Malcolm Butler

Malcolm Butler "is the President and CEO of Partners of the Americas, the largest volunteer organization working to promote economic and social development in the Western Hemisphere. Partners creates people to people programs to expand opportunity across the Americas. Mr. Butler oversees the work of 60 citizen-led partnerships between 45 US states and 31 Latin American and Caribbean countries.

"Mr. Butler brings a rich and varied background to Partners. After completing undergraduate work at Rice University and graduate work at Oxford, he joined the U.S. Foreign Service. His State Department diplomatic work took him first to overseas assignments in Mexico and Iran. Returning to Washington D.C., he moved to the Office of Management and Budget in the Executive Office of the President, where he reviewed international economic programs, and to the staff of the National Security Council in the White House.

"He then shifted to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), where he held many of the Agency's most senior career positions. He served as Mission Director in four countries - Bolivia, Peru, Lebanon, and the Philippines - at critical moments in their relationships with the United States. In Washington he directed the USAID Bureaus for Intergovernmental and International Affairs, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He also served as the Agency's Executive Secretary.

"Mr. Butler led several of the Agency's most critical initiatives. He launched U.S. assistance to Lebanon's reconstruction and famine relief in Ethiopia. He designed and led U.S. economic support for the Philippines' return to democracy under Corazon Aquino. He was given the same task for the Newly Independent States of the former Soviet Union, then created the new Bureau for Eastern Europe and the NIS and led it through its critical first year. For his work at USAID, Mr. Butler received citations from U.S. Presidents and recognitions from foreign governments, and attained the personal diplomatic rank of Career Minister.

"After leaving USAID, Butler spent a year as Program Director of the North Carolina Outward Bound School, on whose Board of Advisors he had long served. He then founded an international economic consulting practice, which provided services in business development, Washington representation, facilitation of overseas acquisitions, and troubleshooting on behalf of corporate boards. Butler was also President of Pax World Service, an affiliate of Mercy Corps and the Pax World Fund family of socially responsible mutual funds." 

Letitia Butler, his wife is also a former U.S. foreign service officer. 


 * Director, US Center for Citizen Diplomacy