Samantha Power, Concord resident, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and President Biden’s nominee to direct the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was recently filmed for a Concord Museum Forum which will air on Tuesday, February 2, 2021. During the forum she will be discussing her memoir, The Education of an Idealist. As part of the Q & A, Samantha Power will be answering questions from four Concord area high school students.
The students and their questions include: Beau McKenna, President of the Model U.N. Club at Concord- Carlisle High School (CCHS), inquired about the need for diplomats to understand and possibly suppress their cultural assumptions when negotiating with others. Megan Ding, a senior at Middlesex School who
hopes to become an officer in the U.S. Air Force, asked about the role the military should plan in humanitarian efforts. Nancy Onyimah, a senior at Concord Academy who operates her own handmade clothing business, wondered how the insurrection that occurred in our nation’s capital has affected America’s moral standing in the world. And Anna Park, a CCHS freshman who has raised thousands of dollars to support schoolchildren in Guatemala after a family trip to that country, asked how, in her new job at USAID, Samantha Power will balance the competing demands of international development including education, health care, human rights, and the environment.
Samantha Power served in the Obama administration as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017. From 2009 to 2013, she served on the National Security Council staff as a Special Assistant to the President and as Senior Director for Multiracial Affairs and Human Rights. Power was the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and is currently a professor at Harvard. She was born in Dublin in 1970 and immigrated to the United States from Ireland with her family at age 9.
Please note that this program is virtual. To sign up for the Concord Museum Forum on Tuesday, February 2, 2021, 7:00 pm go to www.concordmuseum.org Registrants will receive a “live” link before the program airs. Donations help support the Museum’s education initiatives.
The program was supported in part by the Sally Lanagan Fund.
Later this spring, the Concord Museum will open a new exhibition “Every Path Laid Open: Women of Concord and the Quest for Equality.” Organized to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, the title comes from Margaret Fuller who once remarked that not only did suffragists demand the right to vote but they also advocated that “we would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man.”
