James F. Thompson

Jim Thompson currently serves as a Director for Partnerships & Innovation at the National Security Staff at The White House. He is overseeing an inter-agency policy committee on partnerships, establishing a White House Council on Homeland Security Partnerships,^[1] and developing an internal best practices guide for partnering. Jim is the former Deputy Special Representative for Global Partnerships in the Office of the Secretary of State's Global Partnership Initiative.^[2] He is the former Acting Director for the Department of State’s Global Partnership Center and is responsible for leading a team in building new public private partnerships (PPP) at State, directing the PPP knowledge management programs, training of State PPP practitioners, and conducting outreach to corporations and foundations. Mr. Thompson is spearheading the fund raising for the Secretary's Global Equality Fund,^[3] and assisting with partnerships on the U.S. Water Partnership.

Biography

Thompson is also the former Acting Director of the Global Development Alliance (GDA) at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). In this role, he led the creation of the new Global Framework agreements for USAID, and built relationships with The Starbucks Coffee Company, Rotary International and Seaboard Corporation. He also led a team in the formation of the Collaboration Agreement, which is a new partnership vehicle at USAID. Thompson joined the GDA in 2004 and redesigned the Alliance Builder training curriculum, which is now regarded as one of the best training experiences at USAID. He was GDA’s primary facilitator for training, conducting Alliance Builder training sessions in Washington, at individual USAID Missions, and at regional training conferences around the world.

As a USAID Food for Peace Officer between 1996–1998 and 2001–2004, he served as Washington’s liaison to the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), writing policy recommendations for U.S. Government interventions and representing the U.S. Government at WFP executive board sessions in Rome. He rewrote the Food for Peace monetization field manual in 1998 and conducted monetization field workshops in Guatemala, Haiti, Kenya, and Washington. In the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch, Thompson served on USAID’s Disaster Area Relief Team in Guatemala and oversaw the determination of the appropriate food aid response.

While serving in the USAID Bureau for Europe & Eurasia from 1998–2001, he redesigned USAID’s Cognizant Technical Officer (CTO) government contract management training program and delivered over 20 week-long training courses, in Washington, Hungary and El Salvador.

Thompson served as a Contracting Officer for five years, working with USAID’s Europe and Eurasia Bureau and for the Global Health Bureau. Additionally, he successfully helped to re-engineer the criteria for the National Institute of Health’s Contractor Performance Review system shared by all of the civilian federal agencies.

Before joining USAID, he worked as a Contract Specialist at the United States Department of Energy, where he managed a $500 million sales program of oil from the Naval Petroleum Reserves.

Thompson has a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Relations from St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. He earned a Master of Arts degree in Political Studies on a Rotary Graduate Fellowship at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He is a resident of the District of Columbia, where he lives with his husband of 17 years and their two children.

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