 I'm Dan Rondi, I hold the Shrier Chair here at CSIS. I'm very pleased to be hosting Robert Kaplan, who's the President-CEO of the Inter-American Foundation. Really pleased people have come out on the snowy day, I'm particularly pleased the good. And thanks to all of you for coming out on this snowy Tuesday afternoon in Washington. We've had a lot of snowy days here in the last few months, haven't we? It's not sticking, fortunately, so I think we can thank ourselves for that. Dan, this is a great place. This is my first time in the new suit at CSIS, so congratulations to you all. It's just a beautiful, beautiful space. Let me start out by saying a little bit about the Inter-American Foundation and where we've come from and what we do. Yes, I can. Is that better? Yeah. Okay, good. I was watching you and you were far enough away. I have only loud and really loud, so this actually is good. And I have a quiet and really quiet. So between the two of us, we should have the whole range of tonality. Good. Is that better? It's perfect. Okay. I can't even do that. Okay. Well, the Inter-American Foundation, this year, is our 45th birthday. And we started by, we grew out of a congressional delegation to Guatemala in the late 60s led by Congressman Dantifacell from Southern Florida who was with a number of other congressmen visiting projects from the Alliance for Progress. And during the day, they went out and visited, see the communities where projects were taking place and they met with government officials and met with embassy staff. And at night, they came back and talked about what they'd seen and thought about it and debated a bit. And then they said, you know, there must be a way that we can get U.S. taxpayer dollars, U.S. relationships directly with the people in the communities themselves. There must be something that we can do there. We're not able to do that just through bilateral government-to-government relationship. Let's see if we can set something else up. So they came back to Washington and pretty quickly, apparently, the legislative history back then was a little bit more rapid than it is today. They were able to put something in 1969 and approve the creation of the Inter-American Foundation as an independent agency. And it's independent in the sense that we don't report through any other department. We're not part of the State Department. I report to a board of directors. The board of directors is appointed by the U.S. president, confirmed by the Senate. The board is made up of nine people, three of them are drawn from government officials, and six of them come from the private sector, from private life. So in that sense, it's independent. The other thing that they thought was really important was to give it a broad mandate. And they thought that that was also important in order to give it the flexibility and the creativity to carry out a wide range of activities and really be able to interact with poor people's organizations in the region. They thought that the independence was also important in order to give the IAF a long-term view so that it wouldn't just be subject to some of the policies of the moment, but that it could really take a long-term view of development in the region. So our mission as the Inter-American Foundation is to help communities thrive. Very simple. We think about communities, and we think that they should be places where people can work together. They can pursue their own interests. They can pursue whatever activities they want to improve their lives and their prospects. And we think that this is an essential building block for democracy in the regions that are both resilient and vibrant. So we think that this is a very important American value as well and reflects that. So how do we do this? We think that the best way and the way that the IAF has done this for 45 years is we don't go into a country and say, this is what we're going to do. We want to fund agriculture or we want to fund health or we don't do that. We say, tell us your best ideas and we'll consider what we can fund because we think that poor people, poor people's organizations in their communities that they have assets themselves that they bring to the table. They've got ideas. They've got aspirations. So we want to hear what they have to say. We think that's a respectful way of dealing with them. We think it's a way that gives the dignity to our interlocutors. And we think that that's fundamentally the way to empower local organizations, to empower to make their communities the best places that they can possibly be. So as I said, we receive proposals. We get about 600 proposals a year from a mix of very base, what we call base organizations. We receive them in Spanish. We receive them. Mostly we receive proposals in Spanish. We do receive a few in English in our English-speaking countries. Portuguese or Creole. We receive proposals in Creole as well. So that all comes into the foundation. We look at them. We discuss them among the staff. Go out and visit any group, any community where we're expecting to fund. So our program officer for Nicaragua has made several trips out to the Atlantic Coast in Nicaragua to visit groups that we've funded out there. And then we make a decision to fund them or not. 600 proposals that we receive a year, we only fund about 10%. So it's a quite competitive process as well. And that's really, that's not the end of the story. That's really just the beginning of the story. Because then we start a relationship of usually two, three, four years. It is not single-year funding. It's a relationship that lasts over time. The average grant is about $200,000 typically for three years. But we've made grants as small as $10,000 or $25,000. And as much as $400,000 for something that's a little bit more substantial, we have funded over 5,000 groups in the last 45 years. 