 Aloha. My name is Larry Foster, and I'm hosting this session of Law Across the Sea. Today we're going to talk about the East-West Center. The East-West Center was founded by Congress in 1960. It's a U.S.-based independent public nonprofit institution for public diplomacy. It serves as a resource for information and analysis on critical issues of common concern in the Asia-Pacific region. It brings people together to exchange views, build expertise, and develop policy options. Dr. Richard Volsteck became president of the East-West Center in January this year, succeeding Charles Morrison, who had served as president for 18 years. Dr. Volsteck will address the past, present, and future of the East-West Center. Dr. Volsteck, an alumnus of the East-West Center, earned a MA and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Hawaii. And then went on to live and work in Taiwan and Hong Kong from 1986 to present. His last position was as president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, a position he held for nine years. Richard, welcome to the program. Thank you. Good to be here. Good. So I have a number of questions I wanted to ask about you. We in Hawaii have heard about the East-West Center for a long time, but many people are a little unclear what it is. So maybe you could sort of tell me, what is the East-West Center? Well, I think the top two things to talk about is, first of all, who we serve, then how we do it, right? So the East-West Center was founded back in 1960 when knowledge in the states of Asia-Pacific and Asia-Pacific of the United States was not particularly well defined and well known. Of course, we had wars in the region, but there was a whole generation of people that was distant history almost. And there was a real interest in building real bridges of friendship and understanding between the United States and Asia-Pacific. And so back in 1960, key players were Lyndon Johnson and John Burns. They decided to put together this institution called the East-West Center. Actually, the original name is still on our documents and things like when I sign checks, is Center for Cultural and Technical Interchange between East and West, East-West Center for short. But we've ended up from the very beginning, up to the present, really serving major constituencies throughout the region, Asia-Pacific and America, in education, leadership development, research, as a major convening location for conferences between Asia-Pacific and the United States. And quite a large package deal with the underlying goal of really getting people together cross-culturally, cross-nationally. And really, I think, which distinguishes East-West Center even more, cross-sector. So, you know, we think, well, okay, Asians, I would say Malaysians and Americans and Taiwanese, may have, you know, different cultures and, of course, different nationalities. But even within each country or each economy, we make a point to bring in people who are cross-sectors. So we do it with governments, with graduate students, with subculture, of course, with NGOs, military, business, a whole range of different sectors of endeavor, you might say, in which people work. And so what we find through our package deal, you might say, the intensity of the things we've run with, it's only for a couple of weeks, or in the case of our graduate students for two years or more, that there is the usual kind of thing you want to have at an international house, but it's a lot more. There's just, there's more intensity and more diversity in the programs we run. So that besides the specific activities we undertake, which may be educational leadership training, research in a specific area, they're cross-cultural, cross-national teams, but also when they convene activities, there's this cross-sector capability as well. So we end up, I think, developing in half or decades what we call catalyst people. People can go in, they've got certain kinds of expertise, but also they have this ability to connect across cultures, across nationalities, across sectors. If you look at it in a place like Honolulu, or Bangkok, or Beijing, I mean, if you want to solve a problem on the ground in some kind of area, whether it's been good research, good background, or have a training program there, or develop educated students, when the rubber hits the road, you've got to deal with government, with academics, with NGOs, and so on. They get things done. And so what we try to do is to train people who are comfortable in those contexts and really serve as connectors with expertise, of course, some capacity building that has been done at the center, but also really an attitude, an EQ, as it were, on steroids. It's got a little more muscle to it than you would find in the normal training program, educational program, or research department. So you mentioned graduate students. So is the East Swiss Center a degree-granting institution? No, actually we've had a great symbiotic relationship with the University of Hawaii from the very beginning. So we're kind of an academic holding company for the university in the sense that we provide grants, have provided hundreds and hundreds of grants, thousands of grants to students over the years who are accepting the University of Hawaii and at the East West Center are two separate kinds of application processes, but in sync with each other. Over the years, the support for students, which was gigantic by the Ford Foundation, for example, used to support about 150 students a year. It was really quite a dedication and realization how important each new generation is for being cross-culturally, cross-nationally trained, really, and aware of other peoples and really directed not to warfare, but peacefare, you might say, in very constructive ways. Now over the years and the recent years, some of the big funding for students has dropped. So we have diversified