Ambassador Craig A. Kelly
Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary
Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs
Inaugural Speech
International Conference on Philanthropy and the Non-Profit Sector
October 15, 2008

Thank you, Mr. Governor.  It’s a pleasure and honor for me to be here in your great state of Nuevo Leon, in the dynamic and bustling city of Monterrey.  I think Monterrey is a perfect venue for this Mexican-American event, because with this region’s strong economic, cultural and personal ties to the United States – as exemplified by the hundreds of regiomontanos who hold season tickets for the Dallas Cowboys or the San Antonio Spurs – Monterrey, and the state of Nuevo Leon, act as a bridge uniting Mexico and the United States.  With its strong business and philanthropic community, Monterrey is uniquely positioned to serve as a model for how civil society can be a powerful force for positive change for all sectors of society.

Thank you also to the National Council for Community and Education Partnerships in Mexico, NCCEP Mexico, for putting this conference together.  For the past decade, NCCEP has been bringing people together, first in the United States and since 2005 in Mexico also, to improve educational opportunity for everyone, with a focus on low-income children and young adults.  NCCEP’s mission can perhaps be summarized in one word:  partnership.  NCCEP works in and with communities.  It includes everyone in those communities who is interested in expanding educational opportunity:  parents, businesses, universities and schools, government agencies, foundations and community-based NGOs.

Here in Monterrey, NCCEP and the U.S. Consulate General, under Consul General Bruce Williamson, saw an opportunity to hold this meeting and increase the momentum here in Mexico for what we in the U.S. State Department call the positive agenda for the Americas.  Because the positive agenda’s heart and soul is also partnership: working together with everyone who wants to contribute to a better future for the people of the hemisphere.  Today more than ever, the United States is working with partners throughout the hemisphere to invest in people – through improved education and training, health care, access to capital, economic opportunity and better security for people’s families and property.  As Secretary Rice said at the Council of the Americas meeting in May, “[The] different countries [in this hemisphere] represent many different traditions and many different cultures.  But we are defining a common future, a common future grounded in common values:  freedom and equality, human dignity and social justice.”

It’s important also to underline that this positive agenda has to do with people.   It’s not about governments, although governments are involved.  It’s about providing people with tools they need to improve their lives and realize their goals.  It’s about promoting social justice for all citizens – fighting poverty, and giving people access to a decent education and health care.  It’s about giving all citizens access to economic opportunity and social mobility, fueled by economic growth and fair and free trade. When all is said and done, the positive agenda is about delivering the benefits of democracy to people.  This means democracy not only in the political sense, but also democracy in its social and economic sense.  The positive agenda is about working toward societies in which, as my colleague Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon said, “[everyone has access to the fruits of prosperity and everyone] feels they are part of a larger national project.  In this sense the positive agenda is really about inclusion.  It’s about inviting people to participate more broadly in their societies.” 

As you can see, the positive agenda is an ambitious one.  It involves partnership for the benefit of people.  And we will continue to work with our partner governments throughout the hemisphere, such as the government of Mexico, to advance this agenda.  But as I said earlier, governments cannot be the only players involved in this work.  In order for this vision to become a reality for more people, we need the contributions, the expertise, the commitment of civil society -- faith-based groups, business, foundations, and community organizations at the grassroots.

It was this idea of partnering with civil society, and doing so on a hemispheric level, that was the motivating force behind the White House Conference on the Americas, held in Washington DC in July 2007 and hosted by President Bush.  This conference brought people from private organizations (NGOs), businesses, foundations, and faith-based groups together to share experiences and best practices, to generate ideas and form networks in order better to be able to improve people’s lives in their communities and their countries.  The people we brought together were from throughout the hemisphere – from Chile and Argentina to Mexico, the United States and Canada.  In fact, one of the panelists from the White House conference, Viviane Alegria of the Coca Cola Foundation in Mexico City, will be a speaker at this conference as well.

The White House Conference participants were a very diverse group, but the work of most of them involved one or more of three areas of endeavor that are central to the positive agenda:  improving education, promoting economic development and advancing health care.

And although most of the participants in the White House meeting were not government representatives, it was most certainly in the interest of the United States government, of the President of the United States, to host this conference.  Why?  Because it is in the interest of every country in this hemisphere that people are able to live decent lives and flourish in our common neighborhood.  And we all need to work together to make that happen more often and in more places.  That’s why U.S. diplomacy in the hemisphere has become larger than just diplomacy between states; it is really between and among peoples.  We are all neighbors in our common hemisphere, and the better the lives are of the family down the street, the better our own lives will be.

In this sense of building a diplomacy between and among peoples, one of the greatest accomplishments of the White House conference, as seen from the perspective of the United States, was to bring together Americans with people from other countries who work in similar fields.  So that we in our country could begin to benefit more from the expertise and experience of our neighbors in other countries, and so that we could begin in earnest to build a stronger sense of neighborhood -- and neighborliness -- throughout the hemisphere. 

And in my view, this meeting that is beginning today, here in Monterrey, is an example of the positive agenda in action, and a big step forward in the process of making the vision of the White House conference a reality.  This event is bringing together committed Mexicans and Americans from all walks of life to get to know each other, to form partnerships in common fields of endeavor, and to unlock more fully the potential of business, foundations and private philanthropy to help improve people’s lives – and this not only in Monterrey or northeastern Mexico, but throughout the United States and Mexico.

