Responsibilities
- This full-time position is pivotal in Ambassador Swanee Hunt’s personal and professional life. The work encompasses a wide range of home care and hospitality tasks, as well as non-professional preparation for appointments, meetings, and events. The personal assistant supports a Junior Administrative Assistant in a variety of ways, ensuring Ambassador Hunt’s commitments are carried out seamlessly and graciously. This position will liaise with all members of her team, as well as her family and guests.
Examples of Tasks
- General support
- Record-keeping as needed
- Deep and light cleaning
- Organizing of home and office
- Support for other staff during hosted events (from 2 to 100 guests)
- Pet care (e.g. veterinary visits, cage and litter boxes cleaning, feeding)
- Shopping (e.g. groceries, performance tickets, personal supplies), mostly online
- Plant care (e.g. watering, pruning)
- Wrapping, sending, and tracking packages
- Mail and phone messages management
- Occasional food prep
- Outside errands (e.g. dry-cleaning, take-out, medication)
- Clothes care (e.g. cleaning, steaming, and occasional mending)
Candidate requirements
The ideal candidate for this position should possess a diverse set of skills and qualities to effectively fulfil the role's demands.
- Understands, speaks, and writes English with ease
- Keeps confidences flawlessly
- Has strong organizational, time-management, and prioritization skills
- Is dynamic and multifaceted, appreciating a wide range of tasks.
- Maintains a professional demeanor in all interactions.
- Meets unforeseen challenges swiftly and resourcefully
- Thinks ahead to address the evolving needs of Ambassador Hunt.
- Is proficient in record-keeping and basic computer use (i.e. Word, Excel, Outlook).
About the principle (based on her induction to the National Women’s Hall of Fame)
Swanee Hunt is known globally as an author, diplomat, professor, philanthropist, and She began her civic work in Denver, where in 1981 she founded the Hunt Alternatives Fund. In its first decade, the Fund organized and gave millions to more than 600 neighborhood groups not being funded by larger foundations. Most were focused on poverty, race, mental health, homelessness, and battered women. Moving into systemic change, she led major related initiatives for two Denver mayors and the Governor of Colorado, plus co-creating a complex women’s foundation to help women and girls across the state increase financial independence.
In 1993, President Clinton appointed Hunt to a four-year term as Ambassador to Austria, where she brought together US leaders in government, business, and cultural with not only Austrians, but also a dozen Eastern European reeling from the implosion of communism. Her passion was former Yugoslavia, where she hosted successful negotiations between warring parties locked in a gruesome genocide of 150,000 people. In addition to endless advocacy and media targeting highest-level political, intelligence, and military leadership across Europe and Washington DC, as soon as the fighting stopped, she helped stabilize the ruined country with American trees for the denuded parks and start-up funds for women transforming brutality into businesses. She collected mountains of Austrian books for burned out libraries and a trainload of musical instruments for shelled schools.
The list continues. As a finale, Ambassador Hunt convened a three-day meeting she dubbed “Vital Voices: Women in Democracy -- 320 influential women from 36 European countries (east meets west). Keynoted, then adopted by Hillary Clinton (as First Lady, Senator, then Secretary of State), the thriving global NGO has now convened more than 20,000 world-changing women worldwide.
Leaving the State Department, Ambassador Hunt founded the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government where, as the Eleanor Roosevelt Lecturer in Public Policy, she has taught for more than 20 years. In addition to myriad student and research-oriented activities, she privately created the Institute of Inclusive Security. Outside the school, her teaching has extended to universities worldwide, and her former graduate students have organized thousands of peers in a professional global network.
Today, through her private foundation she has created programs to use arts as a road to higher education and exit from poverty; stop sex trafficking by stopping johns from buying; prevent war by leaning on policy shapers positioned to appoint women leaders to negotiating teams, break congressional gridlock by increasing the number of women – Republican and Democratic -- in the highest political US offices; and strengthen 64 leaders of massive social movements, from immigration reform to labor organizing to climate change.
Swanee Hunt has written four books, hundreds of opinion pieces, and three syndicated columns. She holds degrees in philosophy, psychology, religion, and a doctorate in theology. An exhibited photographer and composer, she is adept at tossing hay, climbing mountains, and rounding up 76 bison, 20 ducks, 16 chickens, 7 horses, 5 Highland cows, 4 turkeys, 2 alpacas, 1 parrot, 1 cat, 1 dog, 1 yak, too many coyotes, and 9 grandchildren.
Job Type: Full-time
Pay: From $25.00 per hour
Benefits:
- 401(k)
- 401(k) matching
- Dental insurance
- Employee assistance program
- Flexible schedule
- Health insurance
- Health savings account
- Life insurance
- Paid time off
- Parental leave
- Professional development assistance
- Tuition reimbursement
- Vision insurance
Schedule:
- 8 hour shift
- Choose your own hours
- Weekends as needed
Experience:
- Microsoft Excel: 1 year (Required)
- Microsoft Powerpoint: 1 year (Preferred)
Ability to Commute:
- Washington, DC 20008 (Required)
Ability to Relocate:
- Washington, DC 20008: Relocate before starting work (Preferred)
Work Location: In person