women of the United States qualified for service abroad and willing to serve, under conditions of hardship if necessary, to help the peoples of such countries and areas in meeting their needs for trained manpower.” More than half a century into that mission, the organization Stroker helps administer counts more than 230,000 alumni: volunteers who have served in 141 countries to date. Currently, the largest percentage — close to half — do their stints in Africa, as she did, with Latin America and Eastern Europe/Central Asia coming in a distant second and third. Stroker oversees some 800 staffers domestically and another 3,000 worldwide. Of the approximately 7,000 volunteers currently deployed around the globe, 63 percent are females, 37 percent are male, and singles outnumber the married volunteers by 98 percent to 2 percent. “We do attract a younger population,” says Stroker, who was 23 when she signed up for service in 1998; today the average age of a Peace Corps volunteer is 28. “A lot of them are newly graduated, looking for their first jobs,” she says.
P HOTO: KARL J OB / U. S. EMBASSY COTON OU, B EN IN
In April, Kathy Stroker L’04 returned to the West African nation of Benin for its 50th anniversary of Peace Corps service. Stroker served as a Peace Corps volunteer there 20 years ago. Today, she is deputy chief executive officer of the fabled organization. Marking the anniversary, Stroker visited the school in Parakou where she taught, met with former students and spoke at the ceremony.
Her work often takes her well beyond the confines of her eighth-floor office on the corner of 20th and L Streets in the nation’s capital. In recent years she has visited posts in Macedonia, Nicaragua, Benin, and Ethiopia, always on the lookout for an opportunity to reconnect with the day-to-day work volunteers are doing. “I like to meet with the staff in the different countries, get a sense of their successes and their challenges,” Stroker says. Her own experiences in Western Africa are never far from her mind. Analyzing risk and managing large-scale projects is hardwired into her DNA, an essential component of her professional experience in both the public and the private sectors. In addition to defending domestic and international clients at Dechert LLP in Philadelphia and at Arnold & Porter in Washington, D.C., the Yale graduate also served as a foreign lecturer at the Institute of Comparative Law and the University of Paris. She also clerked for the Honorable Michael M. Baylson of the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania. After working for the U.S. Agency for International Development as deputy assistant general counsel, Stroker returned to the Peace Corps in April of 2016, as that agency’s acting general counsel. A great deal of her time is spent keeping abreast of world events. “We have a cadre of safety and security experts working for us; every post has a safety and security manager. We pay a lot of attention to news reports, to what’s actually happening on the ground, and assess constantly.” Evacuating the volunteers from Burkina Faso, a landlocked country in Western Africa where demonstrations, marches and violence are common, was a case in point. “Once we got the experts to weigh in, we had to think about the risks, and whether those risks are acceptable. In Burkina, the risks to our people were mounting, and we were not comfortable with leaving them there.” So, the next challenge became finding transportation and locating temporary housing in neighboring Ghana. Stroker counts among her legal specialties international development, foreign tribunals, and public policy, all of which dovetail with her vision of the Peace Corps’ core mission. “We do represent the United States in a very concrete way,” she says. “We are sending American citizens to make a person-to-person connection. At the end of the day, those connections are more important to our image than the person who is sitting in the White House at any one given time.”
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