5,000. And that's an IAF contribution of $700 million. Over 45 years, the IAF has contributed $700 million. The groups that we've supported themselves have either contributed or they've mobilized from local businesses, local government, other local partners, over $1 billion. So we're not the majority partner in these enterprises. We're just an enabler of an idea of an initiative that comes from the grassroots themselves. We see ourselves as gap fillers. And then essentially we use the opportunity to have a relationship over a few years. Currently we've got a portfolio of about 250 projects, active grants, with the IAF contribution of $65 million. And the counterpart is about $100 million. So again, it's very much a grantee run thing. We also want to stress that I've said a couple of times that the approval of the project is not the end. It's the beginning. We see our relationship as much beyond the project itself. Yes, we have projects with goals. We've got objectives. We've got activities. We've got indicators, all of those things. We know exactly where the money is going. And I can talk about the auditing that we put in place. Every grant gets audited every year by a certified audit firm, local audit firm. We have results, reports, and all of those things. But fundamentally what we're investing in is the relationship with the organization itself because we believe that building the capability of these local organizations will yield benefits that go way beyond what they achieve in this individual project. We're trying to help them to build the capability to do things beyond what they do with us. And part of what we've done in the last few years is we've gone back and visited communities where projects have been carried out five years after we've finished our funding just to see what's happened. And it's a very interesting experience indeed to see how things have either morphed and expanded tremendously or in some cases, you know, fallen apart. But mostly have improved. The last thing I want to say is that in addition to the money that we give through a grant, this relationship I keep on coming back to is super important in the sense that we build relationships among the grantee partners. So I just came back from Peru last week. I spent a week in Peru visiting several different partners. And one of the things that we did there is we had a two-day meeting of all two dozen grantee partners in the country where each one of them, most of them didn't know each other and no reason to know each other. They're working in many different parts of the country. We brought them together and they told a little bit about what they're doing. 10 minutes just enough to wet the appetite and it's very hard. It's very, it's speed dating. It's very difficult to get a group that's been, you know, this is, they're putting so much energy into this to keep them to just 10 minutes. But that was enough to really spur an incredibly rich and vibrant conversation among the groups themselves. And so we have a group that focuses on agroecology and they're hearing from a group that's working on persons with disabilities. And it's actually being, the project is being presented or the initiative is being presented by a blind woman. And they're starting to come back and they're thinking, well, there are actually persons with disabilities in my community. And are we really tapping into all of the resources that we have in our community in agroecology? Are we taking it, now we see how capable people are. Can we actually take advantage of that in our community? So it's really a form of opening people's eyes to the opportunities that they have in their communities that they may not even be aware of. Sharing experiences among women who are doing Andean weavings up in the Sierra. Again, they're learning something from groups that are working on coffee, et cetera. Doesn't sound like they'd have much in common, but believe me, they do. And they come back really enriched. So what we're looking at, what I'm really excited about over the next few years is that we're going to try to invest in powering that even more where we have not just the networks in the country, but we find some way to link those groups with groups in Nicaragua, perhaps, or groups in Pottawai, or groups in Chile that we're no longer working with, that we've worked with in the past, but we maintain a relationship of some sort because everybody has an opportunity to learn from somebody else. And I think there are ways that with modern technology, but not just with modern technology because many of these groups don't have access to the internet in their community itself. So we've got to find something else as well. And it's a difficult problem. I think that's a really powerful tool that poor groups can come to take advantage of just like rich people have learned to take advantage of networks and like. So that's where I think, that's one of the things I'm excited about. I'm excited about a lot of things, actually. We can get into some of the other things, I guess, in the Q&A. I don't want to take up too much time with an opening statement. So, Dan, go ahead, I'll turn this over to you. We'll just share the microphone. We'll share it. It should be more this side. Yeah, two thirds, that's probably. So, thank you, thanks a lot. I think, could you talk about in particular that ready Americas, red Americas, and what is it? And because I think you touched on it a little bit early, just in a little bit more detail, what is that? So Red America is a network of corporate foundations, Latin American corporate foundations, that the IAF helped to create over 12 years ago, I guess, long before I came to the foundation. And it really grew out of some work that some foundation program officers had with corporate foundation partners in a couple of countries. And there are about a dozen of them, I suppose. They came together and they started thinking in maybe one or two countries. They said, is there something that we can learn ourselves and how to do better grant making for development? Transforming our foundations grant making to not just focus on shoes in local orphanage or a theater or painting a school or something like that, but do something that really is much closer to what the IAF is talking about with grassroots development and empowering communities. So they came together and started talking about it, developed with our support, developed a whole approach, took on board our evaluation methodology, ended up also creating a diploma program at the Tecnolójico de Monterey, the Technical Institute, I guess you translate that Technical Institute of Monterey in Mexico. Itam. No, not Itam, the Tec de Monterey in Monterey. And now it's a network that's growing to over 80 members from 11 countries in the region. Some companies we've heard of, I'm sure. Some companies you've heard of, some of you've never heard of. Some of the ones that we've heard of. Well, there's a local Walmart in Brazil as one. There's Votorantim and maybe you've heard of it in Brazil. Otibrecht. Otibrecht is a member, that's right. So there's a number of corporate foundations. Our core in Argentina. Our core, our core whole seam in several different countries. That's a Swiss company, but it's got this local branches and they've all set up foundations. So now some of the things that they're working on and we're working on with them is, well, how do you bring this practice or this experience working in communities? Because the foundations, these are corporate foundations. The staff of the corporate foundations have