When USAID Administrator Samantha Power travels around the world, she plans meetings with government officials, press conferences with journalists, and visits to the USAID Mission and project sites. She also does her best to join a sports game — rugby in Fiji, baseball in the Dominican Republic, basketball in Serbia.

For Power, it’s a way to get to know young people, to have more than a superficial encounter while visiting a country, representing USAID and President Biden. As she trades her suit for a jersey to sweat it out with them on the court, as she falls down while going for the goal and they help her back up, sports becomes the great equalizer.

“There is really nothing like sports — to be side by side with people, to ask them about what they’re most worried about, what they dream about, to ask them about their lives, how they got here,” Power told journalists in May after a youth soccer match in Morocco.

Wherever she goes, sports is a way to signal we’re all the same, Power says. We all have similar struggles. We’re all worried about the world we’re leaving behind for our children, the next generation.

“We’ve seen the magic of sport from the Olympics hundreds of years ago to the present, the ways in which countries that never spoke with one another suddenly find themselves playing each other in the World Cup, and they exchanged jerseys,” she said in Morocco.

“We have seen people of different religions or ethnic groups who might have been at war, maybe five years before, suddenly they’re playing on the same basketball team, and they say: ‘Hey, give me the ball.’ ”

— USAID Administrator Samantha Power

Participating in sports is also a way to signal respect, Power says. In 2023, as the first USAID Administrator to visit Fiji, Power joined a game of women’s rugby with the Lilian Amazons Rugby Club.

“When we come to someone else’s country, one of the things that is very important to do and very valuable to do is not to come bringing what matters to you, but to really try to understand what matters to the people with whom you’re engaging,” Power said, while speaking to the press in Fiji.

The U.S. State Department has a division within the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs dedicated to sports diplomacy, established after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as a way of reaching out to youth in the Middle East through soccer.

At USAID, we use sports as a development tool. USAID programs have harnessed the power of sports to advance shared objectives around global health, nutrition, education, peacekeeping, and gender equality.

While in Morocco this spring, Power met a young woman, Intissar Chaabani, who participated in a USAID education program several years ago. She was having trouble in school, but through this program, she discovered soccer — known locally as football — and her academic performance improved. She loved football so much that she set her sights on playing for the national team, a goal she achieved.

“Sport can change many things,” Intissar said. “It fosters a positive mindset and it allows you to turn your focus away from bad influences. Now, I fill my time with sports / exercise, not other things.”

On a personal level, sports plays an important role in Power’s life, as well. After immigrating to the United States from Ireland at the age of 9, playing American sports was a way for Power to make friends. She fell in love with baseball and today considers herself a Red Sox fan.

Watch the following video to see the many ways Power participated in sports games around the world since becoming USAID Administrator in 2021:

About the Author

Nic Corbett is the Deputy Director of Strategic Communications for Content in USAID’s Bureau for Legislative and Public Affairs.

Samantha Power has been a war correspondent, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a Harvard University professor, a human rights advocate, and the youngest-ever U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. And today she’s started her newest job as USAID’s administrator.

Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., introduced Power to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in March by explaining Power’s last name derives from “de Paor,” which means “of the poor” in Irish.

“Fittingly, she has dedicated her entire life in the service of others using her razor-sharp intelligence and fierce advocacy as a journalist, activist, and diplomat to stand with the world’s voiceless masses, all while simultaneously advancing United States’ interests by building bonds in every corner of our world,” Markey said.

At the confirmation hearing, Power emphasized the four interconnected global challenges she’d prioritize as head of the Agency: the COVID-19 pandemic and the development gains it has imperiled, climate change, conflicts and the root causes that fuel humanitarian crises, and democratic backsliding.

Storytelling is a constant thread through Power’s life. “We make sense of our lives through stories,” Power wrote in her memoir The Education of an Idealist. “Regardless of our different backgrounds and perspectives, stories have the power to bind us.”

In that spirit, here are four stories to get you acquainted with USAID’s newest administrator:

She is an immigrant who embraced sports to fit into American culture.

Power spent her early childhood in Ireland, and immigrated to the United States when she was 9. She arrived at the airport in Pittsburgh outfitted in a Stars and Stripes shirt. But with a thick Dublin accent and little knowledge of her new country, fitting in would be a challenge. Soon after her arrival, the city came together to root for the Pirates in their improbable 1979 playoff run, and Power joined in. She fell in love with baseball, and started playing American sports to make friends.

By the time she went off to college, Power was committed to becoming a sports journalist — yet an internship would cause her to question this path. While working in Atlanta at a CBS affiliate’s sports department, she caught a live feed of Chinese students her age in Tiananmen Square experiencing a violent government crackdown as a result of their peaceful efforts to get the Chinese Communist Party to pursue democratic reforms. Struck by their bravery, she wondered what could be done to help them. In the following days, the image of “Tank Man” grabbed Power’s attention. In seeing such a stunning assertion of human dignity, she resolved to learn more about the world.

When she ultimately did pursue journalism, Power’s reporting focused on people experiencing conflict and the stories of those trying to make a difference on behalf of vulnerable people. Yet her love of sports never faded. Now a Red Sox fan who considers Massachusetts home, Power told The Athletic she found practicing diplomacy and playing baseball have much in common: they are the ultimate team sports, with few quick wins. Fortitude, resilience, and patience are must-haves.

She became a journalist who saw the importance of USAID.

In 1993, Power began her journalism career covering the Bosnian War, where she first witnessed the role USAID played around the world.

“I saw USAID staff and partners deliver food to the vulnerable, while supporting mothers as they tried to locate their missing sons and husbands,” Power said at her confirmation hearing.

“Since then, wherever I travelled — whether to East Timor just after it became the world’s newest nation; Darfur, in the midst of this century’s first genocide; or west Africa, at the height of the Ebola epidemic — USAID was there — America was there — identifying needs and moving heaven and earth to meet them.”

