Reflections and Learnings as President Carter turns 99

99 years ago on Sunday, one of the world's most exemplary humans, President Jimmy Carter, was born on a peanut farm in Georgia and led an extraordinary life from the very beginning, building bridges across race and class even as a child and working to bring the world's attention to problems that were not in the spotlight at every stage of his career, from climate change policies that were way ahead of their time to programs to eradicate debilitating parasitic diseases that are a model for disease eradication and international public health programs worldwide.

Earlier this year, he chose hospice care and time with family rather than further medical intervention. Soon after, his wife Rosalyn revealed she was suffering from dementia. She spent a lifetime dedicated to challenging the stigma of mental illness and educating the public, medical professionals, and journalists that mental illness, like any disease, is treatable and should be addressed like any other public health challenge.

Since then, I have been thinking a lot about what the Carters mean to me, and President Carter's birthday seems like a good time to share some of my reflections.

Hundreds of amazing people have worked for President and Mrs. Carter and thousands more have been photographed with him. Many are sharing selfies with him because he has meant so much to so many of us. At the risk of being self-serving I am jumping on the bandwagon. I feel both honor and pride to have spent just over two years of my life supporting The Carter Center's global and mental health programs, but I have kept this treasured photo in a box because I also feel a profound sense of embarrassment and inadequacy in having it on a wall, let alone sharing it. At the time this photo was taken I had expectations and aspirations for a particular path toward making difference in the world, inspired in large part by President Carter since the first grade when I first campaigned for him in the mock election at my elementary school. Photos of my time at the Carter Center for me are reminders that many of the ways in which I imagined making a difference back then have not materialized in the way I had planned, but there are so many things that I learned from Jimmy and Rosalyn Carters' way of being that I believe are worth sharing.

1. Humility and empathy are strengths. President and Mrs. Carter spent a week every month at the Center and visited everyone's offices personally and asked about our typical work day and what our pain points were. They visited village health workers and knew they were just as important as any multi-million dollar donor. They read any letters, speeches, proposals, or talking points we sent and made corrections to ensure they were written in the simplest, unpretentious, and most accessible of language. They surrounded themselves with experts and never pretended to have all the answers. They are also humble in their day-to-day lives. I was with Mrs. Carter at a fundraising event and my colleague and I met with her in her hotel room to brief her, and we entered and she was standing in the foyer ironing her own clothes and had sent the hotel staff away, preferring to do it herself. She complained that during her incognito shopping trip at a department store earlier that day, someone recognized her and tried to sell her real pearls when she was perfectly happy with fakes. Rosalyn became a fashion role model for me in that she wore the same suits for most events. The trappings of status and wealth were simply never of interest to the Carters, enabling them to focus their resources and energy on more important things. The Carters spent time building houses for the homeless every year, recognizing how important it is to do manual labor and have empathy with people whose life circumstances made finding shelter a challenge.
2. Evidence-based decision-making paired with skepticism can give you the strength to pursue strategies that may be unpopular or unnoticed for the greater, long-term good. Data and research have always been a critical part of everything The Carter Center does. Disease prevalence data, deployment of health workers, and allocation of funds are just a few among the indicators tracked meticulously and used to inform the next quarter's or next year's plan and resource allocation. While the Carter Center could have focused on problems with easy wins or to make headlines to attract donations and keep themselves in the spotlight, instead they used research and science to identify critical and often intractable, obscure problems that would most benefit from their celebrity and expertise, rather than focusing on the low-hanging fruit. Examples are projects on peace and democracy in places like Southern Sudan to the debilitating disease of river blindness. The Carters were also authentic and tough - they do not hesitate to ask probing questions to understand the data and would not hesitate to express skepticism, even to experts and VIPs, and expected others to do the same. Authority or celebrity should not dull our reasoning and willingness to question, even if it can be uncomfortable. They never took counter-arguments or proposals personally, and nor would we do so, because the goal was to implement best practices, not to elevate ego. Finally, being values-driven only takes you so far -- it may lead to making decisions based on gut feelings or what we wish to be true about the world, but the Carters have been able to simultaneously lead in a way that is both purpose-driven and evidence-based. Getting things done means taking off the rose-colored glasses.
3. Idealism is best paired with pragmatism and diplomacy. I came to admire President and Mrs. Carter as a first-grader because of the idealistic way in which they talked about human rights and taking care of the environment, but studying the Carter Adminstration's policies in high school and college and, later at The Carter Center, I learned that, to accomplish audacious, idealistic goals requires realism and an understanding that there are always complicated trade-offs. Eradicating disease and delivering vaccines in rural villages throughout sub-Saharan Africa requires negotiation and engagement with national and local actors with whom one might not share values or even may consider evil in many respects. Change cannot happen without recognizing the connection between different domains - such as public health and politics, or business and the environment, and the Carters were courageous in talking about such gray areas and facing them head on. When many others shied away from controversy, the Carters were not afraid to reduce starvation in North Korea through a non-governmental agricultural program, strengthen public health training in Ethiopia, or try to eliminate Guinea Worm in Sudan, all while still advocating for human rights with the less-than-angelic actors they had to work with. In fact, pragmatic engagement with multiple parties often contributes to change more effectively than sweeping declarations or public condemnation. Nuance and pragmatism attract fewer headlines but are often where the change is made, because engagement and negotiation with those we disagree with is how things get done. In short, Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter embody the essence of diplomacy, which involves working behind the scenes to acknowledge disagreements and work through them to find common ground.

There are so many other lessons I learned from these two remarkable people, I will save a few for another time.

Happy Belated Birthday, President Carter, and best wishes to you and Rosalyn! I hope that I live to be 99 and I know you will continue to inspire me and be my primary role models both in how you have lived your lives and how you approach aging and the end of life. It has been the honor of my life to have had a glimpse of the people behind the image, and to know that every bit of praise and appreciation being showered upon you know is an understatement. I am so grateful to carry all that I learned with me and try to apply them in some small ways in hopes of making a minuscule fraction of a tiny portion of the difference you have made in the lives of millions of people around the world during your extraordinary time on this earth.

Interesting connection between President Carter, one of my first employers, and Volvo Cars: President Carter's Environmental Council honored Volvo Cars for its 1976 landmark contribution to cutting automotive emissions by making the Lambda sensor technology available to the industry. https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/media/pressreleases/5124

Did you know that President Carter is the only US president who did not wage war?

https://theelders.org/news/only-us-president-who-didnt-wage-war