Going the Distance

Barbara Turner has carried U.S. aid across the globe.

Barbara Turner's four decades with the federal government embody perseverance, achievement and public service that would be hard to match in the private sector, especially in today's world of frequent career changes. She worked her way from the lowest rungs to the highest, and along the way made a big difference in people's lives.

During her years in government, Turner traversed a wide territory. As a young health officer in Egypt in the 1980s, she helped implement a new approach to fighting childhood disease, particularly dehydration caused by diarrhea. Today, oral rehydration therapy, which consists of giving parched children a solution of water, salt and sugar, is credited with saving countless lives. She helped pioneer the Agency for International Development's work in the former Soviet Union, educating the citizenry about free markets and property ownership. She led a mission to war-torn Sarajevo only six weeks after the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995. And recently, she helped promote the Global Development Alliance, which has matched up about $500 million in AID funds with $2.5 billion in private sector resources.

"Barbara is first and foremost a leader," says AID Administrator Andrew Natsios. "No single officer in the agency has had the impact she has had over the course of her career."

Turner, 57, began her government career 40 years ago as a part-time typing clerk on high school break in Northern Virginia. She was a GS-2. A job opened in 1966 at AID that was full time and offered a promotion, so she took it. She was struck by the influence U.S. assistance could have on people's lives. In 1974, she traveled to Afghanistan, where AID ran a large public health program. Mostly, she says, "I went to help." The seed was planted, and in 1977, Turner took her first leave from government to earn a public health degree at Johns Hopkins University.

Save for two relatively brief leaves of absence-one to earn the master's and then a two-year unpaid stint as a senior health adviser at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York-she stayed in government and steadily climbed the ranks. Most of that time was at AID, working on programs and in offices devoted to a range of foreign aid, and ending up in one of the highest positions at the agency. When she left AID and the federal government in July, she was the deputy assistant administrator in the Bureau for Policy and Program Coordination and a member of the Senior Executive Service.

"I think it's hard to have a better job than in government, where you really do have an opportunity to have a broad-reaching impact," she says. "Very few private sector jobs are going to offer you that."