who's in our dormitories. We have almost 700 rooms to fill if they're jammed. So we have students who are supported by other, somebody, university scholarships, some are self-supported in some respects, but we still have a very critical mass of students, which are absolutely essential historically in the current times for the East West Center. But the degrees they earn are from the University of Hawaii. What we try to do is have both intellectual and social programs in addition to their coursework on the East West Center campus. We're not just one building. We're a 21-acre campus with six buildings, three of them are dormitories, a big conference center, a student center for activities, and of course our main building for research and administration and so forth. So we try to involve students as much as we can. I was involved as a student myself. When I was still a graduate student at the university, but also at the East West Center, I had a MAM PhD grant, both about two years long. My PhD program took a lot longer. I was doing classical Chinese as part of it, which took a bit of time. So I had two contract areas of research at the East West Center. I had a wonderful opportunity to work with researchers there that helped write a chapter for a book in one case and actually published my own book as it was a conference summary sort of thing that I helped edit heavily. And then I served two, had two jobs in the administration on contract with the dean and the president's office. So I really took advantage of both the University of Hawaii opportunities as well as the East West Center, and so it's a real honor to come back and pay it forward really because I gained so much from Hawaii itself and the university and the East West Center that when they kind of twisted my arm last year to leave a terrific job in Hong Kong, I thought, well, you know, it'd be good to get back to Hawaii. I lived here 18 years before, come back home, see a lot of friends, and make new ones, of course, but really to get back into what I considered an extraordinary synergy between the East West Center, University of Hawaii, the community, and other institutions in town. So it's good to be back. Good, good. You talked a little bit about the mission of the East West Center. It's been around since 1960. Has its mission evolved over the years? And where do you see its mission heading under your leadership? Well, I would say the basic mission, which is what you're stating your opening remarks and to promote understanding and public diplomacy kind of issues across all our programs. We are partially funded through the Department of State by congressional appropriations, and then about half an hour comes from contracts and grants and donations and so forth. I think we're going to try to rebalance and diversify a bit on the less appropriations in more other areas, I think, in realization of the facts of life and under the new administration. But I think it's the right thing to do anyway, more diversification. We don't have much corporate funding, so we're going to do that. What about international funding? We do, but I think it needs to be tapped a little more. Of course, you mentioned what the change is. The mission is the same, basic mission. The implementation of it is different. I mean, it's 21st century. So, interestingly enough, and this is true for Asia, your question as well as America, we're seeing across all sectors, education, government, you name it, business, the impact of information, technology, communication, ITC. And that kind of technological advance is to do anything well in any sector or across sector. People have to be much more aware of social media, B2B, B2C, all these kinds of things in business. Educational techniques for teaching have changed because of this. So, there's a need both in Asia Pacific and in the United States in the areas in which we've worked and will continue to work, say leadership training and capacity building, that for a component part of that is to have technology as a big part of the process that we undertake of the center, but also for continuing connectivity after people leave through social media, for example. Could you talk a little bit about the leadership training that you folks provide? How does that work out? We've been doing that for a long, long time. One of the aspects has been really lary to train trainers, too. Whether it's in education, we have a K-12, activities for training and group across, again, across nationally, cross-culturally, teachers of K-12 about Asia Pacific and studies as well as U.S. We have in the United States primarily a program that's training and capacity building for small colleges and junior colleges in Asia Pacific development. There are programs that have been very, very successful. We have a large, primarily leadership training group, which has about 12 different subcategories of types of leaders they train. We had a terrific group in the center last week from, I think, about seven or eight countries in Southeast Asia. Young entrepreneur NGO heads for the ages of about 25 to 32 or so, so pretty young. The training activity was to help them learn how to crowdfund for startup NGOs in the environmental area. The dynamism of that group was extraordinary. We brought people from the community and the university, and I got involved, too, in some of them not judging but kind of evaluation of their crowdfunding pitches. You could see firsthand how young people, with a dedication in this case to an environment, trying to get the technology right, utilize this new crowdfunding capabilities, but also learn from each other on presentation of materials, elevator pitches, and follow-up things, everything from governance to fundraising to organization and control of volunteers. It's quite a package deal. Okay, we're going to go to commercial shortly, and when we come back, we'll