Remembering Chris Stevens

This site has been set up by the family of Chris Stevens to capture the memories of people touched by Chris, far and near. To share a private message with Chris's family, please send an email to [email protected]. To share a story or memory with the world, please click here. Chris had a passion for building bridges between the peoples of the Middle East, North Africa, and the United States. In this spirit, a fund was established in his name to support this important, yet unfinished, endeavor. Individuals from around the world contributed to the J. Christopher Stevens Fund, and the funds were granted to partners committed to carrying out the work Chris began. The Fund closed in early 2016, but the work of the Fund continues. To learn more about this work, or to make additional contributions, please see: The J. Christopher Stevens Virtual Exchange Initiative, hosted by the Aspen Institute The Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens Symposium Fund at Hastings College The Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens Program for Middle Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley The Peace Corps Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens Memorial Fund, hosted by the Peace Corps

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Chris Stevens Memorial Lecture Peace Building Mural

Conflict is Inevitable, Violence is Not The 3rd biennial Ambassador Chris Stevens Memorial lecture took place on March 1, 2017 in the Karen Hille Phillips Center…

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After ambassador died in Benghazi, sister honors him through Seattle medical-exchange project

With the help of a private endowment, Christopher Stevens' sister, pediatric rheumatologist Anne Stevens, is bringing pediatric residents from Kenya to work in Seattle’s global-health community.

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The J. Christopher Stevens Fund Final Report

Dear Friends and Family,

Thank you for your generous support of the J. Christopher Stevens Fund.  To honor the life and work of Chris, the JCS Fund was established in September 2012 to support activities that build bridges between the people of the United States and the people of the Middle East and North Africa. The JCS Fund seeded programs that promote cross-cultural understanding, educational youth exchanges, Middle Eastern and North African scholarship, and other people-to-people activities.  With the support of the JCS Fund, every program now hosts a dedicated memorial fund in Chris’s name, so that his life may continue to educate and inspire.

We completed all grant-making earlier this year and have now closed the JCS Fund to additional donations. We have also shut down the www.jcsfund.org website. This note serves as our final report to all JCS Fund donors. We welcome you to continue to work with us to build bridges through the projects described below. Project updates and other news will continue to be posted on www.rememberingchrisstevens.com.  

None of this would have been possible without your generosity, your optimism, or your belief in our ability to come together as a global community and turn a tragedy into hope. Thank you.

Sincerely,

The JCS Fund Advisory Board

Mary Commanday, Jan Stevens, Jennifer Butte-Dahl, Dana Lung, Anne Stevens

UC Hastings College of the Law: Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens Symposium Fund

Hosted by Chris’s law school alma mater, this fund supports annual symposia with an emphasis on law and public policy as used in practice to advance global understanding and peace. To date, the following three symposia have been held, with another planned for Spring 2017.

2015-2016:   “America’s role in a Changing Middle East and a Changing World”

Featuring Ambassador William J. Burns, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

2014-2015:  Law, Politics, and Policy in the Greater Middle East

Featuring Ambassador R. Nicholas Burns, Sultan of Oman Professor of the Practice of International Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Mr. Robert Worth, Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, contributor to the New York Times Magazine.

2013-2014:  The Arab Spring and the Future of U.S. Diplomacy

Featuring Professor Beth Van Schaack, Professor Catherine Powell, Professor Jane Stromseth, Professor Asli Bâli, Professor Sujit Choudhry, Professor Clark Lombardi, Ambassador James Jeffrey, Ambassador Ronald E. Neumann, Ambassador Thomas A. Shannon, Jr.

Peace Corps Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens Memorial Fund

Contributions to this fund support Peace Corps volunteers to develop community-initiated and volunteer-led projects that build bridges between young people globally.

UC Berkeley Center for Middle Eastern Studies Stevens Scholar Program

Hosted at Chris’s undergraduate alma mater, this fund is dedicated to deepening and extending knowledge of the Middle East and North Africa, particularly in the areas of culture, language, politics, and history. It was announced on the one-year anniversary of Chris’s death. The fund supports research and travel by graduate and undergraduate students who demonstrate a high level of distinction in Middle Eastern Studies.