learned to work with community members, but not necessarily the corporation. So how do you infect the corporation itself in their relationships with community with this view of what is the behavior and the procurement practices and the employment practices. And so it goes beyond just philanthropy and it really becomes much more about. It's linked into their business. To their business. It's not just corporate social responsibility, it is business. Yeah, I mean there's a lot more, it's become a lot more complicated, the concept of social license to operate and how you engage in a community and what your brand is in terms of attracting either people that come work for you or stay working for you and how your company's perceived is a lot more complex and the stakes are a lot higher than it was. So RedoMedica is kind of a fervor of thinking about that. And so it's a network and they charge membership dues. They have an annual meeting. I'm going to their annual meeting next month in Chile. They also have seminars from time to time in different countries. As I said, they're in 11 countries. Fantastic. So it's up and running and they're now in a process of strategic planning that we're supporting. And do you need to write checks to the Red Americas? No, we don't write, well we are helping them with their strategic planning exercise. It's not a money relationship. It's an expertise network. At this point it's a partnership relationship of expertise and thought partner. That's what it should be. It's about it's evolving. It's like you said, it's about the relationship as opposed to money's a part of it, but it's about networks and people and ideas. What we have done and we continue to do from time to time is partner with some of the members of Red America, the corporate foundations. If we want to try to reach into very small communities where the corporation has got a presence and with grants of 15 or $25,000, we can partner with them. We put in a dollar for every $3 that they put in and it allows us to really have a presence in some of those communities that can then blossom into something else. Can you talk about, you talked a little bit about successes and failures. We were talking a little bit in the pregame about successes and failures and how the Intermeric Foundation thinks about successes and failures. How it does evaluations and also how does it share learning but how does that impact your grant making going forward? And how do you share that with others? Right, so we've got a very elaborate system for tracking results about 15, 20 years ago before the current wave of enthusiasm for evaluation. And there are fads in the business, right? There are fads. I've been a beneficiary of several of them myself. I'm sure, I'm sure. We started something called the grassroots development framework, which essentially I think there's a handout somewhere around for that. So the grassroots development framework, we've shaped it in the shape of a cone. There it is, and you can see the cone there kind of in the bottom right-hand corner that has three levels. It's results at the individual and household level, results at the organizational level, results at the community and societal level. So as we engage in, as we approve a grant to an organization, the first thing we do is we sit down with them, our program officer visits, the community sits down, and they try to identify five or six indicators from among a speed of 40-some indicators that we've got. Only five or six, and they're supposed to be the ones that best capture what they're trying to achieve. But give us some standardization across grants as well to help us. But it's tapped to their ability to collect the data because you don't wanna overload farmers' association working on cow with a whole bunch of data collection. It's not gonna be very useful. At the same time, they do need to build up the capacity to collect key data and then analyze it and take management decisions as a result. So every six months, they report to us the results of that data collection. And we have a local professional that is contracted by us to go and visit with them, do a verification of the data, talk about the results that they're achieving and any changes that they may wanna make as a result of that change. So again, building up this, it's all about the building of capabilities, the organizational capabilities to take decisions and to move on. So that's how we work with them on the level of the individual project. We also, then of course at the end of a project, we do a project history to try to capture some of the results. That gets fed back into our own analysis process as we approve, consider new grants. We also, I mentioned earlier, we do a visit to some groups five years after they've ended. We've now, in the last couple of years we've done, we've gone to I think a dozen. And they're up on the website. We've got a summary of them up on the website, you can see. And some of them have, again, spectacular successes. I just visited in Peru, a group that was a coffee cooperative. They came to us asking for a little bit of money to get into a new activity, which was brown sugar, that they had learned about they got the idea from a visit to some peers, another cooperative in Colombia where they produced brown sugar. They said, wait a minute, we can do that back here in our communities. Maybe there's an international market for brown sugar. They talked to their coffee buyers, a French coffee buyer. They asked the IAF for a little bit of help to kind of get into the business. We gave them a little bit of support. 10 years later, brown sugar, their coffee, brown sugar, now cacao producers as well. So they've diversified their product. Their buyer in France now gets more profit from the relationship with them on brown sugar than it does on coffee. So they're the barons of brown sugar of Eastern Peru. That's fantastic. So that's one of the success stories on the five years after it. We wouldn't even know about it if we didn't go back and visit. That's a great story. I can tell some failures too, but maybe I'll save that for a little bit. Yeah, keep that. Let's see. I like the upbeat. Okay, yeah. You know, you do learn from failures as well, and I think that's something. Can I talk about that book? Yeah, so the IAF back in the 70s. Back in the 70s, in the mid 70s, after five years of operation, the staff is unheard of. I don't think I could do this today, but the IAF closed its doors for a few months and decided to just sit, gather information about what it is that they'd learned over five years of grant making, the first five years of grant making, and wrote a book. Wrote a book, it's called They Know How. It's kind of emblematic