Pompton Lakes parishioner honored for CRS international peace and development work

BRIDGET BUCARDO RIVERA

POMPTON LAKES  Imagine leaving all the comforts of home behind to travel to a foreign land and help the world’s poor and vulnerable. For many, it would be a tough challenge, but for Bridget Bucardo Rivera, a parishioner of St. Mary’s here, it was a dream come true to be making a difference in the world working with Catholic Relief Services (CRS), the U.S. Catholic Church’s official international humanitarian aid agency.

Because of her work with CRS, Rivera was recently chosen as the recipient of Fordham University’s prestigious Swanstrom-Baerwald Award, which recognizes outstanding individuals who have made significant contributions to the service of faith through the promotion of international peace and development. Fordham is a private Jesuit-run university in the Bronx, N.Y.

Her journey with CRS began when she learned about the organization’s mission as an undergraduate student at Villanova University, Pa., operated by the Augustian order. She had a number of professors and courses that really changed the way she saw the world. One professor who had a significant impact on her was Dr. Suzanne Toton (now retired) in Villanova’s theology department. “She helped me understand how my Catholic faith and the principles of Catholic Social Teaching were deeply connected to issues of global poverty and injustice,” said Rivera. “Dr. Toton, together with Villanova University, forged one of the first university partnerships with CRS. I was fortunate enough to be a part of that work with her and when I learned of the work of CRS, I thought — this is what I want to do with my life.”

In 2009, her first professional experience with CRS came as an intern with the organization. She was graduating with her master’s degree from Fordham University’s International Political Economy and Development (IPED) program. She received the International Peace and Development Travel Scholar­ship, which is awarded to students in good academic standing and gives them the opportunity to serve overseas for six months with CRS upon graduating from the IPED program. Dr. Henry Schwalbenberg, director of Fordham’s IPED program, had fostered a strong partnership with CRS over the years and was instrumental in establishing this scholarship program for students.

Just as she was graduating from the IPED program, Rivera said, “My husband and I learned I’d received the scholarship. I remember him saying to me — ‘We need to go or you will always be left wondering. You can’t miss this opportunity to do what you’ve always dreamed of doing.’”

With that support, Rivera, along with her husband and three-year-old daughter, left New Jersey and headed to El Salvador for the six-month internship not knowing what to expect. Rivera said, “We wound up staying overseas with CRS for nearly eight years living in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Zambia (in southern Africa). We loved every minute of it.”

In El Salvador, Rivera’s work focused largely supporting rural women and youth in participating in Savings and Internal Lending Communities, or SILC, a savings-led microfinance approach and a key programming area within the work of CRS. Microfinance helps poor households to form groups, pool their savings, and make loans to each other. This approach has created economic opportunities for more than 3.2 million people who live in the world’s most impoverished areas.

After completing her fellowship in El Salvador, she and her family headed about 250 miles southeast in Central America to Nicaragua to work formally with CRS as an International Development Fellow. There, she supported CRS’ local partners in disaster risk reduction and helped CRS secure a multi-million-dollar USAID grant to enhance the livelihoods of smallholder farmers. While in Nicaragua, she was also called in to briefly support CRS’ response to the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Serving with the team in the region, she said, “I’ll never forget the privilege I had of working alongside CRS’ incredible emergency response team there, who would get up at 4 a.m. to deliver food rations to families in displacement camps and sleeping alongside them in tents on hotel grounds, since no structure was safe enough to sleep in at that time.”

In 2012, Rivera and her family moved to southern Africa when she accepted a position with CRS Zambia. There she led a diverse team of CRS and partner staff to secure funding for numerous new programs, including a $10 million CDC grant to provide care and treatment for people living with HIV and AIDS (PLHIV) and a $10 million USAID grant to support the nutrition and agricultural livelihoods of rural Zambian communities. Her proudest achievement in Zambia, she told The Beacon, was accompanying a local faith-based organization providing HIV care and treatment to the most rural areas of Zambia to win their first $1 million direct grant from CDC.

After three years in Zambia, Rivera, who is fluent in Spanish, moved back to Latin America, accepting a position with CRS’ Latin America Regional Office. In this role, she oversaw the successful submission of more than 50 funding proposals each year to expand the work of CRS and partners in rural agriculture, literacy and school feeding, youth livelihoods, and emergency response. During this time, she worked with CRS teams in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, the Dominican Repub­lic, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia, and went back to Haiti numerous times to support the relief work of CRS there, including the aid response to Hurricane Matthew in 2016.

In 2018, Rivera shifted to a global position as part of the Partnership and Capacity Strengthening Unit. In this role, she supports country programs across the world to live out the agency’s commitment to partnership and local leadership through effective capacity strengthening of local partners, including faith-based organi­zations, civil society organizations, and government. Rivera now serves as CRS’ Senior Technical Advisor for Capacity Strengthening. She is part of the Program Impact and Quality Assurance (PIQA) Department within Overseas Operations.

While she attributes Dr. Toton and Dr. Schwalbenberg for having had a significant role in her work with CRS, she notes that her mother was also a great inspiration. “My mother always taught me that to have faith and to love is to give of yourself freely and generously; that when you give in this way, you are blessed and you will find joy and purpose in life. Similarly, my husband has taught me not to be afraid to venture out in life. When deciding on whether to accept the position with CRS in Zambia, I was unsure. I remember him saying to me, ‘Why not go? If we don’t like it, we can always come back.’ It turned out to be the adventure of our lives. In fact, my entrepreneurial husband opened the only Latin restaurant in the country while we were there, which was great fun.”

On being honored by Fordham and serving with CRS for over a decade, Rivera said, “I am deeply humbled to receive this award because working for CRS is one of the greatest privileges of my life and Fordham University laid that path to CRS for me. The Fordham University IPED program has a strong relationship with CRS and supported me to gain my initial professional experience with CRS through their International Travel Scholarship program. So coming back to Fordham to celebrate this partnership and the work of CRS around the world feels like a full circle moment to me.”

She now lives in northern New Jersey with her husband and two children.