Power went on to report from Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. In 2003, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her book “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, which drew on her reporting and interviews with policy makers to examine why the U.S. Government had failed to prevent genocides.

She recognizes the power of stories in building empathy: “As a war correspondent, storytelling was the most effective tool I had to bridge the vast space between those suffering the wounds of distant conflict and my American readers.”

Power put these skills to use as a public servant, recalling in her memoir: “As a diplomat, when foreign officials refused to budge in negotiations, I would try to shake up stale debates by sharing authentic, firsthand stories about the many people who were being affected (for good and bad) by our decisions.”

She was the youngest U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in the Obama Administration.

While at the UN, Power — now a mother of two young children — rallied countries to fight the Ebola epidemic, ratify the Paris Climate Agreement, strengthen peacekeeping efforts, and negotiate and adopt the Sustainable Development Goals. She made a point of visiting the ambassador of nearly every member state in their office. For many, she was the first U.S. ambassador to set foot in their country’s mission.

As Power later reflected, “By visiting the other ambassadors rather than having them travel to the U.S. Mission to meet me (as was traditional), I was able to see the art my colleagues wanted to showcase, the family photos on their desks, and the books they had brought with them all the way to America. Most significantly, regardless of their size, wealth, or geopolitical heft, I could show them America’s respect.”

Power found creative ways to use the arts in her diplomacy. To build support for protecting LGBTQ rights, she brought ambassadors — some from countries that criminalize LGBTQ status — to the Broadway musical “Fun Home,” about a woman coming out.

“You could just see them as humans, watching this young woman try to repress her longings and her crush, and they were living it with her,” Power said in a TIME interview with actress Amy Adams. “The level of identification with that was so much greater than I ever could have mustered through traditional diplomacy.”

One of her mottos is “shrink the change.”

Power often talks about the concept of “shrinking the change,” from the book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. The phrase refers to how individuals can come up with small solutions that over time add up to a big solution. This can empower people to act when they might otherwise feel overwhelmed by challenges like human rights abuses, climate change, or the global refugee crisis. Even if one can’t solve the entire problem, Power says, “surely there is something we can do.”

In this spirit, Power and her team developed the campaign #Freethe20 to advocate for the release of 20 female political prisoners from around the world. Complementing the work of families, lawyers, and NGOs, the effort used social media, diplomacy, and the platform of the UN ambassador to pressure countries to stop silencing women’s voices. Sixteen of the 20 women profiled in the campaign were ultimately released.

“In an atmosphere of repression and democratic backsliding around the world, I found it gratifying to focus less on the overall human rights ‘recession’ — an abstraction that could be paralyzing — and more on specific people,” she wrote in a LinkedIn piece. “Once freed, these women would again be able to raise their voices on behalf of important causes.”

In nominating Power for the USAID job, President Biden said:

“There is simply no one better to ensure our development agenda is a core pillar of our foreign policy.”

USAID is proud to have Power on board, and we welcome her leadership in helping us build a more stable and just world.

About the Author

Nic Corbett is a blog editor at USAID. Learn more about USAID’s work by following us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Follow Administrator Power on Twitter @PowerUSAID.

1. He grew up in the Midwest.

Ambassador Mark Green was born in Boston, but he attended high school and college in Wisconsin. He majored in English and political science at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and was named to the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics All-America team in swimming. He received his law degree from the University of Wisconsin Law School.

2. He volunteered in Kenya.

Along with his wife, Sue, Ambassador Green volunteered as a high school teacher in Kakamaga, Kenya, through WorldTeach. The organization was founded at Harvard, and recruits American college graduates to volunteer overseas. During his time in Kenya, Ambassador Green contracted malaria and typhoid.

3. He served as the U.S. ambassador to Tanzania.

In 2007, Ambassador Green was appointed as the U.S. ambassador to Tanzania by then-President George W. Bush. He led more than 350 U.S. and Tanzanian nationals representing 11 distinct U.S. Government entities, and was a prominent voice for U.S. interests, as well as democratization, anti-corruption and HIV/AIDS. He still speaks kidogo ku (“just a little”) Kiswahili.

4. He has a diverse family background.

Ambassador Green’s father is South African and his mother is British. Both of his parents have been proud Americans for more than 20 years. He also has close relatives in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

5. He served in Congress.

In 1999, Ambassador Green was elected to represent Wisconsin’s 8th District in Congress, where he served four terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. He helped craft legislation that launched the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), an independent U.S. Government foreign-aid agency, as well as the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR), an interagency initiative that has transformed the global HIV/AIDS response across more than 60 countries. He was later nominated to serve on the MCC Board of Directors by then-President Barack Obama.

6. He’s respected by the international development community.

Most recently, Ambassador Green was president of the International Republican Institute. IRI is a non-profit that advances freedom and democracy worldwide. Previously, he served as president and chief executive officer of the Initiative for Global Development, senior director at the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, and managing director of Malaria No More.

7. He has strong bipartisan support.

At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Ambassador Green earned praise from Congressional leaders — both Republicans and Democrats. Here are some quotes from the hearing:

“Mark’s exemplary character and unique qualifications make him an inspired choice to lead USAID in the future.” — Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI)

“He has the deep personal passion and commitment to do this job, as shown through years of work in advancing our common good on the international stage.” — Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI)

“He has an uncanny ability to bring people together of differing views [and] of differing backgrounds and get them to work on the same page. He is a person who knows what it takes to improve and transform the lives of others.” — Speaker Paul Ryan

About the Author

Nic Corbett is USAID’s blog editor. Learn more about USAID’s work by following us on Facebook and Twitter. Follow Ambassador Green on Twitter at @USAIDMarkGreen.