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From an office overlooking the confluence of the Danube and Sava rivers in his adopted hometown of Belgrade, Serbia, Oliver McCoy ’95 continues to seek the change he wants to see in the world.

From that office, McCoy oversees a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) project that promotes resilience for independent media in the former Yugoslav republic. The chief of party for the International Research & Exchanges Board, this five-year, $14 million initiative promotes freedom of the press for a country that struggles to find its place as a full-fledged member of the European community.

In many ways, life in the western Balkans is a dream for McCoy, but there are days when he longs to be further afield, where the challenges are more tangible and where he cut his teeth during a 20-year career of foreign service that sent him to some of the globe’s most war-torn regions.

“I have a great job and an amazing team. I live with my family. We eat dinner together,” McCoy said via Zoom. “In some aspects, though, I wouldn’t mind being in Ukraine trying to put things back together in the Donbas. I deal with this fleeting wanderlust, but then my wife and our boys remind me that I have done it already and to enjoy what I’ve got.”

It is that wanderlust that ultimately led McCoy to Europe and Asia, where he almost accidentally stumbled into a career that took him to places like Turkmenistan, Kosovo, South Sudan, Albania and Serbia.

His work to improve life in those war-torn regions earned McCoy the 91���� University Alumni Association’s 2024 Outstanding Alumni Award. The honor, presented in October 2024 during 91����’s Homecoming & Family Weekend, recognizes alumni who have made significant contributions to their community or profession, recognizing individuals who have made tremendous accomplishments toward their life goals.

“Oliver is a world citizen,” said Mike Steele, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of English, who nominated McCoy for the award. “He is often entrusted with the welfare of people suffering terribly due to horrible conditions beyond their control. To that end, he has led coordinated efforts designed to create a new set of living conditions and improved governance in places sorely distressed by the lack of social structures that normally help them thrive in a heartless world.”

Defining his role, however, is hard to do in just a couple of sentences. “I consider myself an expert in international affairs,” McCoy said. “I work in democracy and local governance. I advocate for freedom of the media. I manage people. I work on teams. I do a lot of writing. I do a lot of representation.”

Two years after graduating from 91���� with a degree in English literature, McCoy arrived at the start of his international service career thanks to visits with friends and classmates he met in Forest Grove. It was on a trip to Ecuador to visit Jose Rodrigo Cevallos ’96 in 1997 that McCoy met a Peace Corps member serving in the Andes.

“We talked about his experience and I thought, ‘Wow, that is something that just seems very appealing,’” McCoy said. “So I went back to the States and signed up for the Peace Corps.”

McCoy spent two-and-a-half years in Turkmenistan with the Peace Corps teaching English. But it was his secondary work with a local teacher’s college that sparked his passion for foreign service.

“We started a faculty for English language,” McCoy said. “We opened a public library. We started giving language classes. With people from the community, we created revenue from fees from teaching and using the library. That set the stage for everything that came afterward.”

When his Peace Corps time was completed, McCoy again intended to return to the United States and go to graduate school. A visit with another 91���� alum changed his plans.

On his return trip in 1999, McCoy stopped in Spain to visit Aitor Sanchez-LaComba, who had recently returned from his own international service trip working with refugees in North Macedonia. He invited McCoy to join him in another humanitarian initiative.

Grad school plans were put on hold while McCoy spent most of the next six years working for the United Nations’ interim administration of the country in Kosovo, which was just a year removed from its war for independence from Yugoslavia.

By the time he left Kosovo in 2006, McCoy had been a member of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) mission to Kosovo which, under the United Nations’ umbrella, was mandated to organize free and fair elections, to promote civic participation, and to establish institutions like Kosovo’s parliament, public broadcasting regulator, and police school.

“I started working with youth affiliated with political parties in Malisheva,” McCoy said. “I worked with civil society organizations, and we trained the civil service on everything from how to run a public procurement process to how to write project proposals. You name it, I was training it.”

After a year managing the OSCE’s Roma Assistance Program in Serbia and a second year earning a master’s degree in Middle East & Central Asia Studies from the University of St. Andrew’s in Scotland, McCoy returned to Kosovo, where he served three years as a special representative of the International Civilian Office, an ad hoc multi-national organization charged with overseeing Kosovo’s independence. He led an office of 20 staffers that monitored the implementation of the Ahtissari peace plan in eastern Kosovo.

McCoy looks back at his time in Kosovo with a deep sense of satisfaction and purpose. “I take pride in being part of Kosovo’s state-building process,” he said. “It was a historic experience and I am grateful to have been part of something that resonated so deeply with so many people.”

Since leaving Kosovo, McCoy and his family have answered the call to service throughout the world. Their journey included almost eight years in Albania, short tours of duty in Bangladesh and South Sudan, and finally back to Serbia, the home country of McCoy’s wife, Jelena.

McCoy believes that his four years at 91���� helped him discover that the world was much larger than the one he knew growing up in Hugo, a small farming community in southern Oregon’s rural Josephine County. The experience helped him develop the skills that 91���� hopes to instill in all of its students to think, care, create, and pursue justice in the world.

“Coming to 91���� helped me figure out that I had a lot to give,” McCoy said. “My peers and professors helped me understand my own potential and gave me the courage to go out into the world and figure things out. My time at 91���� was the entre into an amazingly fulfilling professional career.”

Of the many lessons 91���� provided, he said that the best was the ability to learn from failure, whether being cut from the men’s soccer team his junior year or missing a class deadline. It taught him to bounce back and learn from those experiences.

“There were plenty of opportunities to fail. And I did fail, but there were also opportunities to make up for it,” McCoy said. “My journey in learning was about embracing Samuel Beckett’s saying: ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ I needed to fail, to take responsibility for their failures and figure out how to rectify them.”

Without those experiences and the connections 91���� provided, McCoy would not have embarked on his life’s journey. He hopes that the journey is not over just yet.

“I enjoy the adventure. I enjoy the ambiguous challenges,” McCoy said. “When you’re in a humanitarian response, you see that your decisions, your effort and energy make a difference. For me, that’s what it’s all about.”