The unstoppable Molly Rossi

Molly Rossi, ’16, was 10 years old the first time she left the United States.

Rossi and her mother flew to Northern Ireland as part of a church mission trip. For 30 years, the region had been marred by street fighting, bombings, and sniper attacks as Protestant unionists and Roman Catholic nationalists fought over whether to remain with the United Kingdom or become part of the Republic of Ireland. While the Good Friday Agreement brought an end to the hostilities in 1998, Rossi said she could still feel the effects in the region when she arrived six years later.

“There was this intense poverty,” Rossi said, “and it was the first time I came face-to-face with people suffering around the world. It was a transformative experience.”

Rossi came home with a burgeoning curiosity about the wider world — an interest she believed made her stand out in her hometown of Franklin, Tennessee, a suburb of Nashville. While many of her friends and family members sought the familiarity of home, she had a growing desire to see and experience as many countries and cultures as possible.

Rossi’s great-aunt Alice Kinnare was the only person she knew who showed interests and drive similar to hers. Kinnare was one of the first women to serve in the Foreign Service in the 1940s and 1950s. As a child, Rossi loved to listen to the stories of her tours in Rome, Hong Kong, and Thailand.

“She was a single woman, living [abroad] in places like Rome and Hong Kong,” Rossi said. “It was unheard of at the time.”

Otherwise, Rossi had few examples to follow. Her parents were surprised when she signed up for Model United Nations, but role-playing a UN delegate opened her eyes to the possibility of a career in international relations. And when she decided to attend the University of Richmond — after searching for the best international studies programs and earning the Boatwright Scholarship — her friends wondered why she wasn’t joining most of her graduating class at the University of Tennessee. She was, she believes, the first student from her high school ever to apply to the University of Richmond.

Rossi always trusted that there was a bigger story about the world around her — and she’s never stopped searching for it. It’s a journey that has taken her to study international law at The Hague, to greet Afghan refugees arriving in D.C., and to spend a year living in Kazakhstan.

Nearly a decade after traveling to Ireland, Rossi went abroad for the second time. It was March 2013, and she was in her second semester at Richmond. She and 10 students and staff members spent Spring Break in Poland as part of the Chaplaincy’s Pilgrimage program. Together, they explored the history of Judaism and Catholicism in the country, the conditions that led to the Holocaust, and the lasting trauma among the Polish community.

Standing on the freezing streets of Warsaw and the snowy fields of the Majdanek concentration camp, she could see the lingering remnants of World War II and the Holocaust — as well as the citizens who were continuing to reconcile and rebuild 70 years later.

“For anyone who cares about making the world better, I think there’s a moment when you see human suffering for the first time and you have this impulse to help,” she said. “Seeing it firsthand in Poland, it opened up this well for me. I could see that [genocide] is still happening today. I had this earnest enthusiasm to fix the world, to change it.”

That same semester, Rossi was enrolled in a history and storytelling seminar with former Richmond president Edward L. Ayers. In it, she learned how to tell the story of the Civil War and slavery with a human connection, as well as the importance of representation and remembering.

Learning about the stories underpinning these two moments in history — the Holocaust and the Civil War — was pivotal, she said, to beginning to understand where her own story might lead.

Her exploration continued the following year when Rossi signed up for the Sophomore Scholars in Residence course Stories of Work, Life and Fulfillment. Taught by Scott Johnson, associate professor of communication studies, the yearlong living-learning course encourages students to interrogate questions, like “What should I do?” and “What do success, happiness, and failure mean?” and “What can I do — inside and out of class — with the six semesters I have left?”

The class also traveled to London over Spring Break to meet with alumni whose careers had taken them overseas.

“It seemed like a really great opportunity to expand students’ minds and get them to say, ‘I could live somewhere else,’” Johnson said. “One of the things I get students thinking about is, how are we shaping our own stories? Adolescence and early adulthood is when students start to see themselves as crafting a story.”

As Rossi considered the questions posed by Johnson, she knew an international studies major was too narrow for her. Instead, the threads of humanity and storytelling and repairing the world that had long piqued her interest began to intertwine, and she started to see a future in humanitarian work. No major offered precisely the path she envisioned, so Rossi created her own: an interdisciplinary major in cross-cultural communications. 

She designed a course of study, drawing from English, literature, anthropology, history and politics. The bespoke program culminated in a senior honors thesis project in which Rossi explored the emerging mental health services crisis on college campuses and made the case for using theater to help students address trauma.

“She was able to see patterns that other students and folks at UR weren’t necessarily seeing,” said English professor Elizabeth Outka, who oversaw Rossi’s project. “And she had the mental dexterity to zoom out to see the big picture and zoom in to see the details.”

Rossi also took every opportunity to experience the wider world and find her way to make it better, incorporating travel to multiple countries into her academics throughout her time at Richmond. She honed her Spanish language skills in Seville, Spain, and worked as an editorial intern with Italian Academy Foundation in Rome. Thanks to a connection she made with an alumnus in London, she landed an internship with the ONE Campaign in Washington, D.C. And her junior year, she spent a semester studying international criminal law at The Hague.

