Van Credle, Senior Lead Program Volunteer
Federal Workers for Democracy (she/her)

Van Credle is an international democracy practitioner, with lived experience operating in challenging political environments overseas. She worked at the US Agency for International Development and partnering nonprofits, providing program design and organizational learning expertise to promote human rights through community-led programs.

Van’s experience ranges from work on the Solidarity Center’s Global Labor Program to the Tides Foundation supported Innovation for Change Network of human and civil rights activists across the world, all through a lens that the people most impacted by the challenge should drive their own solutions.

Quickly after USAID was dismantled in January 2025, Van collaborated with colleagues and networks to train former federal workers on public narrative, organizing, and collective action to raise public awareness about how this administration would operate, starting with illegally dismantling USAID, violating the authority of Congress. She has since worked to weave global democracy and peacebuilding experts into the existing US civil rights and community movement, including federal workers, to build power towards a renewed American democracy.

Van holds an M.A. in Economics and Development Program Management from The Catholic University of America, where her thesis project was an impact‑evaluation design for a civil society peacebuilding project in Yemen.