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National Peace Corps Association > About Us > Board of Directors > Tony Barclay – Chair
Tony Barclay – Chair
Chair
Tony Barclay became Chair of the National Peace Corps Association’s Board of Directors in September 2011, after the 50th Anniversary celebration of the Peace Corps.
Currently, he is Adjunct Professor of Development Practice at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) and Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, where he teaches workshops that build practical management skills for development professionals. For 30 years, he was a senior executive at DAI, an employee-owned international development consulting firm, serving as CEO from 1999 to 2008. During his tenure, DAI grew from a boutique firm to a global company with annual revenues of $375 million and 2,500 employees working in more than 50 countries.
In 2009, with support from DAI, Tony created the Development Practitioners Forum, an initiative aimed at accelerating the diffusion of knowledge by creating connective tissue among practitioners working in different sectors, geographies, and institutions. The Forum pioneered an interactive online question-and-answer platform used by front-line practitioners in more than 80 countries, which is now managed by students in SIPA’s New Media Task Force.
Honored as Executive of the Year in the October 2008 Greater Washington Government Contractor Awards ceremony, Tony has had a long career as a global development professional. He served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in western Kenya in the late 1960s, and returned there for his Ph.D. research in anthropology on the impact of a large-scale sugar project. After a two-year assignment on a United Nations study of the African sugar industry, he joined DAI’s development consulting staff in 1977. He moved into a senior management role in 1979, as the firm commenced a period of rapid growth; became DAI’s President in 1990; and succeeded the founding CEO in 1999. In January 2009, fulfilling DAI’s internal succession plan, he passed the CEO’s duties to a long-time DAI colleague, James Boomgard.
Tony has been a recognized leader in the foreign assistance community for more than 20 years. He has testified in Congressional hearings as chair of the International Development Task Force of the Professional Services Council, and served on the executive committee of the PSC’s board for five years. He was a founding board member of the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition; is a past President of the Washington Chapter of the Society for International Development; and served for two terms on the board of the Corporate Council on Africa.
Currently, he is chairman of the board of Social & Scientific Systems, Inc., an employee-owned public health research firm; a nonexecutive director of DAI; a member of the National Peace Corps Association’s Advisory Council; a trustee of The Mountain Institute; and an advisory board member of the Development Executive Group (devex.com) and Clean Engines, Inc.
Tony received a BA in History from Yale University in 1967, and an MPhil (1976) and PhD (1977) in Applied Anthropology from Teachers College, Columbia University.
