With the addition of its third and final team member, the City of Atlanta‘s Office of International Affairs has now reached full strength.
Bettina Gardner last week joined the office as international affairs coordinator, where she will help plan meetings with inbound delegations, coordinate overseas trips and interact with Atlanta’s global community.
She joins protocol officer Noah Downer and director Claire Angelle, who also announced that the department would be moving to the offices of Invest Atlanta at the Georgia-Pacific building on Peachtree Street.
The move underscores the commercial focus of the office, Ms. Angelle wrote in an email notice to the media announcing Ms. Gardner’s hiring.
“Because the main priority of our office is to help Atlanta-based companies in their exporting activities and to attract locally foreign direct investment, we have also relocated our offices to Invest Atlanta in order to build stronger synergies between our two entities,” Ms. Angelle wrote.
Ms. Gardner is a Stone Mountain native and graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology. She worked previously in Washington for WorldStrides Capstone Programs, an educational travel company that helped coordinate MBA and study tours for executives. She also worked for the Georgia Department of Agriculture‘s international trade division and for the Southern United States Trade Association, which takes delegations of American agricultural companies to trade shows overseas.
Ms. Gardner speaks fluent Spanish and Portuguese and has lived in both Europe and Latin America. She holds internationally focused master’s degrees from Georgia Tech and the Thunderbird School of Global Management, along with a bachelor’s in multinational business operations from Florida State University.
Mr. Downer also speaks Spanish and Portuguese, while Ms. Angelle is a French native, giving the office capabilities in multiple languages.
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