COMMUNITY NEWS
children up to age 8 who are growing up in socially and economically difficult circumstances. Laugharn worked for more than 11 years in a variety of roles for Save the Children USA, and was based for eight of those years in Bamako, Mali. As Save the Children’s Deputy Director in Mali, Laugharn helped develop the “Village Schools” model, which promoted access to basic education, girls’ schooling, and community participation. He was later Save the Children’s Mali Field Office Director, West Africa Area Director and then Education Advisor for Africa, providing technical assistance for programs in ten countries.
NIGER The Multicultural Coalition of Grand Island (NE) this summer brought aboard new AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer Steve Anderson, who will serve as a development coordinator through June 2016. Anderson will evaluate, enhance and expand the Multicultural Coalition’s programs. The Multicultural Coalition is part of a grant that was also awarded to the Heartland United Way and Heartland CASA to have an AmeriCorps VISTA member serve at the site. Anderson was born in Sweden and raised in California. Following law school, he volunteered with the Peace Corps for four years in Niger. He studied and assisted a wide range of populations, including agricultural communities on the Komadougou River, nomadic herding groups on the arid steppes of the Saharan littoral and mobile fishing camps on the islands of Lake Chad. Anderson returned to the United States in 2013 and worked in Washington, D.C., contributing to the Joint Sahel Conferences at the National Defense University and consulting for the World Bank and U.S. AID development programs.
SOUTH KOREA Kathleen Stephens (1975-1977), the former U.S. ambassador to Seoul, will start a new career in September as a professor at Hankuk University of
Foreign Studies. Stephens will lecture on diplomacy and trade, with a focus on the Korean Peninsula and international order. Stephens is a career Foreign Service officer with the rank of Minister Counselor. She was Director for European Affairs at the National Security Council, from 19941995. Stephens has had two diplomatic postings in Korea, as Principal Officer at the U.S. Consulate in Pusan, Korea (1987-1989), and as internal political unit chief at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, Korea (1984-1987). She holds a B.A. from Prescott College and a Master’s degree from Harvard University. Prior to joining the Foreign Service in 1978, Ms. Stephens was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Korea and an exchange student and Outward Bound instructor in Hong Kong.
THAILAND Susanne Aspley (1989-1991) has been awarded the national 2015 McKnight Artist Fellowship for Writers in Creative Prose for her debut novel, Ladyboy and the Volunteer, a book about a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand and her best friend, a transgender Thai prostitute. The $25,000 fellowship, administered by The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis MN, is for outstanding literary merit. Aspley is also author of I Know How to Hola and I Know How to Ni Hao, bilingual books for children in language immersion. Aspley holds a MA from the University of Minnesota and is an advanced graduate from the U. S. Defense Information School, Ft. Meade, MD. Along with her Peace Corps service, she also served 20 years in the Army Reserve as a photojournalist in Bosnia, Cuba, Kuwait and Panama, and is a retired veteran.
UGANDA Francine Madden, an internationally known wildlife conflict specialist, has been hired by the state of Washington to help defuse tensions over the state’s expanding wolf population. Madden
is the co-founder and executive director of Human Wildlife Conflict Collaboration (HWCC) —a global nonprofit organization integrating best practice standards in analyzing and transforming deep-rooted social conflict in the conservation field. Recognizing the “missing link” in conservation practice, Madden pioneered efforts to bring expertise and lessons learned from the conflict transformation field (a niche within the peacebuilding field) into the field of wildlife conservation through HWCC. Madden leads HWCC’s Conservation Conflict Transformation (CCT) capacity building and conflict intervention work. She will work with the 18-member citizen Wolf Advisory Group, which provides input to the state
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WorldView ∙ Fall 2015 ∙ www.PeaceCorpsConnect.org | 47