out and meet the staff in the field and understand what their pain points are is incredibly important — that’s how I learn.

President Carter and Rosalynn Carter always believed in hiring locally and making sure programs were grounded in local needs, not simply what headquarters was presenting, and to me that’s really important. It’s not one-size-fits-all: What I see in the DRC is not necessarily relevant to Ethiopia, just like how what I see in Arizona is not necessarily relevant to what I’m seeing in Pennsylvania.

But I think being here in Atlanta is equally important; it’s helpful to be around to make sure I’m listening the whole time and reacting appropriately.

I think that’s the most difficult thing about management: you can’t be on a train, or in a boat, if no one is rowing with you.

Hutchison, NationSwell: The Carter Center has recently expanded its domestic work around conflict resolution, democracy, and the integrity of elections. Having seen social and political instability internationally, what feels similar to this moment in America, and what feels different?

Alexander, The Carter Center: When The Carter Center started out, we were initially peace-focused; it was largely about human rights and conflict resolution.

President Carter felt like he could bring people together around a table — all of our buildings here are literally round, because he didn’t want anyone’s back to be in a corner. So, our entire raison d’être was specifically focused on human rights, conflict resolution, and convening people quietly to have those conversations. And then as he traveled, he saw health problems emerging at the end of the road. That became equally important, because both he and Mrs. Carter saw health as a basic human right. 

When you think about how we have changed, and what we have seen, that’s one of the reasons we’re doing more domestic work now. In our conflict resolution work, we were named in the Colombia Peace Accords; we were named in Mali as an observer; we’ve done so much work in Israel-Palestine; we’ve worked in Sudan and South Sudan. In all of those places, we were seen as a neutral voice and a place that could reconvene people.

To be able to go into states here is more difficult, because as The Carter Center, we are the center of a former Democratic president. That makes the work much more challenging, but there are similarities in how we approach it. We don’t have to worry about fighting warlords, but we do recognize that you have to take a left-leaning lead and a right-leaning lead, have them build a community, and find a place where they can agree on something — and that is an incredibly powerful message to people who are listening. 

In North Carolina, for example, they see a former Republican Supreme Court justice sitting on stage with a former Democratic mayor from Charlotte, and the two of them are disagreeing respectfully. That moment shows people that we don’t have to agree on everything, but there are some issues where we can talk, find the low-hanging fruit, and build from there.

We do that with warlords, and we do it with political parties here. I think that helps with polarization because we’re not there just to talk at people — we’re there to listen and hear what might be the easiest problem to solve, and what might be the lowest-hanging fruit we can grab onto and build from.

We’re also using lessons from places like South Africa and Northern Ireland to ask: What have we learned? How can we disagree better now, so that when the coin flips and the other side is on top, we know how to do that in a way that’s not vengeful?

Hutchison, NationSwell: Striving for a healthier and more peaceful world is a demanding job for an organizational leader. What are some of the strategies you’re employing in your own life to make it healthier and more peaceful?

Alexander, The Carter Center: Mrs. Carter focused so much on mental health — and destigmatizing it in particular — even as many as 50 years ago, and I think COVID went a long way toward doing that. There isn’t one person you’ll have a conversation with who doesn’t have a family member or a close friend who had a mental health crisis during COVID or post-COVID. And even now, we’re in such a polarizing time. So how do you have these conversations, and how do you take care of yourself?

Our mission statement is to wage peace, fight disease, and build hope. And hope is not a policy, but it is something that we all have to hold onto. Every part of the world has gone through something similar at some time or another, so we’re not alone.

If you can find like-minded people, have one good conversation a day, and find one appreciation for something positive that happened; it really helps ground you.

And if you can turn off the noise, that’s also incredibly important. I am not on social media anywhere near as much as I probably should be, because even those alerts and breaking news notifications can be overwhelming.

Hutchison, NationSwell: What are some of the programs, signature initiatives, or facets of the work that you’re doing right now that feel particularly exciting or top of mind for you right now? 

Alexander, The Carter Center: With global health and peace being our focus, and with The Carter Center having started as a peace-focused organization and then grown into global health, President Carter had a wonderful quote that he always used, from his high school teacher: “We must adjust to changing times and hold true to unchanging principles.”

For me, when we’re looking at our signature initiatives, we have to honor our existing commitments. We started down the path of eradicating Guinea worm, and we were doing it in a very specific way. We were getting closer, and then the disease jumped to animals. So how do we adjust to that? How do we address a disease that has moved from humans to animals, and therefore can move back again?

That is probably our signature initiative on the health side, because no other disease has been eradicated except for smallpox. Smallpox was eradicated with a vaccine; Guinea worm is being eradicated through behavior change — by teaching people how to collect water differently than they have for generations and generations.