Middle Eastern Studies (MES) Scholarships granted to date:

2015-2016

•    Ph.D. candidate, Development Economics: "Public Infrastructure-building in Kurdish Majority Regions in Turkey," Diyarbakir, Turkey

•    Sophomore, Political Science: Mideast Wire Tunisia Exchange Program, Tunis, Tunisia

•    Senior, Middle Eastern Studies (MES): Thesis research on art as subversion in the United Arab Emirates, Sharjah, UAE

•    Ph.D. student, Anthropology, "Dissent and Authority in the Modern Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt," Cairo, Egypt

•    Senior, MES: Thesis research on Islamic State, Amman, Jordan and Erbil, Iraq

•    Senior, Political Economy: Jordanian foreign fighters in the Islamic State, Amman, Jordan

2014-2015

•    Senior, MES: Intensive Arabic Study, American University in Beirut

•    Ph.D. candidate, City and Regional Planning: “Decentering politics: peripheral urbanization and the remaking of class relations in Tunisia," Tunis, Tunisia

The UC Berkeley Center for Middle Eastern Studies recently received an additional grant to establish the Chris Stevens Global Ambassadors Program. These funds were provided by the Stevens Initiative, described below.

The Stevens Initiative

The Stevens Initiative is a multilateral public-private partnership designed to increase people-to-people exchanges between youth in the United States and the Middle East and North Africa. A central component of this initiative is called virtual exchange, which works by using technology to empower young people from different cultures to participate in a kind of global classroom, where they regularly exchange ideas, work on projects together, and develop relationships built on mutual respect.

Through virtual exchange programs, Syrian refugee students in public high schools in Jordan can meet with young people in Kentucky and New York via real-time facilitated, video conferences to collaborate on projects about their identities and values, and to help tackle complex global challenges together.

The Stevens Initiative is housed at the Aspen Institute and is a collaboration between the J. Christopher Stevens Fund, the U.S. Department of State, the Bezos Family Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the governments of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Algeria and Morocco, and Microsoft, Mozilla, and GoPro.

The Stevens Initiative successfully completed its first awards competition in 2016, which resulted in a total investment of $5 million to 10 awardees connecting over 23,000 students in the United States (25 states) and the Middle East and North Africa (covering 17 countries) using virtual exchange.

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Chris Stevens’s Family: Don’t Blame Hillary Clinton for Benghazi - The New Yorker

A conversation with the sister of Ambassador Stevens, who was killed in the Benghazi attack, about the new report from the House Committee’s long investigation.

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Chris Stevens was everything America could want in an ambassador, as the whole country has come to see — how he first went to the region as a young man in the Peace Corps, how during the revolution, he arrived in Libya on that cargo ship, how he believed in Libya and its people and how they loved him back. …I also think of the Libyans who took to the streets with homemade signs expressing their gratitude to an American who believed in what we could achieve together. I think of the man in Benghazi with his sign in English, a message he wanted all of us to hear that said, “Chris Stevens was a friend to all Libyans. Chris Stevens was a friend.

U.S. President Barack Obama

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Chris Stevens was a true son of the West, who hiked and jogged and danced his way through the hills and forests of northern California. He loved the “cool, refreshing fog” of the Bay Area, the sight of the Golden Gate Bridge, and the embrace of his family. He shared the restless soul of the frontier. His mother liked to say he had sand in his shoes. Always moving, running, working, seeking out new challenges and adventures. From the beginning, there was music in Chris’s life. The son of a cellist, Chris himself played the saxophone. Friends in Jerusalem remember his passion for Palestinian songs… he would serenade them in Arabic. A young Foreign Service Officer who was with him in Libya marveled at Chris’s appetite for history and culture. He stayed up late reading old memoirs of former Libyan leaders and delighted in sharing obscure historical trivia and cracking jokes not just in Arabic, but in the local dialect. Other colleagues remember his endless patience and talent for listening. Chris understood not just the science of diplomacy but the art of it. …Chris found his second home amid the shifting deserts and crowded cities of the Middle East. He climbed the Atlas Mountains, wandered through Syrian souks, and jogged through Libyan olive groves. When the second intifada erupted while Chris was stationed in Jerusalem, the only place he wanted to be was on the streets of the West Bank. That winter, during a rare snowstorm, Chris and a young colleague drew Palestinians and Israeli border guards into a spontaneous snowball romp. A moment of “common ground” amid so much violence.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

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Chris believed in the value of each person’s story.

