Dear Mr. President: We Need a Strategy and New Legislation for U.S. Global Development

What do EBay, Episcopal Relief and Development, and Levi Strauss & Co. have in common?  They (and more than 200 other prominent organizations and individuals) are calling on President Obama to create the first-ever U.S. global development strategy and to rewrite the outdated 1961 Foreign Assistance Act with Congress.The open letter, which appears in Politico today, includes signatures from members of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN), businesses, non-profits, development practitioners and former government and military officials. They applaud the president’s G8 announcement on a  “New Approach to Advancing Development” and the Feed the Future and global health initiatives.  But the signatories urge President Obama to create a strategy to give coherence to U.S. development efforts that are currently spread across more than two dozen U.S. government agencies.  They also call for the administration to work with Congress to create a foreign assistance act for the 21^st century.Check out the open letter here and add your name to the letter!