And the fact that that behavior change has led to only 10 human cases in the world last year, down from 3.5 million cases a year in 21 countries, is remarkable; that’s one of our biggest health initiatives.

Also on the health side is that mental health piece. Everyone cares about mental health now, and that was not true six years ago; it was still very stigmatized, and people wouldn’t talk about it. Now, we’re finding ways to address it through school-based behavioral health and through caregiving.

Mrs. Carter said there are four types of people in the world: those who have caregivers, those who are caregivers, those who will need caregivers, and those who will be caregivers. That’s all of us. So recognizing the need for mental health and caregiving is another important piece of the health side.

And then, when you look at the peace side of the house, there’s no shortage of conflicts. Our job is to continue to place ourselves in the middle as a neutral party that’s willing to talk to both sides and see if we can find space where we can agree on something.

We’ve been really successful in that, not only because of President Carter’s voice — because he could just pick up the phone, knock heads together, and say, “This has to be done” — but because of that legacy. Generationally, in these countries, The Carter Center can walk in with a kind of clean slate, and that gives us a special place at the table.

We also continue to raise the flag on human rights, human rights abuses, and rule of law issues that affect human rights. So it’s a little bit of everything, but those are probably the top four focus areas.

For me, it’s like a graduate school education to be surrounded by colleagues who have devoted their lives to this work, and then to go that last mile and talk to people who have recovered from Guinea worm — people who are now working with us as health volunteers, or working directly for the ministries.

Hutchison, NationSwell: What are some of the things that are giving you hope at the moment?

Alexander, The Carter Center: For me especially, President and Mrs. Carter planned incredibly effectively for the future, and they also gave us an extraordinary off-ramp. During COVID, they stopped coming up every month to spend time here, and that allowed all of us to grow into ourselves and determine what this organization was going to look like when they were no longer active.

They had been talking about that transition for 25 years. And even though we only truly lost them in the last 18 months, they had established this foundation for us that I can build from. That gives me a lot of hope.

I feel like I’m leading an organization that has great ideas every day. The work is choosing which ones we really want to double down on, while still honoring the commitments we already have and continuing to innovate and learn all the time. That’s hopeful.

I see our work as preserving democracy and making headway — not only overseas, but in our own backyard — and we can’t do that unless we’re willing to be honest about where our own foibles are, and apply that honesty to every lesson we have learned.

That honesty and transparency also give me hope. It means we’re not walking around life with blinders on. We’re asking: What does the big picture look like, and how can we effect change?

Raymond Hutchison: Let’s say you’re having guests over; what are you putting on the record player. What books are you going to lay out for them to see? 

Alexander, The Carter Center: I just went through one of our bookshelves recently, and Ta-Nehisi Coates was the first thing I saw — and it was in Dutch. When did I ever think I was actually going to read that in Dutch?

It really depends on what kind of person was coming over. I could have jazz or piano music on if I were looking to lower the vibe, and I’d be very happy to have Springsteen on if I were trying to get people hyped up.

As far as books go, Peter Attia is on my bookshelf right now, because I was living off this idea that I was going to get healthier and be better. And then there’s Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, which feels very relevant because I’m in the sandwich generation. I have parents in their 90s and kids in their 20s, so I think I’m drawn to books that help me think about how you treat both generations, and how you find your place in the middle of that.

Hutchison, NationSwell: What is one call to action you have for other impact leaders in this moment?

Alexander, The Carter Center: Hope can’t just be something we talk about in the abstract. It has to mean staying engaged — especially when the work feels hard, or slow, or discouraging. We have to look at the generations around us, older and younger, and recognize that if we don’t make a difference now, we’re missing the moment.

A lot of that engagement has to happen at the subnational level. That’s something we’ve learned overseas: not everything happens at the national or federal level, and we need to learn that here in the U.S., too.

How are you involved in your community? How are you proximal to solving local problems? So much of this work is going to come from the ground up. We can’t wait for government or policy to take care of everything; we have to build from trusted local institutions — the places people already know, rely on, and feel safe turning to.

Here in Atlanta, for example, we run a domestic violence program that works through fire stations. Someone experiencing domestic violence — especially a child — may not feel comfortable walking into a police station, but they might walk into a fire station. There are 36 fire stations in Atlanta and only six police stations; they’re close, they’re trusted, and people show up.

That’s what we all have to work toward: finding trusted institutions where we’re willing to show up, listening to each other, and making them stronger. That’s what builds social cohesion — not talking past each other, not othering each other, but creating places where people can be seen, heard, and helped.