Elisa Martinez GS '96: Helping to fight the war on poverty

Elisa Martinez GS '96, a graduate of the Wilson School, claimed Princeton cultivates the spirit of public service. If her own career is any indication, she's right.

Martinez is a senior program advisor for Gender Equity and Diversity with the organization CARE (Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere) USA.

CARE USA is part of CARE International, which is, according to its website at www.careusa.org, one of the world's largest private humanitarian organizations. Together, CARE branches worldwide work in poor communities in more than 60 countries, helping people there make their lives better. In the fiscal year 2002, according to its website, CARE spent $391 million to directly improve the lives of over 31 million people in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin American and the Caribbean.

CARE is supported by individuals, corporations, foundations and other organizations and receives funding and commodities from government agencies, the European Union and the United Nations.

Martinez, along with her Atlanta, Ga.-based team, helps to make sure CARE USA works with a focus on women's situations and the gender dynamics of development in the countries in which these programs are located.

"A lot of it is — just to boil it down to basics — is being available to program offices when they are thinking out their strategies . . . ," Martinez said.

For example, she and her team found a way to give girls in Afghanistan equal access to schooling, Martinez said.

These girls were not receiving equal education under the influence of the Taliban. Martinez said she and her team did this without violating the letter of the law of the Taliban. They wanted to remove barriers to gender equity but knew they must sometimes work with local constraints too.

Martinez and her staff in Atlanta rely on the assistance of staff members in the countries in question. The CARE staff, according to its website, is made up of more than 12,000 individuals, most of whom are citizens of the countries in which they work.

"They are kind of the meat and muscle that makes this organization move," Martinez said.

People are encouraged to become involved with CARE as volunteers, she said, but the organization principally works through its staff.

History of CARE

CARE was founded in 1945 to provide relief to survivors of World War II. The relief came in the form of CARE packages, which were U.S. Army "10-in-1" food parcels obtained by CARE at the end of WWII. After CARE acquired them, Americans could buy them for $10 a piece and send them to family and friends in Europe where starvation was a real threat.

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Since then, CARE has greatly expanded its scope and its services.

Martinez's own involvement with CARE began at the Inter-American Dialogue, a policy institute in Washington, D.C. She worked there after graduating from Georgetown University, where she had studied foreign affairs, concentrating on history and diplomacy.

Martinez came to the Inter-American Institute in the early '90s, a time Martinez remembers was marked by a "huge infatuation" with the theory of free trade. She said people thought poverty would go away if barriers to free trade were eliminated; there was very little discussion of the role that increasing inequality and political stability in poor countries might have on their economies, Martinez said.

"I just became interested in what happens to people who can't get on this train [out of poverty]," Martinez said.

The chairman of the Inter-American Dialogue, who was also the chairman of CARE, said Martinez, recommended she go back to school. Martinez ended up at the Wilson School. She spent two years there, earning honors for her work in development studies.

After the Inter-American Dialogue and graduate school at Princeton, the first job Martinez applied for was a fellowship with CARE. The fellowship no longer exists, but was then designed to help people without a lot of overseas experience start working with international Non-Governmental Organizations.

While Martinez did not discover her interest in poverty while she was at the Wilson School, she credits the school with encouraging public service.

After acknowledging complaints about the number of graduates of the school that go into public service after having received so much support from the school, she said it had been wonderful for her to get a great education and then feel like a part of something that was trying to end poverty.

Career of service

Martinez said she is in awe of the people she has met through CARE, giving the example of a group of Mayan peasant women. They are members of a credit group organized through CARE, and one of the women is now challenging the mayor — a male — in her home town for his position.

"It's a really incredible world out there. It doesn't look like what you think it's going to look like when you head out to rural Bangladesh and you've got women wearing saris and carrying cell phones," Martinez said.

There is, Martinez said, a "tremendous need for bright minds and energy" where work to alleviate poverty is concerned, and she encouraged people to look beyond themselves. Martinez described her own experience with public service as extremely rewarding.