of the IAF's philosophy that it's the groups themselves that know best what they need and what their priorities are. And the last chapter of that book is titled The Foundation as a Learner, because the foundation was set up to be a learning organization before we even called them to use that term. And it was learning from failure and talked about the failures of grant making. Now nobody does that anymore. Maybe people are starting to talk a little bit about failures, but we're kind of careful to talk about failures too much. Selective failures. Selective failures, and only things that then turn into successes, although that is something that they did point out. It's like the college essays, right? Like what are your weaknesses? I work too hard, I'm too hard on myself. But they came up with some wonderful typologies of failures like the Lawrence of Arabia syndrome. And after that, as grants were being reviewed for a number of years in the foundation, they would say, no, this looks like it's got the signs of their Lawrence of Arabia failure, which is a grant that is based on, a bet that's based on an individual charismatic member of an organization. And yeah, it's gonna work as long as that person's there. But as soon as that person leaves, there's a risk that everything falls apart. We know that's, of course, that that's the case. So we think about that very clearly when we're considering a grant. We ask about the governance structure of an organization that we're working with. What are the relationships of the different members of the board, of the staff, to the founders of an organization, whatever it may be. If it's a cooperative, how do they transition leadership? So that sort of thing. Another found it, another syndrome is the artificial insemination syndrome. They all have great names. That is very interesting. What is that? Well, I think it has, don't get excited. I think it has something to do with animal husbandry. And it's an idea that came from an outside group that they said, this is a great idea. This is a new product or a new process or something. These people in this area would benefit from that. Fund this, and the IAF funded it in some cases because it seemed like a good idea. But in fact, it completely ran against the reality because it wasn't something that the communities themselves resonated with them, but it confronted something that was embedded in their own local ways of doing business or culture or practices or assessment of risks. So again, we recognize that it's not rocket science. That's something that we've seen over and over again in the aid business, is funding something that comes from the outside that doesn't really take account of the local context. We were talking about the evolving situation in the region and being a learning organization. Could you talk about the IAF's thinking about poverty? We were having this very interesting conversation before about how governments in the region are thinking about how to address poverty and sort of what's called a national government to local government model that perhaps doesn't necessarily bring communities into it or talk a little bit about that, because I thought that was a very interesting insight. So I was making the observation before we came into the room that there's been a lot of success in Latin America in reducing poverty. In the last 10 years, you can see it. The late rates have come down in Brazil. It's a success story in some respects. And a lot of the way that has happened is through vertical programs that come from the government to, some of these are conditional cash transfers, no to the individuals, to individuals. So to individuals in exchange for participating in a health assessment program or in keeping their kids in school. And these are very effective at eliminating, at really putting in place the right incentive to invest in human capital at the family level. My observation was that is great as far as it goes, but I think it needs to be complimented by investments that really build community. I don't see the same sort of attention being paid to building the capacity of people to work with each other to achieve a common end. And I worry that many of the programs are really too focused by being only focused on the individual and not being focused on building the kind of civil society and social capital that we see is so important. That in fact it's more fragile than it would otherwise be. So I see that as something that the IAF does very well by focusing on the collective ability to work together. As I said, I think early on, we think that the ability for people from a community to get together and address a problem or take advantage of an opportunity is really a building block of democracy that unless you nurture that, it's not gonna just take place simultaneously. I think if I recall, Dante Fechel had, was fondly remembered for many things, but one of the things that he's remembered for is being a proponent of democracy promotion, if I recall correctly, in terms of I think he's one of the founders of the National Democratic Institute, among others. Can you talk a little bit about your, just to go a little bit further about this relationship with democracy or democratic accountability, how you go a little bit further about this. Right, so we do, some of the groups that we fund do participate in participatory budget. That's a wave that has really taken off in many countries of the region where you have budgets that are being decided at the municipal level. And Peru, I was just in Peru, another example from Peru where there are lots of resources that come in part from ruralities, from mining, that make the municipal governments or regional governments awash in resources and there are rules for applying them and it needs to be a participatory process for setting the priorities. So we're supporting a number of groups in Peru that are participant at the municipal level that are working with these roundtables to try to set priorities. And one of the farmers, I mentioned this coffee cooperative that is now a sugar, brown sugar and cacao cooperative. One of the farmers that I met as I was out in this tiny little town is on his local participatory budgeting council. This is, I don't know if he's a literate, but he's a very, very humble farmer. He had never really spent any time out of that area but he had an opportunity to participate in setting of budgetary priorities for his area. That's not something that we fund directly in that particular case, but in other cases, we are funding groups to participate in that, that's right. Can you talk about why, what does the United States get out of the Inter-American Foundation doing its work as opposed to