Mara Russell, a 1975 Palisades High School graduate, joined the Land O’Lakes Foundation in Arlington, Virginia, as Title II Institutional Capacity Building Manager in June. Having worked in food aid in the U.S. and overseas in Iraq, Somalia and Moscow, Russell is now managing a grant that supports food aid programs in Zambia. Russell says the objective of the USAID/Food for Peace grant is ‘to improve coping with food insecurity and using dairy as a coping mechanism.’ While Land O’Lakes has been involved in developing food aid programs since the early ’80s, Russell says, ‘this is different from what they’ve done in the past because we’re not just providing technical support, we’re working with people.’ For example, the program will be providing Zambians with dairy cows, or ‘food aid on legs.’ Having recently returned from a four-day trip to Zambia, Russell says ‘many people are caring for relatives and kids who don’t belong to them’ as a result of sickness or death in the family. Therefore, families receiving extra food rations would benefit from the livestock option, which could provide milk and an income for the family. Russell first became interested in Africa while attending UCLA, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in anthropology. Specifically intrigued by social organization and political anthropology done by Africanists, she attended a summer volunteer program called Operation Crossroads in Kenya, then went on to earn her master’s in anthropology from Columbia University. ‘Up until age 16, I wanted to be an actress,’ says Russell, but ‘I did a good job in U.S. history and went the social studies route.’ Originially from New York, she grew up in Detroit and Baltimore before moving to the Palisades with parents Claryce and David in 1974. Russell joined CARE (a humanitarian organization fighting global poverty) as an intern in 1986, performing administrative work before negotiating food aid programs. She helped initiate monetization programs with CARE, working in Honduras and the Dominican Republic, then became deputy and acting director in the old Food Unit in New York. Russell’s desire to go back overseas took her to northern Iraq in 1991, after the first Gulf War, where she worked in a three-month food distribution program. Stationed in Zacho, near the Turkish border, she helped provide food rations for people coming over the border into Iraq. She was amazed that some of the food she distributed included pate and Belgian chocolate. ‘We were not recognized by the Iraqi government,’ she says. ‘We didn’t get visas in Baghdad.’ However, in comparison to the recent Iraq war, Russell says, ‘aid came in from all over the place’it was a broad coalition, a joint initiative.’ Another difference Russell sees is that when she was working in Iraq in ’91, ‘there was a real partnership between the NGOs and the military…the military knew when to take their hands off. My concern [now] is that the military is in charge and sometimes their approach is not as appropriate as it could be. We’re draining resources that could be used in more appropriate ways.’ At the end of 1991, Russell went to Mogadishu, Somalia, where there was no social framework and a lot of civil strife. ‘It was the first war zone I’d been in and I was terrified most of the time,’ says Russell, who had to evacuate to Nairobi three or four times in the six weeks she was there. ‘It was a crapshoot whether [food] distribution would be successful on any given day.’ Now, Russell says, ‘work has been done to manage and secure situations [in countries] where aid is required, but it is still a very inexact science.’ Having known aid workers who were killed, she admits that some of the work she has done is ‘not for the faint-hearted and people who have nervous reactions to gunfire.’ Though Russell had never anticipated working in a war zone, she says, ‘I wanted to try it out and see what it was like…I did my best, it just didn’t suit me.’ She chose to go on to Russia in 1992, and worked in Moscow as distributing food manager for a couple years. She also wrote a proposal for food coming into Armenia after visiting the area of the 1988 earthquake. ‘It had been four years [since the earthquake] and nothing had been fixed at the epicenter,’ Russell says. ‘Everything was the same’the housing complex where people had died and the clock still on the time of the earthquake. People were living in big water pipes even in cold weather.’ Russell rejoined CARE in 1999, and worked as coordinator for Food Aid Management (FAM), the 16-member PVO consortium that programs USAID/FFP Title II food resources. FAM is a USAID/FFP-supported project, and CARE has served as the project holder for the consortium since FAM’s inception more than 15 years ago. (The FAM project will end September 15.) As FAM coordinator, Russell and her staff had the responsibility of coordinating/facilitating with FAM consortium members the implementation of strategies and activities related to improving and strengthening the Title II programs. ‘Mara [did] a remarkable job bringing together managers and staff from 17 disparate organizations to accomplish FAM’s work,’ said Bob Bell, Food Resource Director, on June 4, her last day of work. Having worked in food aid for almost two decades, Russell believes people ‘need to recognize more clearly that needs are changing constantly. There’s a growing recognition that there’s no such thing as a steady state’things improve and then get worse again. In some ways, what’s really challenging is the degree of resilience to which we’re able to respond to food emergencies, different kinds of disasters, droughts and civil strife.’ She says the main focus becomes, ‘How can we best develop systems to respond better and provide [these countries needing food aid] with the capacity to deal with these problems themselves.’ Mara Russell currently resides in Bethesda with her 10-year-old daughter, Rebecca.
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