Anne Stevens

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Official Biography Endorsed by the Family of Chris Stevens

John Christopher, “Chris,” Stevens was born in 1960 in Grass Valley, California, to Mary F. Stevens (Commanday) and Jan S. Stevens, both members of a family of teachers and public servants.  His early years were spent in Marin County, hiking, camping, and playing tennis with his parents and sister, Anne, and brother, Tom.  The family later moved to Davis and, in 1975, to Piedmont, where Chris attended Piedmont High school, Class of 1978.  He was editor of the school newspaper, played on the tennis team, played the saxophone, and performed in the school’s music & theatrical performances.  In the summer of his junior year in high school, Chris was accepted to the American Field Service home exchange program in Spain, since he had studied Spanish.  This experience ignited his interest in travel and foreign languages.

At UC Berkeley, where Chris majored in History, Class of 1982, he studied French and then spent a semester in Perugia learning Italian.  Entering the Peace Corps after graduation, he was sent, because of his knowledge of French, to Morocco, where the Peace Corps required a beginning course in Arabic.  He was then sent into the Atlas Mountains, a Berber region, to teach English from 1982 to 1985.  On his return to the U.S., Chris attended the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, in San Francisco, Class of 1989, serving as a member of the Law Review.  After passing the California Bar examination, he worked for two years in international trade law at the firm of Pillsbury, Madison and Sutro.

Chris’ career in the Foreign Service began in 1991.  Since he spoke Arabic, the State Department sent him to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia as a Consular/Economic Officer.  He next served as Special Assistant to the Under Secretary for Political Affairs, as Iran Desk Officer, and as Staff Assistant in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, before being posted as Consular/Political Officer in the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.  His next two posts were as Political Officer in Damascus, Syria, and Deputy Principal Officer and Political Section Chief in Jerusalem, where he served for three years.  From 2006 to 2007, he was a Pearson Fellow with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  From 2007 to 2009, when the United States resumed relations with Libya, Chris served as the Deputy Chief of Mission and as chargé d’affaires in Tripoli, Libya.  During this time, he worked on the rebuilding of the U.S. Embassy, which subsequently was vacated during the Libyan insurgency.

He then returned to Washington, D.C., and after a year’s study at the National Defense University, National War College, he received an M.S. degree in History, specializing in national security studies.  From there, he was appointed Director of the Office of Multilateral Nuclear and Security Affairs, but shortly afterward, because of his familiarity with Libya’s government and other, non-governmental persons, he was appointed the American Envoy to the Libyan Transitional National Council in Benghazi, during the insurgency, from March 2011 to November 2011.  After the fall of the Qadhafi government, he was nominated to be the U.S. Ambassador to Libya and was confirmed in May 2012.  He returned to Tripoli to rebuild the American Embassy, which had been destroyed in the insurgency.  He was enthusiastic about the opportunity to help launch a new, democratic government in Libya.

In early September 2012, after attending a friend’s wedding in Stockholm and a conference in Stuttgart, Chris returned to the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli.  On September 11, 2012, he traveled to the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi to inaugurate a cultural exchange center.  That night, the mission was attacked by terrorists.  Chris was overcome by smoke inhalation from fires set in the building and a ring of fire set around it.  The Libyans who later found him there took him to the local hospital, where he died shortly afterward.

Chris’ body was flown to Tripoli and subsequently to Washington, D.C., where it, and those of three other Americans killed with him, was received by President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a formal military service at Andrews Air Force Base.

His ashes were later taken to California, where they are interred at the foothills of the Sierras with his Stevens ancestors.

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The Work of the JSC Fund In The News

Stevens Initiative Announces 10 Awards to Fund International Virtual Exchange (Apr 2016)

Building Virtual Bridges (Apr 2016)

A Lasting Legacy for Ambassador Chris Stevens (Apr 2016)

Remarks by President Obama at the Summit on Countering Violent Extremism (Feb 2015)

Vice President Biden Launches J. Christopher Stevens Initiative (Nov 2014)

Remarks by VP Biden to the Global Entrepreneurship Summit (Nov 2014)

White House Global Entrepreneurship Fact Sheet (Nov 2014)

Joint Communique - U.S.-Algeria Strategic Dialogue (Apr 2014)

The Real eHarmony (Feb 2014)

Joint Statement by the United States and the Kingdom of Morocco (Nov 2013)

Family of Slain U.S. Ambassador Announces UC Berkeley Fund (Sep 2013)

Fund Honors U.S. Ambassador Stevens on One-Year Anniversary of His Death (Sep 2013)

Chris Stevens' Father: Carry On His Good Work (Jun 2013)

Why We Need A Million More Chris Stevens And How We Can Get Them (Nov 2012)

Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens Symposium Fund Established at UC Hastings (Oct 2012) 