say the Tinker Foundation or as opposed to say the Ford Foundation and talk a little bit about that survey that you were telling me about as part of your answer? So the Inter-American Foundation is a very, very small investment of U.S. taxpayer dollars. I think our staff figured out that it's equivalent to about six cents per taxpayer per year as our current budget, maybe. I'm looking around here from the right. Yes, do you want to double your investment? I'm going to double down, all right. So one of the things that. That really is nothing. I mean, six cents per, that's great. So one of the things that we were trying to get a handle on is as we talk with our oversight committee on Capitol Hill is, well, what are we getting for this? What, you know, is there an advantage to the perception of America in the region, for example, apart from all of the development benefits? What is in it for me, as you ask? So we participated two years ago in something called the Grantee Perception Survey. It's run by a group called the Center for Effective Philanthropy. That's a very good group. Is it in Boston? It's in Boston, that's right. We're the only government agency. At that time, we were the only government agency ever to have participated in that survey. I think probably we still are the only one. And it's a great survey because if I send a survey out to my grantee partners, I'm going to get feedback and it's all going to be great. They're going to say I'm great. Everything you do is right. You're so smart, you know, blah, blah, blah, right? So the Center for Effective Philanthropy thought, one way to get around that is to have a standard survey that we send out to a bunch of foundations. So not just the Inter-American Foundation, but to the Ford Foundation's grantee partners or the MacArthur Foundation or the Gates Foundation. So there are, I think, 300 different foundations that have now participated. Some work only in the United States, some work internationally. And then what you do is you see how, or they do, they, because it's confidential, they compare our grantee partners' responses to the grantee partners, to the grantee responses from other foundations and then see where are we above, where are we below, where may we want to think about making some changes as a result. It's not a strictly scientific comparison because of course the grantees are different for us than they are for these other foundations. They're quite different in nature, but also different in specifics. But we had a 74% participation rate, which is really high, amazing, really amazing. How much is a 74% so it's 50? No, no, I think it was 250 grantee partners, I think so 74% was, you do the math, it's 150. So it was a very high participation rate. And there is, in that survey we asked the question, has your relationship with the Inter-American Foundation, because it's mostly a standard questionnaire, but you get a chance to ask five or so questions, right? So one of the questions we asked was how has the working with the Inter-American Foundation changed your perception of the United States? And 75%, if I remember correctly said, it has improved or strongly improved the relationship with the United States. I think another 25% said, should say the same, maybe 1% said it, you know, near down or I don't know. Because you guys are two pure crap. Or something, yeah. I don't really, I don't know. I don't mean program officer. But the great, so the participation survey was really terrific, but then the other thing that was really terrific is getting the comments. Because in addition to the standard comments on, you know, SAT type of, there was opportunities for writing in specific comments about the relationship with the foundation and one of the things that I'm really very proud of, because I talked before about our emphasis on building the capabilities of the organizations. The thing that we did best on, and in fact better than any grantor that the Center for Effective Philanthropy had ever surveyed before, was on the question of how our procedures and systems contribute to grantees' own capabilities. They said that our, just the way of working with us, that our grantees said, strengthened them more than any other organization said that their systems, that the Gates Foundation or the Rockefeller Foundation strengthened them. Or AID. Well, no, AID wasn't a participant in this case. Let me just follow that just a little bit further, because I think there's a whole conversation in the broader international development discussion about country ownership. I don't know how much you follow this stuff about the Busan Declaration and the global partnership. It just seems to me that when I look at much of the traditional official aid architecture or bureaucracy, I don't hear that kind of response for most official aid agencies, though they would like to have that kind of response. Are you taking, what I'm trying to get at is, have you done, have you taken that, have you just told the story into the DAC or the OECD or you have other donor, bigger donors come to you and said how do you do this and how are you sharing this with other official donors or how are you sharing this with philanthropy in addition to sort of the learning that the Center for Effective Philanthropy, because I actually think that's quite interesting and actually something you all could be, if that's something to share with donors in addition to what you're sharing with how you're dealing with, how you engage and partner with and have sophisticated and meaningful relationships with partners on the ground. Right, well, no, we haven't had the discussion with the member of the DAC or OECD, and I think there are focuses. There is this lovely in April. Well, maybe that's where I should go. I should be going there today, you and Manny can make a special trip. Yes. No, so we haven't done that, but we have talked with other, we do have some relationships with other foundations who have come to us and they said, well actually, you have a platform that is useful for serving a kind of group that we can't really reach. You're cost-effective, for us to build a program to provide the kind of service that you provide would be too costly, so we'd like to partner with you and I think that this story about how our grantee partners see us is really reinforces that. How many staff do you have? We've got just about 40 staff here in Washington. Massive bureaucracy. Massive, massive, massive bureaucracy. We can fit on a bus. The relationship we were having, a little bit of a conversation earlier about how you engage with the interagency if I can call it that. So the State Department, do you have any kind of a formal relationship with the