Dear Friends:
I hope that this missive finds you all well. I don’t normally send holiday letters, but
the year 2015 promises to be a momentous one, and I wanted to share it with
each of you.
Since my retirement from the Foreign Service in 2012, I have
been actively involved with the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA),
mainly with AFSA’s Committee on the Foreign Service Profession and Ethics
(PEC), which I chaired from 2012 until the summer of 2014, and working with the
outreach staff in explaining the Foreign Service and foreign affairs issues to
audiences such as ROAD Scholars and others. I also served as the chair of the
AFSA working group that developed the Chief of Mission Guidelines in 2013.
I have throughout my career been intensely interested in
enhancing the Foreign Service as a career, and now in my retirement I have been
able to take an active part in efforts to achieve that. After careful thought,
I am now ready to take the next step, and am running for the position of Vice
President-Retirees on the AFSA Governing Board in 2015.
I ask your support in what will be a challenging race. Along
with nine other colleagues I am running as part of the Future Forward
AFSA slate. Any active duty or retired AFSA member of any foreign affairs
agency can vote.
For those of you who cannot vote, I ask your help in getting
the word out online
on Facebook or Twitter. You can also copy the Future Forward AFSA URL, http://www.futureforwardafsa.com/
and share it on other social media sites, such as LinkedIn and Tumblr.
The next couple of months will be busy, but I’m looking forward
to it, and with your help, I’ll be able to move my involvement to the next
level – to work with like-minded colleagues to build on AFSA’s strong record of
accomplishment and maintain it as an independent voice for the Foreign Service,
and to help build a Foreign Service that is capable of addressing our nation’s
most complex diplomatic challenges.
Sincerely,
Charles Ray
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