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Past Event
Seminar

It Takes A Village: A Conversation with Special Representative Desirée Cormier Smith in Honor of International Women’s Day

RSVP Required Harvard Faculty, Fellows, Staff, and Students

Please join the Future of Diplomacy Project for a conversation with Desirée Cormier Smith, the State Department’s first ever Special Representative for Racial Equity and Justice.  While the communities that the Special Representative's mandate serves are specific - marginalized racial, ethnic, and Indigenous peoples, including people of African descent - the Special Representative believes, as Maya Angelou put it, none of us is free until all of us are free.  In honor of International Women's Day and U.S. Women's History Month, the Special Representative brings forth an important conversation about intersectionality - where one person's multiple or intersecting identities might subject them to varying forms of racism, discrimination, violence, or xenophobia - to remind us that our collective liberation rests on the shoulders of one another; to acknowledge that it takes a community of us who #EmbraceEquity, a village of us to secure freedom for all. Erika Manouselis, Manager of the Future of Diplomacy Project, will moderate.

Date: Time: - Location: Weil Town Hall, 1st Floor
Special Representative, Desiree Cormier Smith headshot

ABOUT

Desirée Cormier Smith

SPECIAL REPRESENTATIVE FOR RACIAL EQUITY AND JUSTICE
BUREAU OF DEMOCRACY, HUMAN RIGHTS, AND LABOR

Desirée Cormier Smith is the Special Representative for Racial Equity and Justice. Previously, she served as a Senior Advisor in the Bureau of International Organization Affairs. Special Representative Cormier also worked at the Open Society Foundations as the Senior Policy Advisor for Africa, Europe, and Eurasia. In that role, she led the global foundation’s U.S. advocacy strategy and execution on a wide range of human rights issues in these dynamic and diverse issues. From 2015 until 2020, she was the Senior Director with Albright Stonebridge Group’s Africa Practice, where she advised and assisted private and social sector clients on growth strategies across the African continent.

Ms. Cormier began her State Department career as a Foreign Service Officer with assignments in Mexico, South Africa, and Washington, DC. Ms. Cormier is the recipient of four Department of State Meritorious Honor Awards and the Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Undergraduate Fellowship. She is an alumnus of the International Career Advancement Program and is a member of the 2019 class of Next Generation National Security Leaders Fellowship at the Center for a New American Security. She was honored by New America as a 2020 Black American National Security and Foreign Policy Next Generation Leader and is a 2020 alumnus of the New Leadership Council Washington, DC chapter. Ms. Cormier currently serves on the Advisory Council of Global Kids, an educational non-profit aimed to inspire underserved youth to pursue careers in public policy and global affairs, and on the Advisory Board of Shea Yeleen, a social enterprise dedicated to empowering women in West Africa and the U.S. Ms. Cormier is a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Ms. Cormier holds a B.A. in Political Science and Psychology from Stanford University and a M.A. in Public Policy from John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She is proficient in Spanish and French.