Dear Friends and Colleagues:

As many of you know, I am leaving the Connect U.S. Fund to take up the position of Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration in the Obama Administration.  Although I am sad to be leaving this uniquely valuable initiative, I am very excited about my new job - and the chance it will afford me to promote U.S. support for the international humanitarian principles that are so critical to responsible U.S. global engagement.  I also leave the Connect U.S. Fund confident that our initiative is in very good health and in very good hands.  I'm delighted that Nancy Soderberg has agreed to succeed me and serve as the Connect U.S. Fund President, and she will be ably assisted by a superb team, led by Heather Hamilton and including Alex Toma, Francesco Femia and Joanna Hecht.

The theory and goals behind this collaborative initiative have been straightforward .  We believe that the "whole" of advocacy for constructive U.S. global engagement can and should be greater than the sum of its parts; that more effective efforts to promote cooperation and collaboration among non-profits engaged in foreign policy will result in more powerful advocacy.   Thus, we have sought to deploy this foundation/NGO initiative to encourage more effective collaborative action on critical foreign policy issues.

In March 2007, we established an ambitious grant-making and operational agenda to promote NGO capacity-building, as well as alignment of themes, strategies and objectives for NGO advocacy in critical issue areas, such as human rights, foreign assistance, nuclear weapons and climate change.  And since that time, we have helped to strengthen collective advocacy efforts in each of these areas.  In so doing, we have augmented the size of the Connect U.S. Fund community by nearly sevenfold and added two foundations to our collaborative.  Our "Call on the New President for Responsible U.S. Global Engagement," issued in January 2009, was a unique, cross-issue collaborative designed to promote early Administration on several critical foreign policy issues.  It has been most gratifying to see that the new Administration has endorsed most of the objectives and requests in that letter, which I believe serves as a model for future collective advocacy approaches.

The progress we have made would not have been possible without the strong support of each of the foundation members of our collaborative, including the Ford Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Open Society Institute and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, as well as our two newest members, the Atlantic Philanthropies and the Ploughshares Fund.  I am also indebted to our extraordinary staff, including Heather Hamilton, Francesco Femia and Joanna Hecht, each of whom will be taking on new responsibilities under Nancy Soderberg's leadership.

I hope and expect to have the chance to continue to see and work with many of you in the months and years ahead.

Kind regards,

Eric Schwartz