talk more about the Swiss Center with Dr. Richard Volstic. Thank you. Hello, this is Martin Despeng. Please join me on my new show, Humane Architecture, like the one in the back that you see of our architect, David Rockwood. The show is going to be on Tuesdays, 5 p.m. here on Think Tech Hawaii in downtown Honolulu. See you then. I've got the Beagle Sisters here with a healthy tip. We encourage you to enjoy the food you eat this holiday season and keep it local and healthy. Yeah. Eat the rainbow in your rainbow, and if you need any produce, come to the... Aloha. I'm Senator Russell Ruderman, representing Pune and Ka'u on the Big Island and the host of the Ruderman Roundtable. We're here at Think Tech Hawaii every other Tuesday at 2 o'clock. You can join us on ThinkTechHawaii.com, and you can find links to our YouTube channel for past episodes there. I want to thank Think Tech Hawaii for hosting us, and we'll see you again on the Ruderman Roundtable. Mahalo. Aloha. I'm Larry Foster, and back again with Richard Volstic, president of the East West Center, and we're discussing the East West Center and the future. Is the East West Center a unique institution, or are there a lot of East West centers around the world? Well, the answer is it is unique. Unfortunately, I would say, actually, because I think it's a terrific idea. You have to give a lot of credit to the U.S. Congress and the leaders I mentioned earlier, but also Hawaii itself and its support, and a long string of people, including our congressional staff. Of course, Senator Inouye was a major player for many years in supporting and explaining what the East West Center was to his colleagues. Now we have our current delegation to the Congress who's doing the same thing. It's unique because the U.S. government has, for almost 60 years, helped fund an organization in the middle of the Pacific recognizing that it's kind of a halfway house between Asia and America, mainland, where people could come and meet and feel comfortable and really have an environment, which Hawaii really operates in spades, I think, of truly multicultural accepting place. And so when we talk to our people who have been back home after what, it's five years or five months, or 40 years, but they say, oh, I got a degree, I got capacity bail, and I learned this and so forth, but it's the connections I made that are lifelong friends and oftentimes very useful for whatever fields they're in, but also just the attitudes that were acquired through the kind of package deal that I mentioned earlier. They eat together, have intellectual and social activities together. There's just so much going on every day that if you're even remotely curious, you can pick up so much more than you can come from just a standard university program or a conference or a training program someplace else. So we have a lot to be proud of, I think as Americans who pay taxes like I do, that this has been a good thing to support. I would like to see more similar organizations sponsored by other places, but I think because there's a lot of things that need to be done cross-culturally and cross-nationally, I think, for the kinds of generalized public diplomacy and ways to solve issues without warfare that I think the center can be very proud of doing for many decades and will continue to do so going forward. So it's a unique place, but it's not so unique I can't be copied by some other sagacious government. Okay. I guess another question. East West Center is located in Hawaii and we're proud to have the East West Center here. What do you see the role of the East West Center in Hawaii? I know it's an international organization that's sort of located in Hawaii, but what's its role in Hawaii or what it should be and what has been the impact of the East West Center on Hawaii? Well, I think that's been a mixed story over the last 57 years. I really talk about going forward. It's my sense that in the first three months or so that I've been back to Hawaii, I've gone around town asking that very question, not just in the university community, but business community and so forth. And I've been kind of surprised that a lot of people don't really know what the East West Center is. Don't realize it's separate from University of Hawaii. When I googled East West Center to prepare for this program, I typed in East West Center and immediately it said, at University of Hawaii. Right. Wrong prepositions should be next to you. Anyway, but the real issue I think is that we run about, you know, several hundred programs a year. And not a line back and got some say about how we operate, given my position, I think we're going to be much more aggressive in involving the community and some of the activities we have. We have a great outreach program in arts, for example. It's dynamite. So a lot of people will know us through that, the Arts Ohana. The ticket things we've done are big, we've had President speaking here, President Obama, way back when I was a student, President Ford, Secretaries of State, you know, Secretary Clinton was here. So there's a platform for senior officials, not just from America to speak. We've had a lot of that over the years. But my concern is in the research area, the training development area, educational area that we can do a lot more to involve the community than we've done, both on our campus and also outreach in the community itself. So stay tuned on that. But I think it's a natural... If I come back and talk to you again about a year from now, I think there's no question we really know much better than we used to be. Yeah, correct me if I'm wrong, but if memory serves me correct, programs like the Hawaii International Film Festival had their origins at the East West Center. And the Polynesian Voyaging Society had its origins at the East West Center. So it would appear that the East West Center has had a