Making a Difference in the Lives of Immigrants and Others who Send Money Abroad

Ed note: This has been cross-posted from the consumerfinance.gov blog.

Over my years of public service, I’ve met a lot of hard-working people who regularly send money transfers, or remittances, to family members and others abroad. Remittances from the U.S. to other parts of the world total in the tens of billions of dollars each year.

Remittance senders are a diverse group from every income bracket. We know that some remittance senders work in the lowest paying jobs for the longest hours. For them, every dollar counts; for their families abroad, every one of these dollars has even more significance. Remittance senders also include consumers paying bills abroad, and mothers and fathers sending funds to their children studying abroad or family members on travel.

Champions of Change are Rebuilding America

The work we do in government cannot be done without our partners. Whether we're investing in safety, road repair, or regional transit solutions, the team using those funds must be responsible and innovative to ensure we get the most bang for our buck. And when those funds are designed to help stimulate a flagging economy--as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act intended--getting the most from our investments is even more critical.

Throughout our ARRA grant making activity, DOT has been very fortunate to have the kind of capable partners these important investments demanded. And I'm pleased that, yesterday, the White House honored several of them as Champions of Change.

These leaders are creating jobs in their communities and using innovative techniques to develop valuable projects to improve America’s infrastructure, build roads and bridges, expand high-speed broadband, provide clean water and energy, and much more.

With the assistance of grants and loans from the Obama Administration's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the transportation leaders I met yesterday have delivered tremendous benefits to their communities:

• Justin Augustine is Chief Executive Officer of the Regional Transit Authority in New Orleans, which is currently engaged in the Loyola Avenue streetcar expansion.
• Dr. Jana Davis is Associate Executive Director and Chief Scientist of the Chesapeake Bay Trust. The Trust has advocated effectively for a Green Streets approach to managing storm water runoff.
• Paulson Chaco is Director of the Navajo Division of Transportation occupying a cabinet level position to the President of the Navajo Nation. He is responsible for 18,000 miles of roadway, 15,000 of which are unpaved and very susceptible to weather conditions.
• Henry Perahia is Chief Bridge Officer of the New York City Department of Transportation. He manages 787 city-owned bridges and tunnels.
• Sam E. Swan is Project Manager for the DFW Connector Project; this project has used an innovative design-build approach to unsnarl a complex tangle of traffic coming and going from the nation's eighth busiest airport.

With Paulson Chaco, Henry Perahia, and Sam Swan

Each of them has written on whitehouse.gov about the changes they worked so hard to achieve, and I encourage you to read about their terrific projects. The challenge will be figuring out where to jump in.

Now, as much as we need good partners to get the biggest bang for our buck, without the Obama Administration's ARRA investments, there wouldn't have been any bang at all.

The budget the President proposed this week will ensure that federal investments in transportation continue in a predictable way for the next six years. The certainty offered by a long-term bill is precisely what America's transportation leaders--like the Champions of Change I met yesterday--need to plan confidently for tomorrow's infrastructure and begin putting our friends and neighbors back to work today.

Ray LaHood is the US Secretary of Transportation.

Rebuilding a Network, Redefining a Community

Leaders are often bestowed awards to honor the efforts and success of the organizations they lead.  Today, I accept the recognition of Champion of Change for all of the dedicated staff at Merit Network who have been hard at work for the past two years to ensure that Michigan will have the necessary cyber infrastructure to thrive in the 21^st century.

When I joined Merit as President and CEO in 2006, I joined an organization with a great lineage as the longest-running Research and Education Network in America.  From our humble beginnings in 1966 as a vehicle to exchange research data between Michigan’s major universities, to our pioneering role implementing and managing the NSFNET in the late 1980s, the precursor to the modern Internet you and I know today, Merit has made significant contributions to Internet networking in America.  And over time, Merit Network has grown into a membership organization, serving the advanced networking needs of community anchor institutions (higher education, schools, libraries, health care, public safety and government) across Michigan. 

Early in my tenure at Merit, it became clear there were many Merit Member’s in rural and remote regions of the state that were underserved with regard to Internet resources.   In serving these Members, Merit took on a challenge that did not exist in other more populated, metropolitan regions of the state.  This was largely due to a lack of backhaul infrastructure in these areas.  The fact that so many of our Member organizations and community anchors throughout the state faced challenges obtaining adequate service, helped Merit formulate a vision for a brighter future for Michigan.