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I have thought of your family so often and have wanted to reach out and express my condolences. I cannot fathom your loss.  Chris was a remarkable person. I worked with him in Saudi Arabia. I was the director of the US Refugee Program after the first Gulf war. Chris was one of the very few in the Embassy who embraced the program and engaged with the Iragi refugees. At the time, the refugee program and the fact that Saudi was host to Iraqi refugees was a very sensitive issue. There were many in the embassy who kept their distance since engagement with the program and the refugees was seen as a potential liability. Chris, on other hand, embraced the refugees and seemed to welcome the opportunity to visit the refugee camps. I have some great photos of him surrounded by smiling refugee kids who appreciated the fact that he paid attention to them (and spoke Arabic).  Chris was genuine, warm, fun loving and from my vantage point, fearless. His decision making was based on what was right, not what was expedient or political. I am so sorry for your loss.  

Sincerely,  Ellen Dumesnil Executive Director International Institute of the Bay Area (IIBA) 

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sad

I’ve been following Mr. Steven’s story, and passing, and as a young american, have never been affected more by anyone’s story more than his. I had never heard of him until the attack, but his humanity and devotion to the American people and all of the world has made me become in awe of him. I’m so sorry for your loss, and can’t express enough what his life has meant to people everywhere. I’m just saddened his life could not have been longer.

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Letter to the Editor

October 23, 2015 - 2:22 am

Daily Republic, Fairfield CA

Ambassador Chris Stevens was the consummate gentleman and "perfetto diplomatico" (perfect diplomat). I had the privilege of calling him my best friend in high school and college. He and I attended Piedmont High and UC Berkeley together. We took Professor Muir's Political Science class together and talked about what it takes for peace. He made the ultimate sacrifice as an American. He brought his California education and World wide experience along with his family (including American Indian) traditions with him to North Africa, a place he loved. I will forever be proud. My thoughts and his really best friends and family are found at the web site "rememberingchrisstevens.com" His legacy is an international scholarship program that I urge you to support. Daily Republic staff: Thank you for your consideration. Mark Kropp, MD

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Memorial Prayer

Chris' name was included in a memorial prayer I requested at The Greek Orthodox Church of the Hampons yesterday. May his memory be eternal.

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Rest in Peace, Ace

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April 25 Fundraiser to support the Stevens Scholar Program at UC Berkeley

The Stevens Scholar Program, established at Ambassador Chris Stevens’ alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley, is dedicated to deepening and extending knowledge of the Middle East and North Africa, particularly in the areas of culture, language, politics, and history.  The program supports research and travel by graduate and undergraduate students who demonstrate a high level of distinction in Middle Eastern Studies, and was launched following an initial gift from the J. Christopher Stevens Fund, established by the Stevens/Commanday family.  The Berkeley Center for Middle Eastern Studies will award the first student grants in early 2015. 

Friends and family of Chris Stevens are organizing a fundraiser for the Stevens Scholar Program, Saturday April 25, 2015. The day starts at 9 am with a golf tournament at Tilden Golf Course, and concludes with a 6 pm reception at UC Berkeley’s International House.  The evening will include inspiring presentations by Middle East and North Africa experts, remarks by this year’s first student Stevens Scholars, and a silent auction.  

To confirm your attendance, please make a contribution to the WORDS AND DEEDS project fund (a non-profit fund established to support this event).  All proceeds, after costs, will be donated to the Stevens Scholar Program at UC Berkeley.

Golf Tournament Only – Donation $150

Reception Only – Donation $125

Golf and Reception - $225

Please make your check payable to “Words and Deeds” and send it, along with your name, postal and email addresses and contact phone number, to: WORDS AND DEEDS, C/O Steven McDonald, 714 3rd Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94118 

Please consider making an additional contribution (suggested amount $15) to sponsor student attendance.

We thank Chris’s fraternity Alpha Tau Omega, and his mother, aunt, and cousin’s sorority, Alpha Gamma Delta: Omicron Chapter, for organizing the fundraiser. For more information please contact Steve McDonald [email protected].  

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The Stevens Initiative

A fitting tribute, announced today in Morocco by U.S. Vice President Biden at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit.

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"Achieve The Honorable"

Photos from the Piedmont High School Library showing the newly completed entrance and display case.  The library was dedicated to Ambassador Chris Stevens in September 2013.  

http://www.contracostatimes.com/my-town/ci_24124945/piedmont-high-school-library-dedicated-ambassador-chris-stevens