Tag: White House

A Washington Insider’s Advice for the New Administration

Posted on by robbie

President Obama confronted a number of foreign policy issues during his two terms in office: a covert mission to kill Osama bin Laden; the expansion of settlements in Israel; a failure to curb Russian aggression in Crimea; military strikes in Libya; a red line and refugee crisis in Syria; the rise of the Islamic State; the reopening of relations with Cuba; and a nuclear deal with Iran. Behind the scenes, NationSwell Council member Matt Spence worked on many of these issues in the White House’s National Security Council from 2009 to 2012 and as head of Middle East policy in the Defense Department from 2012 to 2015. As Donald J. Trump readies to be sworn as president this week, NationSwell spoke to Spence, now a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and a fellow at Stanford, about the world the next commander-in-chief will face.

How did you get interested in international policy? Why did these big global issues matter to you personally?
In some sense, it’s unusual. I grew up in Southern California and lived in the same house my entire life. I’d never been out of the country until college. But when I was born, my father was in the Army reserves, and I remember him being deployed to Korea in preparation for the first Gulf War. My mom was the first in her family to be born in the United States; her grandparents and two uncles had come here very suddenly during World War II when the Nazis took over. So, in the background, there was a strong interest in international issues. I remember my dad reading a lot of military history and international affairs when I was growing up, and I was just fascinated.

You’ve credited your first White House role to a doctorate in international relations and “a fair amount of luck.” Why did you choose to join the Obama campaign in 2008?
I got very excited about Barack Obama when he was a candidate after reading a speech he gave in 2007 to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He talked about how the way to keep America safe was by pursuing smart policy and supporting development throughout the world. I’d written my doctoral dissertation at Oxford about the impact of democratization on developing the rule of law and what America could do to support that in Russia and the former Soviet Union. I was really struck that the danger in these societies was not that they’re aggressive, but that they were so weak and broken. I remember Obama at the time talking about how a starving child in the Middle East or Africa is as much a threat to the United States over the long term as the spread of weapons of mass destruction. I think we’ve seen that now with broken states, refugees, the rise of totally ungoverned spaces. Obama got that at a real visceral level, and he was saying this, by the way, when he’d only been a senator for a very short time.

Looking back on your time in the White House, what was the greatest test of your resolve?
I started at the White House on the first day after the inauguration, and I was just working all the time. I was at my desk by 6:30 or 7 in the morning, and I would leave around 10:30 or 11, as one of the last people leaving the West Wing. There is so much that is happening at the same time; the sheer bandwidth of the diverse issues is just mind-blowing. At the beginning of an administration, one of the most valuable qualities is just stamina to come in and work those types of hours. But the key, in the middle of all that, is to try to think about how to keep your head above water. What do you actually want to be doing? How do you think about history?

[ph]

How did you maintain perspective amidst all the pressure?
I got a great piece of advice from my boss at the time, the national security adviser. He said, “Always make time to read history.” In the middle of these 14-hour days, I read the memoirs of past national security advisers, secretaries of state and other figures. I remember finding a passage in Zbigniew Brzezinski’s memoir from when, as Carter’s national security adviser, they dealt with the Iranian revolution. I gave it to the national security adviser as we were thinking through the protests surrounding Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, in Tahrir Square. You don’t want to overgeneralize from history: Those were very different events in very different historical times. But there’s something humbling to think through the changes that occurred decades before. These issues appear very unique; everything looks new to you, in a sense. Essentially, how do you try to learn from your mistakes before you make them?

You had the chance to travel with and brief President Obama. What did you learn from him about leadership?
He has an amazing sense of priorities. Many times, sitting in the Situation Room, he would say very explicitly, “Look, this is a presidential-level decision. I’ve made my decision. You guys go execute and figure it out.” He was very clear on which issues rose to his level that he needed to handle and which he could delegate, which is incredibly important for an executive. There’s a lot of noise in national security or business decisions or running an organization. Given this huge glut coming at you, what are the key things you really need to pay attention to?