Let me step back for a moment and make a few observations that I believe are important for me to say as a representative of the United States government, who is sharing this platform with Governor Jose Natividad Gonzalez Paras and who will be followed in the course of this gathering by several distinguished representatives of the Government of Mexico.  The positive agenda for the hemisphere that this conference exemplifies involves private citizens taking leadership roles, sometimes alongside government, sometimes without government involvement, to build a better life for people in their communities.  But there is a crucial role for government, and that role is demonstrated by several of the common initiatives that the U.S. and Mexico are pursuing together.   Government is needed for three principal and critical tasks:  To provide a free, democratic polity within which people can participate in public life and exercise their rights as free persons; to uphold a free and fair marketplace in which economic opportunity is open to all; and to guarantee an orderly and reliable rule of law in which people can go about their lives without being threatened by organized crime and lawless violence.

The government of the United States and the government of Mexico, under the courageous leadership of President Felipe Calderon, are working as closely together as they ever have to ensure that our governments can better deliver these fundamental benefits to our peoples.  I’d like to mention three examples of that, that I believe are particularly worthy of your attention and support as leaders of business and philanthropy.  First, on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly just a few weeks ago in New York, President Felipe Calderon, President George Bush and counterparts from 10 other governments in the hemisphere officially launched the Pathways to Prosperity in the Americas Initiative.  This initiative seeks not only to consolidate what we have accomplished through free trade, but also to begin a broader dialogue about how we can ensure that the benefits of trade liberalization are broadly shared throughout our societies – how we can make sure that everyone in our societies can take advantage of the economic growth created by trade.  An important component of the Pathways to Prosperity Initiative is to engage the private sector and civil society in our search to increase the benefits of trade and share them more broadly.  So many of you – right here in this audience -- may well be hearing from us.

A second key common initiative of Mexico and the United States – and the Central American countries – is the Merida Initiative.  We know that organized crime and trafficking of drugs and arms across our borders is a problem that the United States, Mexico and the Central American countries share.  And organized crime is a growing blight that we need to address together.   Mexican authorities have reported that drug-related crime has taken the lives of thousands of people during the last two years.  President Calderon has shown tremendous courage and dedication in bringing the fight to the powerful drug cartels who are attempting to threaten the very rule of law in Mexico.  The Merida Initiative is a response to this crisis.  It establishes a solid partnership among the United States, Mexico and Central America to stop drug-related crime and the trafficking of drugs across international borders.   This year, the United States has dedicated $400 million to help Mexico in our common fight against this scourge, as a part of a three-year plan involving $1.5 billion for secure communications systems, community action programs, helicopters and surveillance aircraft, nonintrusive inspection equipment and more – all with the goal of dramatically reducing drug trafficking and violence on both sides of our border.  Without security, without a reliable rule of law that keeps people safe from organized crime and violence, we will not be able to continue moving forward with our positive agenda for the hemisphere.  President Calderon is determined to defeat organized crime, and the United States stands with him in this struggle.  I know that you, as civil society leaders from both countries, support this effort as well.

Finally, I must emphasize the importance of the Summit of the Americas.  The Summit is the only forum, other than the Organization of American States, where all 34 electoral democracies of the Western Hemisphere meet to represent their values and shape the future of our region.  The United States and Mexico have an established history of working with our Summit partners to address the region’s most pressing concerns, including terrorism, drugs, human trafficking, HIV/AIDS, education, international labor standards, infrastructure investment, and small and medium-sized business lending.  We hope to carry this partnership forward into the Fifth Summit of the Americas to be held in Trinidad and Tobago in April 2009, where leaders of the Western Hemisphere will meet to discuss how to improve the lives of their citizens in accordance with the Summit pillars:  Human Prosperity, Energy Security, and Environmental Sustainability.  Although the Summit process is not perfect, we must not concede this forum to others in the Hemisphere who would eagerly jump in to fill any void we might leave by abandoning it.  We recognize that it is really our Summit partners in the multilateral banks and the private sector that are the keys to implementation.  A strong private sector component is crucial, and Trinidad and Tobago are working with the OAS to ensure that both the private sector and civil society are fully engaged in the process.

The challenges that we face are enormous.  We’ve got a lot of work to do.  And we need to tackle it together.  This conference is an important part of that work before us – the work of building a safe, democratic and prosperous neighborhood in this hemisphere.  I laud your dedication and commitment, and I am honored to be a part of this gathering.  Thank you, Mr. Governor, for your kind invitation and for your leadership and foresight in supporting this effort.   Thank you to NCCEP for your creativity and dedication – for your vision of better schools for all, and for the innovative work you are doing to realize that vision.  Your efforts exemplify what we all want for the hemisphere – a positive agenda built upon broad-based partnership.  Thank you also to the government of Mexico, represented here by the Secretaria de Educacion, the Secretaria de Desarrollo Social and the Secretaria de Salud, for being a valued partner in advancing the positive agenda we share for the hemisphere.

Finally, let me close by again commending all of you in attendance for your participation.  Together, we can give of that which we’ve been given – our talents, our resources, our hands and our hearts – in order to make our corner of the world a better place for everyone.