ID? So let's talk about that and then I want you to talk about this interesting legacy relationship with the Inter-American Development Bank separately. We'll come back to that. But talk first about how you work with State, why do they want to work with you and who are others? So we have a board of directors and in the past it has been the case that the Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere has been on our board. Roberta Jacobson, the current Assistant Secretary of State has currently before the Senate as a nominee to our board but has not yet been confirmed. And I'm not presuming anything. Of course not. And we have in the past also had the Assistant Administrator for USAID on our board. The Western Hemisphere for Latin America. That is not currently the case. So there's that sort of. Is that open right now or? We have, well, we have three government. We have three USGPOs. We have Kelly Ryan who is from the Department of Homeland Security but is currently at the Migration Institute. Refugee Specialist. And then we have two open ones. One is Roberta Jacobson. They're not designated as State for Say. It can be anybody. The President has free discretion to name anybody. In fact, Bill Riley from the EPA was on our board. Really? Haddy Babbit. In Bush 41. In Bush 41, yeah. He was the head of VP1. So the President can choose who he wants. And that's why, in this case, Homeland Security was more of the, I think, a confluence of interests and specific issues. And Mark Lopez is also a current nominee. He's a great guy and hope he gets confirmed. Don't want to presume anything but he'd represent us very well as a U.S.C.D. at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. So those are our three, both current member and nominees. So just so the State Department came to us. So that's one way that we have a relationship with the State Department traditionally but also the State Department came to us and said, look, we don't have the ability to work with groups on social inclusion. So they had a program that they had committed to. The U.S. government had committed to as part of the Summit of the Americas, one of the last Summit of the Americas. I can't remember what the program is called. It's got some acronym that I do remember. But I don't remember what I used to spell it out. There are. And so they asked us to carry it out for them. So we are directing our grant making with groups that I think 20% of the grants that we make are for traditionally marginalized groups like African descendant or indigenous peoples or persons with disabilities. So they asked us to reach out to some of them with some special and some new funding to work with them and try to network them as well. So that's one way that they saw that it was in their interest to work through us for an initiative that they had. To work with TDA or AID? Not with TDA and with the U.S. AID. We do work in the countries that we are both working. We talk with them from time to time in the missions. I was just in Peru. Do you have to get permission for your program officers from the Ambassador to come into the country? Yes, we have to cut. In order to travel, we do. And also every grant that we make, we first, before we approve the grant, we share it with the Ambassador and ask for a view or just make sure that there's no issues about the group itself. It's not a programmatic decision, but it's just a... Or a courtesy. It's a courtesy, but it's also useful for us if there's any concerns about that. They have tacit knowledge on the ground that we wouldn't necessarily have. So it's a protection for us as well. With the U.S. AID, when I first came to the IAF about three years ago, I sat down with Raj Shah. I went down and visited other heads of agency as well. Daniel Johannes at the MCC at that time and others. And Raj had the idea that we should come up with a joint statement about how we complement each other. So we had our staff sit down and work that out. And at that point, Raj was talking about procurement reform and working with local groups was intrigued by the fact that we have an experience of doing that. That's the sort of what was leading to my question earlier. So we've shared our experience doing that. In fact, what we think the complementarity is, is that some of the groups that we work with are very much more basic than some of the groups that they could possibly have a contractual relationship. Because they're talking about it as a contractual relationship rather than a grant making relationship. But they can eventually maybe take on the role. And so in this grantee exchange that I mentioned in Peru, a local U.S. AID officer came and gave the spiel about this is what U.S. AID does. There may be opportunities for you if you're within these narrow, narrowly defined areas that U.S. AID works. So we do work with the U.S. and other government agencies. We also are a participant in the president's partnership for growth initiative. It's in four countries, one of them is on El Salvador, or a couple of years ago. And- Is Peru also one? No, there's only one in Latin America. I can't remember where the others are. It's Ghana, Philippines, and somewhere else. It's definitely Philippines, probably Ghana, but I don't remember the fourth one. I was focused on Latin America. There's a prize for whoever remembers the fourth one, but we'll come back to that. We'll come back to the Q&A, but so El Salvador- So we were participating in with all of the agencies that have programs in El Salvador. And our program we present as contributing to I think one of the two pillars. Mostly the pillar on economic development, on community businesses. We're carrying out a chronic violence learning project, so we're also sharing some of the lessons that we're trying to learn together with our grantee partners about violence in their communities. Talk about this really interesting legacy relationship with the Inter-American Development Bank. Right. That was fascinating. It's less a relationship with the Inter-American Development Bank than where the beneficiary of a trust fund that the U.S. government set up at the Inter-American Development Bank over 50 years ago to make loans, low interest loans to Latin American governments alongside the fund for special operations of the Inter-American Development Bank. And as those funds reflow back, both principal and interest, reflowed very little interest, but principal mostly, they have come to the IAF for the last 40 years to fund a portion of our program. So currently it's about $5 million a year. There's very little money left. The trust fund that was set up 50 years ago, I think they're mostly 50 year loans. So it's just about to run out in the next few