long, subtle, not-so-subtle impact on Hawaii. Yeah, you know, that's true. I mean, that's to be much to be proud of. We are incubators for those programs. They go out on their own and done very well. You know, I think in some respects we continue doing that. Sometimes things get legs and you say, wow, that just makes sense to go off on your own and do it. I think being an incubator for the non-government, you know, 501C3 kind of community in Hawaii, something we'll continue to pay attention to, try to do, because I think it's important, again, a way to bring texture to the non-government organization, not-for-profit organizations in Hawaii, and we work with them a lot anyway. So I'm proud of that. Going forward, I think we're looking at an array of other kinds of projects that may or may not be picked up, say, by the university or other things, too. Those all work. The point is that we stay connected. There's synergy among us. After incubating, we just didn't say goodbye. We try to be supportive of the festivals and so forth. Hey, has anybody looked at the economic impact on Hawaii of having the East West Center here? I know people have done it for HPU. There he is, I think, because we have a staff of 160 people. That's an impact right there. We bring in a lot of, through our contracts and grants and other kinds of money that's spent in Hawaii. Of course, the student support is spent in Hawaii and so forth. There's an impact for sure, but I think no less important is we have an office in Washington, D.C., also a satellite office. We're in Hawaii for America, mainland America as well as Hawaii, and in Hawaii for Asia Pacific. So it's not just a national institution that's lucky to be housed in Hawaii, but I think really our goal is to be as clear and vigorous about explain how much we do in the United States and for Asia Pacific, both individually and as regions, going forward as we've done in the past. But still, lucky Hawaii, for me, is going to be back. Yes, it's going to be particularly good to have you. I think you're the first alum to serve as president. First alumnus to do it. So I kind of knew what I was getting into, I think. But I must say, I've been away for 30 years from Hawaii, so of course lots of things have changed, but there's still that warmth and a lot of spirit I picked up with so many friends and so forth since I've been in acquaintances. They were kind enough to come up and say, well, remember me? And usually I do. It's just that kind of place where you build many, many friends and what can be long-lasting acquaintances, which I think is one of the great aspects of this community. You mentioned this workshop you did for the environmental folks, and one of the things you taught them was the elevator speech. What's the elevator speech for the East West Center? Well, this month is, please support us. As you know, we are waiting for Congress to take action on the skinny budget and so forth. That's been sort of the history of the East West Center. It was zero and then money gets back and added back in and stuff. You've been going through that cycle for a very long time and yet still there. You know, I think that's one reason that was attracting me to come back because although I'm a retooled academic, I've worked in business now and business associations for 18 years and there was, you know, it's always been, to my mind, even as an alumnus before I came back, the lack of corporate support and the great stuff we're doing is kind of surprising. So I'm hoping to help as we maybe lose a little bit of federal funds when we make it up and other contracts and grants but also in corporate support as well. Do you think your contacts in Asia will assist that corporate funding efforts? I certainly hope so. Let me ask another question and maybe this is more on the substantive side. You've used the word peace fair and warfare. We seem to be heading into a period of time where there's more focus on warfare in terms of funding programs in the United States. Can you make a case for funding peace fair? Actually, of course I can and I think the interesting thing is that I think even the skinny budget with its kind of extremes on this, we're going to see some back off on that. We have a lot of the, not just State Department people but also military, senior military officers also have said, you know, you've got to have both diplomacy. Warfare is the last option and so cutting back on the kinds of things the East West Senate does and soft diplomacy or the State Department does and its various activities, like loan, USAID and so forth, those kinds of things are really essential and we've seen for 70 years since World War II and so it's really essential that the proper balance be set. There's no question our military could be modernized more but there's also no question that those of us in soft diplomacy or education and these others, you might say softer fields have got to retool a little bit too. I think the advantage of this kind of shot across the bow of the skinny budget is making all organizations rethink their priorities, rethink their principles and rethink their operational and I think we're going through that exercise ourselves. I frankly think it is useful and hopefully we'll get the balance right on the Congress side but also we'll get the balance rebalance done better on the East West Center side as well where we're really looking for broader funding base, broader support base but that funding and support should come from doing what people need in the 21st century and like anyplace else we need to rethink and refine retool some of the things we do for better results right now. We've been discussing the East West Center with Dr. Richard Wulstek we really appreciate your coming on the show and we're excited about what's going to happen at the East West Center in the near and not so distant future. Aloha. Thank you.