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Former President Jimmy Carter has a complex legacy from his time in the White House, but what he did after he left Washington D.C. might just be his most important work of all.
ATLANTA – More than four decades after opening its doors, the Carter Center continues to work to make the world a better place.
"We're not going to do anything that other people are doing well because it's being done," said Karin Ryan, a Carter Center senior policy advisor on Human Rights. "Let's pick the things that are hard."
Some of the difficult issues the Carter Center will continue to tackle are peace and human rights. It's something former President Jimmy Carter cared deeply about, and he received a Nobel Peace Prize for his work.
"He would always want to stand up for the hardest thing, Israel and Palestine, I mean, the hardest conflict in the world and he wanted to stand for peace and human rights for everyone," Ryan said.
It's a conflict that former President Carter devoted much of his life during and after the White House to solving, but peace was far from his only work. The man known as a globetrotting humanitarian had a big focus on global health.
"What was so interesting about the diseases that the Carter Center focused on is that they were the neglected diseases, but only affected the poorest of the poor," Ryan said.
One of those diseases is guinea worm, a crippling infection caused by a parasite when someone drinks contaminated water. The Carter Center says in 2023 there were just 14 reported human cases worldwide down from the millions of infections in the 1980s.
"He always wanted to go after the most forgotten, least of these," Ryan said. "This comes from his Christian belief that you have to stand with the least of these, the most vulnerable."
Even in death, Mr. Carter’s work is not done, and the Carter Center says their job now is to carry on the legacy he leaves behind.
"People want to honor him, and that's good, but what I know I can hear in my ear is that what he's going to expect from us is to elevate the work," Ryan said.
The Source: This article is based on original reporting by FOX 5’s Tyler Fingert.
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