The Cox Foundation supports America’s Foreign Service in three principal areas:
Recruiting the best and the brightest individuals for the Foreign Service
- Funding to update job analysis and competency modeling is helping the FS identify new skills needed to the year 2017. This innovative look to the future affects recruitment, job classification and promotions.
- With support from the Cox Foundation, Career Diplomacy: Life and Work in the U.S. Foreign Service (Harry Kopp and Charles Gillespie, Georgetown University Press, 2008) offers prospective recruits and their families engaging, practical insight into the realities of a foreign service career, its challenges and rewards, past and present.
- In 2000 and 2006, the Foundation supported the Department of State’s efforts to improve and expedite the FS Officer employment process.
- “Profiles in Democracy: the U.S. Foreign Service,” a documentary made for TV in 1991, showed Americans, for the first time, the enormous value of the Foreign Service to this nation. This video, now available in DVD, continues to be in demand.
Enhancing retention through enriching professional opportunities
- Sabbatical leave fellowships enable select mid-level FS officers to pursue a variety of exciting projects, re-engage with America and return to service rejuvenated.
- Foundation support for the “War for Talent,” a study conducted by McKinsey and Company, a nationally recognized management consulting firm, helps the Department of State attract, develop and reward top-notch employees.
- Highly competitive awards for excellence in foreign language instruction at the Foreign Service Institute serve as valued incentives for its teachers.
- Funding workshops for training FS personnel in ISO-9000 process mapping of its administrative functions acted as a catalyst for ongoing reform of FS management functions worldwide, thereby boosting employee productivity and the Department of State’s customer service.
- Various new programs for spouses and dependents of Department of State personnel serving overseas include professional training, managed health networks, special education certificates and a children’s handbook.
Educating and stimulating the U.S. public to support adequately an effective U.S diplomacy.
- “Embassy of the Future,” a study with recommendations by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, addresses the tension between diplomacy that meets security needs yet also achieves effective outreach and advocacy (http://www.csis.org/media/csis/pubs/embassy_of_the_future.pdf).
- What must be done to support effective public, foreign assistance and reconstruction/stabilization diplomacy for the future? In-depth answers to this question, and recommendations, are in the “Foreign Affairs Budget for the Future” study, developed in 2008 by the American Academy of Diplomacy for federal executive and legislative leadership.
- A stimulating web-based course in U.S diplomacy (www.usdiplomacy.org), prepares those seeking FS positions, instructs U.S. government personnel engaged in foreign affairs and supports scholarship. Managed by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, the site also educates U.S. government employees, their dependents, students and the public at large about US diplomacy.
- Support for the initial design of a contemporary, interactive U.S. Diplomacy Center museum– the very first of more than 225 U.S. government-supported museums to focus on diplomacy -- is in the planning stages, with the Department of State.
- “The Advocacy of U.S. Interests Abroad,” a 1998 project of the Henry Stimson Center, chaired by then-Ambassador Frank Carlucci and funded by Cox and two other foundations, recommended various reforms used by successive Secretaries of State.
A 509(a)3 and 501(c)3 tax exempt foundation with its financial office in Texas, the Una Chapman Cox Foundation funds only those programs and activities that support its stated objectives. Generally, grants are to a U.S. public entity or to other 501(c)3 organizations.