During your tenure at the Defense Department, what was the most important development that will shape the future of the Middle East?
When you ask anyone about the Middle East, they picture conflict, chaos, danger. We have to try to think about opportunities. We’re facing a real time of American isolationism. Americans don’t feel that the Middle East is unimportant, but they throw their hands up and wonder if there’s anything we can do about it. Can we maintain leadership without having tens of thousands of troops in the region that most Americans don’t really support?

I remember going to Jordan to lead defense talks with the government. We were in the process of providing a huge amount of military assistance, because they share a border with Syria and Iraq, they had a very serious refugee crisis and they were facing threats from neighbors. A senior member told me, “We deeply appreciate the military assistance that you’ve given us, and we need it. But what we need even more is millions of jobs.” In a sense, it sounds cliché, but as a representative of the most powerful military in the history of the world in a region that’s deeply hungry for security, these countries were thinking about how to educate and employ this next generation. When you spend your days thinking about war planning, that wasn’t what I expected. The most valuable export we have is not from these $750 billion defense budgets, but economic opportunity and entrepreneurship.

What piece of advice would you give to the incoming Trump administration?
Listen and surround yourself with good people who are dedicated, know what they’re doing and will be thoughtful about their role. Right now, there really is an opportunity to show what he’s going to do to govern, and he should show he’s going to govern in a very different way than he campaigned. He said he’s going to do that, and just match the work now.

To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.

What Are the Latest Farming Innovations in America? This Group Is Touring the Heartland to Find Out

Posted on by robbie

“American farmers are a dying breed,” a Newsweek cover story tolled last spring. The splashy headline was eye-grabbing, but the narrative of aging farmers and agricultural decline is closer to myth than fact. More and more young people are joining the time-tested profession, bringing new technology, ideas and environmental consciousness to farming.
Just who are these millennials heading into the fields, and why are they doing it? It’s a question Young Invincibles, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit focused on youth engagement, along with Global Prairie, a digital media and marketing firm in Kansas City, will be asking on a nationwide listening tour, FarmNext: Giving Voice to the Next Generation of Food Producers. The group will host its first meeting at University of California, Davis today, followed by stops at Kansas State University, Virginia Tech and Iowa State University. It all culminates in a summit at the nation’s capital this fall.
NationSwell will be following the conference as it hops around the country, bringing you stories about young farmers’ perseverance and innovation in the face of challenges. We’ll focus on how we can incentivize young people to do the crucial work that stocks our markets with food; how drones, mapping and the latest inventions are changing the business of agriculture; and how America as a whole can bridge the divide between rural and urban communities.
“I think we’ve seen the millennial generation as a generation that has been let down by traditional institutions, whether that’s the real estate market, Wall Street, government,” Tom Allison, Young Invincible’s policy and research manager, tells NationSwell. For young people, “there’s a cultural search for something authentic, and you can’t get more authentic than reconnecting with the land, growing your own food and becoming part of the ecological system in a way that maybe has been lost in previous generations.”
These 80 million teens and twentysomethings — idealistic, socially, tech-savvy and penniless, if you believe what the media says — compose a growing share of the country’s workforce. Agriculture’s no different. While some indicators, like the average age of the “principal operator,” may appear to show farmers are getting older, those aren’t exactly accurate. “A lot of times a family might designate the oldest person in the family, out of respect and tradition, even if Grandpa isn’t necessarily doing as much work or making the business and ecological decisions of the farm,” notes Allison, whose family operates a small vineyard in Virginia.
Most other numbers reveal a millennial-driven business. The median age for non-management farmhands is 37.4 and for miscellaneous agricultural workers it’s 34.1 — both far younger than the median age for all occupations: 42.3. Another way of measuring the age of the workforce, the share of jobs held by millennials (16 to 34 years old), reveals that in fields like agriculture and food science, 41 percent of jobs are held by young adults.
Those figures are expected to grow. While the number of students majoring in agricultural studies remains low overall — 1.8 percent — its growth is skyrocketing, with a 39 percent increase over the past five years.
“There’s attributes that make us uniquely adapted to the agricultural industry,” Allison says. “We have collaborative approaches to work. Even though it is one person toiling in the soil, it really takes a whole network across the industry: the folks selling the equipment through the food chain pipeline to the buyer. Young people are also so adapted to technology. Agriculture relies more and more on predictive analytics to inform decisions on what to grow and when, GPS or drones to identify problems in the field that are too big or too small for one person or a crew to identify and big applications for food chemistry.”
Farming is not as easy or romantic as it sounds, as Allison can attest. It’s “not exactly Norman Rockwell,” he says. There’s days in late spring when you light a fire at the end of your row of vines to ward away a frost, tend it all night, then have one flock of birds eat your entire crop the next afternoon. There’s days in late summer when the salty sweat burns your eyes under 100-degree heat. But even for all the hardship, the rewards of harvesting something from the soil are attracting a new group.
“The numbers are there,” Allison adds. “Young people are getting into farming, both because they care about it and because there’s a lot of opportunities there.” Which is good news for the rest of us, since our dinner depends on it.

