Nov. 19: Karen Hanrahan Talks Human Rights

NOVEMBER 19, 2012

TODAY ON THE INKANDESCENT RADIO NETWORK

Our spotlight is on: Karen Hanrahan, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Human Rights and Democracy

Our hot topic: How can you become more empathetic?

Your host: Hope Katz Gibbs, publisher of Be Inkandescent magazine, and founder & president of The Inkandescent Group, LLC

On this episode of the Inkandescent Radio Show, host Hope Katz Gibbs interviews Karen Hanrahan, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Human Rights and Democracy for the Obama administration.

When it comes to defining what it means to be a Truly Amazing Woman, sometimes it’s the work a woman does—from running a multimillion-dollar business, and founding a philanthropic organization, to being a bestselling author or an internationally renowned artist. Sometimes it’s just who she is, what she has overcome, and the fact that she is willing and able to share those life lessons with the rest of us. Karen Hanrahan is a powerful combination of all of the above.

Hanrahan was appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor in August 2012. Hanrahan began her work under the Obama Administration working with Ambassador Richard Holbrooke as the U.S. Coordinator for International Assistance to Afghanistan and Pakistan. She went on to design and run the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (the QDDR) for Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. Ms. Hanrahan recently served as the Chief Innovation Officer for the UK Department for International Development (DFID), on detail assignment in London.

We met her back in the spring of 2008—before she had stepped into these top jobs. What has life been like in the last four years?

In this podcast, you’ll learn:

These positions are but many high-level jobs she has held in her illustrious career, which began after graduating with a Political Science and Journalism degree at Indiana University in 1992.
While in college, Hanrahan took the first steps along her path to work internationally when she spent a year abroad in Morocco, studying at the King Fahd Arabic Language School in Tangier, and the School of International Training in Rabat.
Hanrahan then got her MA in International Politics at American University in 1995; and in 2000 finished her Law degree—with honors and at the top 5 percent of her class—at the University of Washington School of Law in Seattle. While there, she was the Law Review editor and a research assistant for Professor Joan Fitzpatrick, a federal public defender who has written habeas corpus petitions for indefinitely detained immigrants, and an assistant mediator at the US Court of Appeals.
If that’s not impressive enough, Hanrahan capped her education with a degree from the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School in 2008.

It is our privilege to interview Hanrahan, who recently added a new title to her resume: Mom! She and her husband, Dean, a truly amazing man in his own right, are the proud parents to Jordan, now almost 2.