This coming Martin Luther King, Jr. Day will coincide with our country's most important ritual: the peaceful transition of power from one president to the next. At noon, a new Administration will be tasked with tackling significant challenges, many of which threaten the ideals of justice, freedom, and human dignity that Dr. King fought for.
When he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, Dr. King proclaimed: "I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history."
Today, we remember those words and draw strength from them as we find our own abiding and audacious faith in the future.
Our faith must be abiding because the kind of work we do at USAID inevitably takes time and comes with setbacks. When you're taking on hunger, disease, poverty, oppression, and conflict, progress doesn't come easily or all at once. It requires deep-seated belief in the impact and importance of the small differences we make every day. The trajectory of development progress in the past half-century has proven that over time, these small steps can lead to massive improvements in people's lives.
We must also be audacious, because quickly evolving challenges require quickly evolving solutions. And over the past few years, I have been amazed by the people across our teams who, on issue after issue, manage to pioneer new ideas to meet the moment, transforming the way we work at USAID to make us more responsive, more efficient, and more catalytic in everything we do, and securing lasting results for communities around the world. I hope you will continue to find the audacity to cast aside "the way it has always been done" and strive for even more substantial and enduring progress across our work.
This coming Monday, let all of us remember Dr. King's example and renew our faith in the possibility of a more just, peaceful, and prosperous world.
