Anne C. Richard is the IRC’s former vice president of Government Relations and Advocacy. A committed and passionate leader within the community of aid agencies in Washington, D.C., Ms. Richard has spoken out on behalf of refugees, the displaced and other victims of conflict to senior government and United Nations officials in Washington and around the world. Her areas of expertise include foreign aid, U.S. foreign policy and Congress, U.S. funding for international programs, civilian-military issues, and crisis response. She has visited IRC programs in Liberia, Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Burma, Thailand, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Jordan, Syria, Haiti and many U.S. cities.

Ms. Richard worked at senior levels of the United States government for 17 years, becoming an expert on foreign aid and resources for international programs, before joining the IRC in 2004. She worked as the chief adviser for budget and planning for then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright from 1999 to 2001. She also served as the deputy chief financial officer of the Peace Corps. After leaving government service in 2001, she lived in Paris, where she wrote and consulted about international aid for think tanks, the private sector, and international organizations, including the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). She has been a non-resident fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations at SAIS/The Johns Hopkins University since 2003. 

A graduate of Georgetown University, Ms. Richard has given testimony to Congress several times and published articles and op-ed pieces in the International Herald Tribune, The Huffington Post, theglobalist.com and Politico.com. She has also written a number of longer academic articles, including on aid to the U.S. after Hurricane Katrina and on the U.K.’s foreign aid program. She has appeared on broadcasts of the BBC, Fox News, Bloomberg Television, Al-Jazeera (English) and National Public Radio.