It all came together a year after graduation, when Rossi landed a position with U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a government agency that provides humanitarian assistance and invests in sustainable development around the world. The role marked a first step towards her eventual dream job: telling stories about and across cultures.

“Everyone kept asking why I created this major, and why I didn’t just study international relations,” she said. “But cross-cultural communications has been my entire career. Nothing could have served me better.”

At 3 a.m. on a December morning in 2022, Rossi landed in Almaty, Kazakhstan. After nearly six years with USAID, she was assigned to the agency’s Regional Mission for Central Asia. She spent most of the next year telling the story of the international development agency’s efforts to promote human rights and freedom across Central Asia.

Her job with USAID had previously taken her into the field in Kenya, Rwanda, and Djibouti, but this was her first time in Central Asia. Rossi says those first early morning hours in Kazakhstan were “jarring.”

“All of the signs were in Cyrillic,” she said. “We were driving to my apartment for the first time, and I didn’t know if the storefront we passed was a grocery store, a pharmacy, or a shoe store.”

“And the culture is as opposite of Franklin, Tennessee, as you could ever imagine.”

In Kazakhstan, she said, people don’t make eye contact with, smile at, or greet unknown passersby. But Rossi said it helped that she understood some of the roots of what she perceived as coldness. While in Poland, she had learned how the end of World War II bled into the start the Cold War, which continued throughout the Soviet Union until 1989. The extended occupation and conflict left Kazakh citizens reserved and hardened.

She also had experience navigating those differences. She had been with USAID for six years in a variety of communications roles — many of which focused on explaining to congressional leaders the impact of U.S. foreign aid around the world.

Her work coincided with several critical moments in international aid. Rossi helped communicate USAID’s involvement in the Rohingya refugee crisis in Myanmar and spent two years helping lead the communications pillar of the agency’s Covid-19 Task Force, including the U.S.’s monumental effort to provide more than half a billion vaccine doses in more than 120 countries. She wrote talking points for the White House press secretary when Covid reached a crisis point in India and helped write the remarks delivered by Vice President Kamala Harris at the 2021 Gavi global vaccine summit. When the U.S. military left Afghanistan and hundreds of refugees crammed into planes bound for Washington Dulles International Airport, Rossi was waiting at its expo center to register them and direct them to cots and food.

In Almaty, as the senior development outreach and communications coordinator for Central Asia, she was tasked with sharing USAID’s story with the people of Kazakhstan and neighboring Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. This meant navigating rivalries among the countries, communicating on state-run media, and understanding Russia’s influence in the region. Sometimes, she had to decide whether it was more important to communicate in Russian, which is used across all five countries, or take on the time-consuming effort of translating messages into local languages.

“I learned that a story that resonates in Kazakhstan is not going to do the same in Kyrgyzstan,” she says. “The countries have different cultures, histories, and religions — but they also have a lot of shared history and culture. We wanted to tap into that identity because the more Central Asia is divided, the more vulnerable it is to outside influences.”

When Rossi completed her assignment in Kazakhstan in October 2023, she moved back to her Tennessee hometown to await her next USAID assignment. She considered returning to D.C., transitioning to a partner organization that works in the field, or following in the footsteps of her great-aunt.

“I got a firsthand look at Foreign Service life,” she said, “and I was still uncertain about it.”

A former colleague from USAID’s Asia Bureau reached out about the congressional relations lead position at the International Monetary Fund.

Unlike USAID — which largely employs American citizens and deploys them around the world — Rossi and her former USAID colleague are the only two Americans in their division at IMF. Rossi is tasked with explaining the value of IMF to congressional leaders to secure funding for the international financial institution.

“The U.S. holds a 17% share of the IMF, so we’re the largest financial contributor,” she said. “It gives the U.S. veto power over everything. They need me to bring a domestic U.S. perspective.

“I have to tell the story of our work to different audiences in a way that taps into empathy and shows the value of foreign aid.”

To make the story of IMF relatable, she often looks to her experience growing up in Franklin, Tennessee. She thinks about how to explain the role of foreign aid to a neighbor who’s known her since childhood but isn’t familiar with the intricacies and nuances of the State Department. She considers how she would tell her grandmother what the IMF does and why it’s important.

It’s not always an easy sell, especially in a polarized political climate with a divided Congress, but she has found ways to break through. She said the IMF’s origin story — as an organization founded in the wake of the Great Depression, World War II, and massive inflation in Europe — makes a compelling case that upheaval in one country can ripple out to the rest of the world.

“When I’m trying to tell our story to a senator, I start with how the IMF was a bipartisan effort that has lasted to this day,” she said. “And that it’s important that we use taxpayer dollars on this because we know that financial instability anywhere in the world affects all of us. In countries experiencing poverty and conflict, we’re trying to get in there early.”

Those wins also give her hope in a time when the world’s problems feel intractable, the solutions stymied.

“There are moments when it feels too big, [when I wonder] if any of this is making a difference,” she says. “But at the end of the day, it’s truly my passion. If I can use my perspective or my way of storytelling or relate to people to help do this work, that feels amazing.”