You are invited to hear Stephen Berlinguette speak on March 8 after the service. Stephen Berlinguette is a career international development specialist who has spent over 20 years managing economic and social development portfolios in some of the world’s most complex environments. From 2010 to 2025, he served as a United States Foreign Service Officer with the USAID, overseeing American foreign assistance programs to deliver poverty reduction, stabilization, education, health, and community development impacts overseas.

His work has spanned the globe: facilitating investments for smallholder farms in post-genocide Rwanda; building roads and expanding electricity in Liberia, where less than 10% of the population had power; and modernizing higher education institutions, supporting persons with disabilities, and cleaning up Agent Orange contamination in Vietnam. In Pakistan, he led massive partnerships in renewable energy to stabilize border regions with Afghanistan while launching new initiatives to expand the economic participation of the country’s women entrepreneurs.

Stephen arrived at his last overseas posting in Morocco in February 2025 to lead initiatives in earthquake recovery and youth empowerment shortly before the directive to dissolve USAID was issued. He holds a Master of Arts in International Economics from The Johns Hopkins University SAIS and is the author of Operation Làm Quen: Motorcycling Rural Vietnam, One Landing Zone at a Time, a historical travelogue that documents his search for forgotten battlefields and the pulse of rural life while motorcycling through the country’s rural interior. He is currently in graduate school to pursue a second career as an autism therapist. He brings a firsthand perspective to the discussion on the legacy of U.S. development and the human costs from the loss of USAID.