The Military Gave This Veteran the Permission Slip She Needed to Lead

Posted on by robbie

From leading the 100,000 Homes Campaign to being recognized by the White House as a Champion of Change to founding the Billions Institute, an organization committed to supporting new solutions to global problems, Becky Kanis has committed her life to making bad things better.
Her motivation stems from one moment, which she shares in her Got Your 6 Storytellers talk. When she was a lieutenant in the 25th Infantry Division, a U.S. Army division in Hawaii, every single link in the communications system went from green to red. At three in the morning, Kanis stood at the colonel’s door — and with a knock, knock, knock — woke her up and explained the situation.
“She literally poked me in the chest and she said ‘un-f*** this lieutenant,’” Kanis says. The colonel could have kicked a trashcan; she could have micromanaged. But instead, she gave Kanis permission to fix the problem.
Kanis says that in order to do our part to make the world a better place, we should ask ourselves three big questions: What do you really want? What are you willing to let go of? And what lights up your heart? Kanis’s talk centers on how she has applied those questions and pursued answers to them in her own life. And it explores how we can all give ourselves permission slips to un-f*** things.
While her seven minutes onstage includes a lot of laughs, there is also a moment leaves the audience in awe. Kanis displays two images of a formerly homeless man named Ed Givens. First, he appears drunk, with his back against a brick wall, and later he appears in a suit at a party the White House threw to celebrate the success of the work that Kanis and others did to address homelessness.
“This is the kind of change that I know in my bones is possible in the world,” Kanis says. Watch the video, then join Kanis in her call to action to un-f*** big things together.

4 Takeaways from the Summit on Working Families

Posted on by robbie

During the Summit on Working Families on Monday, First Lady Michelle Obama recalled once bringing her youngest daughter to a job interview.
“Who I was at that time was a breastfeeding mother of a four-month-old, I didn’t have a babysitter, so I took Sasha to the interview with me,” she said. “And I thought, ‘Look, this is — this is who I am; I got a husband who’s away; I got two little babies, they are my priority. If you want me to do the job, you gotta pay me to do the job, and you’ve gotta give me flexibility.”
Echoing the struggle many Americans face in striking a balance between work and home life, the First Lady  joined her husband President Barack Obama, the White House, the Department of Labor, and the Center for American Progress in hosting a day-long discussion directed at creating better workplace policies for parents.
Business leaders (including CEOs from Johnson & Johnson and Goldman Sachs), lawmakers, working families, and White House officials participated in the all-day summit, as well as Vice President Joe Biden and Dr. Jill Biden.
At Monday afternoon’s remarks, Obama announced a presidential memorandum requiring federal agencies to provide employees more flexibility to take time off to take care of ill family members, to nurse, or to be able to work from home without suffering repercussions. Though the president did not offer up a plan requiring paid leave, he outlined four major themes that could help create a better life for American workers.
Flexible workplaces
The White House argues that more flexible schedules lead to happier employees, boosts productivity, and reduces turnaround rates, as Bloomberg Businessweek points out.  As a part of the president’s executive order, federal agencies are required to review their policies on flexibilities as a part of the Office of Personnel Management’s plan to create a Workplace Flexibility Index, which will be updated annually to measure success, according to a White House fact sheet.
Obama also urged lawmakers to pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which would require employers to accommodate pregnant women with flexibility that would allow them to keep their jobs.
Mad Men actress Christina Hendricks also spoke, illustrating the point that U.S. workplace policies were outdated. Using her character on the AMC series, a single mom and professional, Hendricks said, “In the 21st century the only place for a story like Joan’s should be on TV.”

