Elizabeth “Betsy” Marcotte
Senior Vice President, U.S. Government Business Unit | betsy_marcotte@dai.com
Betsy Marcotte thought she had retired for good in 2004 when she said goodbye to her colleagues at PA Consulting. That year, she and her husband cycled across the United States, from Yorktown, Virginia to Astoria, Oregon. It took them 83 days. She was looking forward to similar adventures in her “golden years.”
It turned out Betsy’s best years and greatest adventures were indeed ahead of her, but not in retirement. The day after she retired, she got a call from a senior executive at DAI. “Are you bored yet?” he asked. The calls continued all through the year. By 2005, Betsy had signed on with DAI. Bike rides to Astoria were out, plane rides to Kabul and Kinshasa were in.
Her first role at DAI was to head up our agriculture and natural resources practices, a fitting assignment given her decades of consulting in the environmental arena, initially for domestic clients such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and eventually on the international stage, where she led energy and environmental projects for the U.S. Agency for International Development and multilateral lending institutions.
In 2008, she was appointed Senior Vice President for Operations, leading DAI’s technical service areas, project management, and business acquisitions functions. In 2011, she took on a more focused brief as SVP, leading the development and delivery of solutions for the U.S. government services market.
Throughout her tenure at DAI, one thing has been constant: her special affinity for Afghanistan and its people. “I feel very fortunate to spend so much of my time in Afghanistan,” she said. “That’s been very fulfilling for me. Painful beyond words at times, but I’m grateful that I’ve been able to get to know that place even a little bit.”
“I came to development sort of as a second career. I had been working domestically on environmental issues and had the opportunity to move into international work—and I grabbed it, and it's the best thing that ever happened to me.”
— Betsy Marcotte