On September 20th, 2016, Dr. Paul Robinson and Molly Short-Carr spoke to a group of over 300 people at the University Center Theater on the University of Montana campus about the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The Event was sponsored by the UM Department of Political Science, Montana Model UN, and Global Leadership Initiative.

It is education and it is awareness that you need to change things, and we don’t have a lot of time. – Dr. Paul Robinson

DR. PAUL ROBINSON

Paul was born in the Belgian Congo, a son of missionaries. As a boy he and his family fled from advancing Congolese rebel militias. He earned both an M.A. and Ph. D. from Northwestern University in African History. Paul then joined the faculty of St. Lawrence University, where for two decades he developed and led the university’s Kenya Semester Program. He also developed and led university initiatives in Africa and consulted on development programs addressing poverty and the HIV-AIDS crisis. In 1999, he joined the faculty of Wheaton College as director of the college’s Human Needs and Global Resources (HNGR) Program, where he served until his retirement in 2013. Paul became a founding member of the Congo Initiative and the Christian Bilingual University of Congo in 2003. He continues to be a founding member of CI’s General Assembly in Congo. 

MOLLY SHORT-CARR

Molly is the executive director of the newly established International Rescue Committee office in Missoula. A native of Buffalo, N.Y., Molly received a B.A. in political science and international relations from Canisius College in 2002 and an M.A. in organizational leadership from Medaille College in Buffalo in 2011. She will soon defend her Ph.D. dissertation in leadership and policy at Niagara University Graduate School. Molly has worked with refugees for almost 15 years. She was the executive director of Journey’s End, a mid-size non-profit serving refugees and Western New York, between 2008 and 2014. That year she moved to Nairobi, Kenya, to work for Church World Service, first as cultural orientation coordinator, facilitating the implementation of an English as a Second Language program in Rwanda and Tanzania. She then became deputy director of CWS, overseeing the human resources, finance, property, procurement, travel logistics, and information technology units. She has been with the IRC since July.

Dr. Paul Robinson’s Lecture Slides in Video Format