Paid family leave 

Obama also pointed out that the U.S. is the only developed country without mandated paid maternity leave. Women now comprise half the American workforce while men are increasingly playing the role of caregivers more than ever before.
“Many women can’t even get a paid day off to give birth,” Obama said. “That’s a pretty low bar.”

Obama also urged Congress to pass the FAMILY Act, which would annually provide up to 12 weeks of paid leave to qualifying workers for personal illness, to take care of a sick family member, or for the birth or adoption of a child. While current federal policy allows up to three months of unpaid leave for newborns or sick family members for some employees, the law only covers about 60 percent of the American labor force—leaving almost half of all workers without the ability take leave sans a paycheck, the president argues.

Child Care

Child care was also mentioned at the summit. As a part of his initiative for better work policies, Obama will ask Labor Secretary Thomas Perez to set aside $25 million towards childcare for employees who want to attend job-training programs. Today, more than 60 percent of families with children live in a dual-income household, compared to only 40 percent of households with two working parents in 1965, according to U.S Council of Economic Advisors report.

“One study shows that nearly half of all parents, women and men, report that they’ve said no to a job, not because they didn’t want it, but because it would be too hard on their families,” Obama said. “When that many talented, hard-working people are forced to choose between work and family, something’s wrong. Other countries are making it easier for people to have both. We should too, if we want American businesses to compete and win in the global economy.”

Equal pay and raising the minimum wage

The president also emphasized pay equality and increasing the minimum wage as part of setting a 21st century workplace agenda. While females are more likely to work in low-wage and minimum-wage jobs than men, more than 40 percent of mothers are their family’s primary breadwinner yet they earn just 77 cents to every dollar, on average, compared to their male counterparts, according to White House economic advisers.

The President argued that by limiting the female labor force the U.S. is hindering its global edge. The U.S. ranks 17th in female labor participation among the world’s richest countries, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. Back in 1990, the U.S. placed sixth.

These four narratives underscored a greater message from the White House: supporting families through better workplace policies is not just a women’s issue.
“At a time when women are nearly half of our workforce,” Obama said, “anything that makes life harder for women, makes life harder for families, and makes life harder for children. There’s no such thing as a women’s issue; this is a family issue. This is an American issue.”

America’s Future: Meet the 2014 White House Science Fair Exhibitors

Posted on by robbie

On Tuesday, the White House was the backdrop to the country’s brightest students and their innovations — including hovercrafts, robots, and solar energy-powered contraptions — that potentially could be the game-changing ideas that make up America’s future.
At the fourth annual White House Science Fair, President Barack Obama welcomed a host of youth from across the country to share their ideas, designs, and experiments in science, technology, engineering and math (more commonly known as STEM subjects). This year’s event also focused on females excelling in STEM fields, according to the White House website.

“If you win the NCAA championship, you come to the White House. Well, if you’re a young person and you produce the best experiment or design, the best hardware or software,” said President Obama, “you ought to be recognized for that achievement, too.”

Among the host of young people was 12-year-old Peyton Robertson. As a native of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Robertson is familiar with flooding and salt-water damage since he grew up in the area of the Sunshine State where hurricanes often strike. So he created a “sandless” sandbag that efficiently protects flood zones. He was recognized as America’s Top Young Scientist at the 2013 Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge and received $25,ooo for his lightweight, effective design.

