Carter Center has been more than a think tank

Posted 7:47PM on Saturday 3rd August 2002 ( 22 years ago )

ATLANTA - Jimmy Carter didn't know what to do when he left office, but he knew that he wasn't ready for a quiet retirement. ``When I left the White House, four years earlier than I had anticipated, I realized that I had 25 more years of active life,'' Carter told The Associated Press last month. ``What was I going to do with the rest of my life? I was a defeated candidate. I never was going to run for office again.'' Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, decided to join with Emory University and form the Carter Center, an Atlanta-based agency devoted to well, they weren't exactly sure what it was devoted to at first. ``There had never been an organization like the Carter Center in history,'' he said. ``There was a lot of skepticism about whether we could be effective or not.'' As the agency marks its 20th anniversary this year, the Carters and others believe it has evolved into one of the most successful nonprofit agencies on earth, providing poor countries around the world with help in health care, agriculture and conflict resolution. Among the center's biggest triumphs: helping avoid military confrontations in Korea and Haiti, eliminating Guinea worm in several African countries and helping monitor elections around the world. But Carter's original vision for the center was much more simple. He saw a place where he could build on perhaps the greatest success of his administration, the peace accord between Israel and Egypt. But Rosalynn had ideas for a broader agency. ``I wanted to continue my mental health work and Jimmy was focused on human rights and resolving conflicts,'' said Mrs. Carter, who turns 75 this month. ``In the beginning, it seemed a little disconnected but the way it evolved just seemed kind of natural to us.'' ``President Carter has been very proud of the fact that it is not a think tank,'' said Chace, who also sits on the center's board of trustees. William Ury, director of the Global Negotiation Project at Harvard University, has been on peacekeeping missions in the Sudan and Ethiopia with the center. ``President Carter and his team have helped prevent major wars, whether it's in Korea, a conflict that actually had nuclear implications, or in Haiti, where they staved off a potentially violent conflict,'' Ury said. ``They pay attention to problems that no one else is paying attention to, whether they are health problems in Africa or whether they're long-forgotten conflicts in some other part of the world.'' You can't make changes just through political work, Carter says. ``You can't separate peace from democracy from human rights from environmental quality from alleviation of suffering, they're all tied together,'' he said. ``That's something that we've come to realize much more clearly since I've left the White House, unfortunately than I did when I was president. ``When I go into a village in Ghana or Mali or Burkina Faso, where two-thirds of the people are incapacitated because of Guinea worm, and we teach them and help them with this disease and go back a year later and nobody has Guinea worm and for the rest of their lives they will never see another case of Guinea worm it brings tears of joy to my eyes.'' The Carters make sure they take time for themselves and their family fly-fishing or hiking together. They volunteer for Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit organization unaffiliated with the center. The former president also teaches Sunday school and is a deacon in the Maranatha Baptist Church of Plains. ``Over the last 10 years, Rosa and I have withdrawn substantially from the operation,'' Carter said. ``We go to the high-profile places like Cuba and Venezuela, but the work of the Carter Center goes on everyday.'' The center has a council on conflict resolution, teams of experts in health and public policy, a research and academic base through Emory and a growing endowment that will help fund ongoing and future projects. ``I laid down, in the very beginning, several basic premises,'' Carter said. ``The most important one is that we don't duplicate what anyone else does. If the United Nations or the World Bank, or the U.S. government or Harvard University is meeting a need effectively, we don't compete with them. The Carter Center just goes to fill vacuums.'' Carter said more than half of the center's work and money go to providing health care. ``This is the greatest need among people who have an income of less than a dollar a day,'' he said. ``If you have a dollar a day, you have to buy food, you have some raggedy clothes and you find some kind of shelter but there is nothing left for health care and education.'' The Carter Center's annual operating budget of $35 million is financed by donations from individuals, corporations and foundations, as well as multilateral development assistance programs. In fiscal year 2000-2001, more than 150,000 donors gave a total of $90 million. ``We have a unique programming mix, tackling critical issues in peace and health worldwide,'' said Carter Center spokeswoman Deanna Congileo. ``The Carters remain actively involved at the center, but there also is a staff of 150 implementing their vision and a strong, independent board of trustees is in place.'' Carter says he wishes the Carter Center could help more, and he hopes that others can use it as a model. ``My hope is other presidents who graduate from the White House will explore ways they can use there enormous influence and prestige for the benefit of poor people in need,'' he said. Carter recalled a recent trip to Mali where the center started a program to fight trachoma, a preventable eye disease. ``One of the villages we visited, a grandmother was holding a little boy,'' Carter explained. ``The grandmother was completely blind and she had the little baby there, about the same age as my youngest grandson, Amy's child, and I just thought about the difference between the medical care our little Hugo will get compared to that little child there. ``But when we taught the villagers how to deal with trachoma and gave them free medicine and I realized that little baby will never go blind. That's a very gratifying thing.''

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