Veteran, humanitarian Rye Barcott to speak March 30

Rye Barcott, author of It Happened on the Way to War: A Marine’s Path to Peace, will present a lecture titled “Spark Change from Within” at 1 p.m. Wednesday, March 30, in Brown Hall Lounge.

Barcott co-founded the non-governmental organization Carolina for Kibera while he was an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

After graduation, he served in the U.S. Marine Corps for five years, deploying to Iraq, Bosnia and the Horn of Africa.

In his memoir, It Happened on the Way to War, Barcott explores the contrasts of community development in Africa and counter-insurgency in the Marines as they clashed and converged in his head and heart.

He recounts his experiences building and learning from leaders in unlikely places — from the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya, to the bomb-strewn streets of Fallujah and beyond. He shows the impact that small, diverse groups of committed people can have in the world.

Barcott earned master’s degrees in business and public administration from Harvard University, where he was a Reynolds Social Entrepreneurship Fellow, a George Leadership Fellow and a member of the Harvard Endowment’s Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility.

In 2006, ABC World News named then-Captain Barcott a “Person of the Year” for his dual service to Kibera and the Marine Corps. In 2009, he joined the inaugural class of TED Fellows. He currently works in the Sustainability Office at Duke Energy in Charlotte, N.C.

Barcott also will be at WUSTL to take part in the International Service and Higher Education Symposium March 30-April 1 at the Knight Center.

For more information, contact Monica Matthieu, PhD, research assistant professor at the Brown School, at (314) 935-7516.