Elana Simon, 18, also presented her work, which focuses on patients coping with fibrolamellar, a type of rare liver cancer that she herself endured at age 12. Simon worked with one of her former surgeons to gather tissue samples from fibrolamellar patients to perform genomic sequencing tests and discovered a common genetic mutation among them. Her results have been published in the renowned journal Science, plus she is a recent winner of the American Association for Cancer Research’s Junior Champion in Cancer Research Award. She has also presented her work in front of 16,000 cancer researchers and will attend Harvard this fall to study computer science.

Girl Scout Troop 2612 of Tulsa, Oklahoma, were also among their much-older peers, presenting their design for a “Flood Proof Bridge,” which includes a computer program that automatically retracts the bridge when flood conditions are detected by a motion sensor embedded in the river bed.  Eight-year-olds Avery Dodson, Natalie Hurley, Miriam Schaffer, Claire Winton, and Lucy Claire Sharp came up with the model as part of the Junior FIRST Lego League’s Disaster Blaster Challenge, which prompted elementary school students to experiment with simple machines, motorized parts, engineering, and math to create solutions for natural disasters like floods and earthquakes. The intrepid troop built the idea on the notion that first responders had trouble reaching certain communities because of bridges in the wake of the Estes Park, Colorado flood. They not only built the model but also developed the computer program, too.
Check out the rest of the exhibitors here.
MORE: These Engineering Students Turned a Simple Assignment Into Two Years of Hard Work, Innovation and Kindness
 

How This 18-Year-Old Immigrant Became a Voice for Her Community

Posted on by robbie

When she was only 7-years-old, Jia Min “Carmen” Yang and her parents emigrated from China to the United States. At the time, Yang didn’t even speak English. Now, as an 18-year-old living in Chicago’s South Side, Yang is a young political activist, persuading other immigrants in her community to get involved in the political process and vote if they are able. She has witnessed firsthand the heartbreak caused by an immigration policy that can tear families apart — and she doesn’t want to see it happen again.
Last December, Yang visited Congress through Wish for the Holidays, an event organized by We Belong Together, a campaign that seeks to mobilize women in support of immigration reform. During this program, Yang heard the stories of many young immigrants whose families were torn apart by immigration laws. “Listening to them tell their personal stories about their families being separated breaks my heart,” Yang said in an interview with the National Journal. “I connect to them and feel their pain, and it only made me more passionate about this issue. It angers me to know this is happening, and I really want to help change it.”
MORE: Paperwork Stood Between Immigrants and Their Dream, So This Group Stepped In
Yang’s neighborhood is composed of a large immigrant population. At Thomas Kelly Public High School in Brighton Park (where she attends school), 96 percent of the 3,200 students come from low-income families. The student body is 87 percent Hispanic, 8 percent Asian, 3 percent white and 2 percent black. “Practically all my friends are immigrants,” she says. Because of this, the issue of immigration reform is very close to her heart. Yang tries to do her part by getting involved in the community. She’s dedicated more than 800 hours to improving the neighborhood. She also volunteers with the Chinese American Service League. But her biggest service is with the Mikva Challenge, an organization that gets youth involved with politics.
For several years now, Yang has been heavily involved in the Get Out the Vote campaign, where she worked to improve voter turnout in her community. She’s been a team captain, helping train new volunteers, working the phone bank and canvasing the neighborhood. “Working on these projects, I have learned that people have to be determined and cooperate together as one in order to make changes,” she says. “It may take a long time to see the results and get what we deserve, however, through handwork and commitment, those things will come.”
Yang hopes the same is true with immigration reform. She hopes that by making her voice heard that other families won’t be afraid to speak out to campaign for change. “There are a lot of people — 11 million in this country — who are undocumented, and 5.5 million of them are kids,” Yang says. “I’ll keep working until I’m reassured that no families are going to be separated, no parents are going to be sent back — and we can go to school without fear that someone will be gone when we get home.”
ALSO: This Nonprofit Is Teaching Immigrants Much More Than Language