Paige Alexander

Paige Alexander serves as chief executive officer of The Carter Center, a nonprofit organization founded in 1982 by the late U.S. President Jimmy Carter and the late First Lady Rosalynn Carter to advance peace and health worldwide. Alexander joined the Center in 2020. In her first year, she led the organization through the COVID-19 pandemic and a period of national social upheaval while charting a path forward for The Carter Center as it transitioned from a founder-led organization to one guided by its founders’ principles.

Under Alexander’s leadership, the Center has strengthened its core peace and health work and expanded into new areas, including global mental health, political polarization in the U.S., and the impacts of climate change on peace and public health. She has provided thought leadership on issues related to peace, health, and the nexus of the two, authoring essays and op-eds that have appeared in Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune, Financial Times, and CNN, and appearing on the BBC, National Public Radio, NBC, and other major outlets. Alexander presented a TEDWomen talk on the connection between human rights and access to information and a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution on the global rise of authoritarianism. She is the recipient of several awards, including Forbes’ “50 Over 50,” the Atlanta Business Chronicle’s “Most Admired CEO,” Georgia Trend Magazine’s “100 Most Influential Leaders,” and the NonProfit Times’ “Power & Influence Top 50.”

Before joining The Carter Center, Alexander spent more than two decades in global development across the government and nonprofit sectors. Between 1993 and 2001, she worked at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), covering missions and development programs for the Europe and Eurasia region, including immediate post-conflict work in the Balkans. Alexander returned to USAID in 2011 as a Presidential appointee to be assistant administrator for the Europe and Eurasia (E&E) Bureau. In 2015, she was Senate-confirmed to lead the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Bureau, overseeing 1,000 employees, programs in 12 countries, and more than $1.4 billion in annual funding.

Between her USAID assignments, Alexander was senior vice president and European founder/president of IREX, an international civil society, democracy, and education nonprofit. From 2017 until joining The Carter Center, she served as executive director of the European Cooperative for Rural Development (EUCORD) in Brussels and Amsterdam, working to bring sustainable, market-led solutions to marginalized farmers in Africa.

Earlier in her career, Alexander was associate director of Project Liberty at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and a consultant to institutions including the C.S. Mott Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Open Society Institute in Prague.

Alexander currently serves on the boards of the World Affairs Council of Atlanta and the U.S. Chapter of the Society for International Development and is a member of the American Academy of Diplomacy. She also serves on the Advisory Committee for Foreign Policy for America and the Board of Visitors for Agnes Scott College and is an advisory board member of several human rights organizations.