The Foreign Service Journal, October 2018

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2018 55 AFSA NEWS Summer and Fall Outreach Includes Baseball and California Visit The lazy days of summer and early fall did not slow AFSA’s outreach program- ming. Our Speakers Bureau events kept up the pace, including an appearance by retired FSO Julie Moyes at the Aurora Hills Senior Center in Arlington, Va., and Ambassador (ret.) Vern Penner at the Rotary Club of Tupper Lake, N.Y., where he spoke on “What the State Department Can Do for You.” Ambassador Penner is a diligent speaker, having met with over half a dozen Rotary Clubs alone in the past year, including in Annapolis, Md., and Bend, Ore. The AFSA Speakers Bureau team is also hard at work updating and refresh- ing available talking points and resources for speakers. Coming soon is a new set of talking points on the ben- efits of economic diplomacy, which AFSA will distribute to Speakers Bureau mem- bers early this fall. We also remind anyone speaking to public audiences that AFSA will happily supply a copy of our book, Inside a U.S. Embassy , upon request. The Speakers Bureau currently stands at 482 members. Will you be the 500th? Our educational outreach is also continuing—Septem- ber saw two Road Scholar programs in Washington, D.C., each of which included presentations by 10 mem- bers of the Foreign Service, as well as visits to the Foreign Service Institute and DACOR Bacon House. We thank the speakers at those programs—including Ambassadors (ret.) Charles Ford, Lino Gutierrez, Jimmy Kolker, Charles Ray and James Zumwalt—for their participation. As this issue hits your mailbox, AFSA President Ambassador Barbara Stephenson will be in Chautauqua, N.Y., with five other colleagues to speak at an AFSA-sponsored Road Scholar program with close to 200 participants. She is accompanied by Ambassadors (ret.) Shaun Donnelly, Robin Raphel, Charles Ray and Shari Vil- larosa. Ambassador Stephenson has also just returned from California, where she spoke at the Common- wealth Club of San Francisco and the San Diego Diplo- macy Council, as well as meet- ing with Foreign Service retiree The Speakers Bureau currently stands at 482 members. Will you be the 500th? groups in both cities. More in-depth coverage of this visit to the West Coast will be in the November issue of AFSA News. The largest outreach event of the last few weeks was the third annual Foreign Service Night at Nationals Park, where almost 600 members of the Foreign Ser- vice community gathered to watch the Nationals take on the Chicago Cubs. This was by far the largest crowd ever in attendance at FS Night. After a rain delay, Amb. Stephenson took the field for the Spirit Awards cer- emony. She was accompa- nied by Melanie Bowen and her children Dora and Jacob Bowen-Glazeroff, whose father Josh is currently serv- ing in Islamabad; Tameka Casselle and children Beni and Alyssa Casselle, whose father Lawrence is in Baghdad; and Eddie Salazar, director of the Diplomatic Courier Service, which is celebrating its centennial this year. AFSA was par- ticularly happy about the very strong showing from our couriers. Alas, after the second inning the game was postponed due to the very heavy rain. Watch for more photos in November’s AFSA News. n AFSA/DONNAGORMAN Spirit Award winners Tameka Casselle and her children Beni and Alyssa, whose father Lawrence is in Baghdad, on the field at Nationals Park.