She was a new mom, weeks postpartum, when she got fired. No warning. No plan. Just a career she’d spent 18 years building — gone.

Kathleen Borgueta wasn’t supposed to become a founder. She was supposed to go back to work at USAID, where she’d overseen global health programs across 15 countries in East and Central Africa, managed COVID vaccine rollouts, and built cold chain infrastructure in Somalia. She had a plan for what kind of working mother she was going to be.

Then the dismantling started.

In this episode, Kathleen joins host Leah Petit to talk about what it really feels like to be fired, publicly called a villain, and left to rebuild your identity — while keeping a newborn alive. She also talks about what she built from the rubble: Pivoting Parents, a 1,200-member global community for laid-off parents refusing to disappear quietly.

This is a conversation about agency — in foreign aid, in motherhood, and in deciding what you do when the thing you built your life around is taken from you.

“There are a lot of days that hope feels false. But having a child and being invested in my community and invested in the global community forces me to have hope for the future.”

Follow Kathleen: LinkedIn, Instagram, and www.pivotingparents.com

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He was in the room when it happened.

Alex Natsios sat next to his father, Andrew Natsios — former USAID Administrator, war veteran, conservative Republican — for four and a half hours as members of Congress stood up one by one and repeated the same false claims about USAID. He watched them do it knowing they were false. He watched Fox News run graphics contradicting his father’s own words while he was still speaking.

That’s when Alex stopped holding back.

In this episode, Alex joins host Leah Petit to talk about what it felt like to witness the dismantling of USAID from the inside — sitting beside the man who helped build it. He shares how watching his father go “once more into the breach” at 75 years old pushed him to find his own way to fight back, and how the flood of misinformation led him to start Unsung Americans — a podcast dedicated to telling the real stories of aid workers on the ground.

This is a conversation about truth-telling, legacy, and what it costs when a country decides to stop believing in its own work.

“Our level of influence in the world was far more significant than even those of us who were very plugged in understood. And we’re all going to lose. America’s not gaining — we’re losing.”

Find Unsung Americans on YouTube or Linktr.ee

Making People Visible

This space exists to make room for more voices and perspectives from people who worked in global development, and to show why that work mattered in the United States and around the world.

Help us keep telling these stories.

Your support makes Global Development Interrupted possible.

What does food security really have to do with global stability and everyday life?

In this episode, I’m joined by Marian Ostertag, a former USAID Foreign Service Officer who spent her career working on agriculture and food security. Marian explains why effective development work focuses on long-term systems — food, markets, and institutions — so countries can withstand shocks without constant emergency aid.

We talk about how food systems connect far beyond borders, why global supply chains are more fragile than we like to admit, and how agriculture quietly underpins everything from economic resilience to security. Along the way, Marian breaks down why pigs can be a matter of national security, why Paraguay keeps coming up, and what’s lost when long-term development work disappears.

This is a grounded, thoughtful conversation about prevention over reaction, systems over short-term fixes, and why food stability matters far more than most of us realize.

Making People Visible

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Your support keeps Global Development Interrupted going and helps ensure these stories are told.