years. But that's the legacy. So every year we get a little bit of resources and that can only be used to fund projects in countries of Latin America. That can't be used to fund any of our staff costs or our office. But it's significant. But it's about $5 million a year these days. It's real money. It's real money. So last question. We've been talking about the evolution of the region. You talked a little bit about that earlier. And we were having this discussion earlier beforehand. How do we, how does the Inter-American Foundation evolve with the countries as they get wealthier? And how does, what does it mean for the Inter-American Foundation to be involved in a country like a Chile or a Costa Rica or maybe a Brazil where it may not be about money? And it was never really, in some extent we were having this conversation, it wasn't necessarily about money all along. It was sort of about, that was sort of a vector of ideas or a catalyst for getting something going that others kind of step into. But how, I know you're thinking about this and it still doesn't have to be a resolved answer. But we've done some work on middle income countries and thinking about it at a state to state level. And I thought your point earlier about this isn't necessarily, you're not in the business of state to state. You're in sort of the social capital business or the individual building, individual accountability or sort of a grassroots form of democracy, which I agree, I don't disagree with. Talk a little bit about how you think about that as these countries become sort of follow the path of a South Korea. And they're not necessarily a South Korea yet. I was just in Seoul two weeks ago and it was jaw dropping. So I know we're not there yet. We can always hope, but I think we're going in that direction in a lot of places. God willing, Chile and Costa Rica are really impressive. I mean, they've made incredible strides. The region's made incredible strides. So I know that must be on your mind and how are you thinking about that and how, what is it, what are you hearing from your grantees about this? Yeah, well, I think a number of things. I think that's where the network like the Red and Medica network comes in and particularly in a country like Chile, we have a very small program. At this point, we're just working with a couple of Red and Medica foundations to help them to really get their heads around doing grassroots grant making like we do. But we're not gonna continue doing that for very much longer. So in Chile, for example, we're thinking, we're looking now, well, what do we wanna do next? And what would be appropriate for the next five years? And that's where I come back to with my comments earlier about the network. We have 250, we worked with 250 groups in Chile over the last 45 years. Now, some of the groups are no longer in existence. Some of them wouldn't be interested in participating with us, but that is a huge resource that is waiting to be tapped and for the benefits of themselves, for Chile and civil society more broadly, and for others, for others to be able to learn from what they have done in Chile on a whole range of issues. So by themselves, it's not enough. But if we can plug them into a region-wide network and start getting exchanges, you can have an exchange from the country that you have a special fondness for Argentina with some Chilean civil society organizations that are working on issues that might be appropriate. So that's one way that I think about how we might work in a country where we're not going to do the kind of responsive grant making that I talked about before. We're not, at these days, we don't get many proposals from Chile, but in fact, in Chile, we wouldn't just respond to a proposal from a grassroots group per se. We're going to be much more directive about how we work there. Other countries will continue to follow the same responsive model. The Central American countries, a lot of places in the Andes, et cetera. And even in Brazil, I think there are lots of places in Brazil that really warrant having a continued involvement of the nature, the northeastern part of the country, some of the central west, there are some tremendous problems. And also some exciting opportunities that you wouldn't be aware of unless you're plugged in there. So for example, this past fall, I was in the north of Matugroso State, about two hours north of Sinalp, which itself is about an hour flight north of Cuiaba, so which itself is probably, I don't know, I don't know where your point of reference is. I don't know where your points of reference, but it's way up there. Well, the fascinating thing is, this is a group of grassroots cooperative that has, I can't remember how many members, but they're producing vegetables for the Sinalp organic vegetable demand. So we're starting to find in countries like Brazil, in countries like Argentina, in countries like Chile, obviously, I was in Peru, there's demand for organic produce. Now, maybe that's not news to some of you, but for me, I was thinking about organics as much more for the US and European market, but there's a sophistication now in even very small places in Latin America and a demand for quality, for organics, and a consciousness about pesticides and chemicals. So I think those are the kinds of trends that you wouldn't actually have an opportunity to spot unless you're present there, but I think it's valuable to a whole host of partners that there is that. Well, look, you've been patient as an audience. Why don't we open it up? Ambassador, if you would like to ask a question, I'd be so pleased and really pleased you're here. Welcome again for coming. I'm really happy you're here. But I know there's some thoughtful people here at Welcome. I know Mr. Cavill would also welcome them as well. Otherwise, I've got at least a half dozen more questions, but I don't want to subject all of you to all of my questions. Yes, sir. Just hit the microphone. Where do you find staff that has... Just to self-identify. My name is Dan Silverstein. I'm a consultant in agricultural development. Where do you find staff that has the special character that it would seem that it takes to handle such nuanced and precise kinds of projects? That's a, yeah, it's an interesting question. They come from all backgrounds. I assume you're talking principally about our program officers. They come from a number of different backgrounds. Many are former Peace Corps volunteers who then maybe worked in a non-profit. We have a couple of ex-world bankers who saw the light, I guess. Well, I don't, it's a joke. All my friends at the World Bank. I think that there are a lot of people who have that sort of special vision of respect and working with poor people to empower their organizations. I think when they come into the organization, they get steeped in the culture as well. We have, it's wonderful. Every year we have a whole crop of interns, young interns that are working and doing work at George Washington or American University or Georgetown or mostly local universities, but even universities farther afield. They'd love to work with us and we'd love to have them working with us because we are a small agency and can always get the extra capacity. So I think that's another group that several years down the road when they gain some experience doing something else, I expect to see them rotate back in. Our vice president for programs currently, he describes himself as a recidivist. He was a program officer at the foundation back in the mid-80s, then left and went to work at the Ford Foundation, number of other both grant makers and grant takers. And then it came back. I hired him back a few years ago as a vice president for a program. So from all over the place. Sir. My name is Donal Duhart. I'm actually Brazilian from Goyaz, not too far from... Ah, not so far. So you've been to Sinoop? Yeah, it's a little long. A little long, yes. Do you provide technical assistance? In addition to program officer orientation to your grantees, do you provide any form of technical assistance? That's an excellent question. So the grants that we make include and they're transferred to the organization themselves and often it's for them to acquire the technical assistance that they need, the technical expertise that could be available locally. Sometimes they, when I mentioned that they put in or mobilize resources from others, sometimes that's in kind support from a local extension agent or something like that. So a lot of that is built into the grant itself. In addition, we have contractors in about 15 countries, about 15 contractors spread around that facilitate the identification of other kinds of technical assistance. They don't provide it themselves necessarily, but they're in some senses, our eyes and ears and they can help to connect what's most valuable if they need technical assistance from somebody else that is doing that in another grantee partner. We can facilitate the trip because one of the things that we find is that more valuable than giving somebody a lecture on something is taking them to see how it's being done elsewhere. And that spurs a whole host of questions that is just a much more effective learning process. So that's what we try to do in the country or as I mentioned in other places. We facilitated a number of people from all over the region going to Brazil, Southern Brazil about a year ago for the Ecovita Conference that you may know about. And that's led to sustained long-term relationships among Mexican, Peruvian, Honduran, and Brazilian gripped. Yes, sir. Yes, Michael Gale from Global Giving Foundation. Hey. The question is, what's your off-boarding process for over four or five years? What's the transition period like when you know the project's going to be ending? It's a good question. I don't think that we don't have, I don't know that we have a structured process that I could lay down in a manual. But what typically I think happens is that as we get close to the end of the project, things do wind up. As I said, we don't think about the project so much itself as we think about the relationship. So there may be some legacy things that go on after the money itself is being transferred in terms of, they will continue to invite them to grantee exchanges, even though they're not a current grantee, or there might be something else that they may ask us to help them to support and visit some place else. So there's some of that. Sometimes we press them into service as trainers or as technical assistants, as a previous questioner asked. We also are very attentive during the course of the project to what is the likelihood of sustainability? And we're asking the question, how are you going to sustain this after, that our minority partnership ends, but how are you gonna sustain it? And that's always a challenge. But they're looking at a lot of, depending on the topic, of course, there are lots of creative ways to continue on. Occasionally we, occasionally they do come back and ask for another grant to do something else a couple of years later. We don't usually do it, we can't extend a grant if we think it's warranted. Once it stops, we don't go do back-to-back funding, but we'll let the relationship last for a couple of years in terms of funding, and then sometimes we've come back and funded something else. So this coffee cooperative that I mentioned where we fund its brown sugar, they are currently working with us on Kakao. It turns out that they've got this kind of, this variety of Kakao that was thought to exist only in Venezuela, but it's also there in Northern Peru. Great, others? Well, Mr. Kavan, I'm just wondering if you might wanna just share some of these just parting thoughts about the Inter-American Foundation and why it matters for, why it's valuable for the United States to continue to support it, because I think you've very well described that and very articulately so, but just for the, if you would, just for the record. For the record. Just for the record. This is my congressional testimony here. Yes, sir. Yeah, well, I think that, I mean, as I've said earlier, I think that investment in the Inter-American Foundation and the work that we do is really pennies on the dollar. It's a great investment, it's cost-effective, it's building directly relationships with people on the ground that gives us an insight into what is happening on the ground and also an ability to connect groups that otherwise couldn't connect with themselves. It's complementary to a lot of the other work that is being supported with USAID or with the State Department or other US agencies. And I think that we have something that we can offer to businesses through the red and medica type of relationship, not just with corporate foundations, but with just really thinking about corporate business practices as well as people really are struggling with how can corporations engage with communities in a way that really helped them to thrive and bloom. So I think there's a whole host of different ways. I think fundamentally the work that we do, building vibrant societies, social capital, is in the interest of the United States. So I think it's a good investment for the US taxpayer and through the US Congress to continue to support. I love that survey about the participants. It's really useful. I use it a lot. It sticks with me. Thanks very much. Please show me a thank you, Mr. Kappel. Thank you.