Former ambassadors on both sides of the U.S-Canada border have joined Atlanta’s Pendleton Group, an Atlanta-based consulting firm with expertise at the intersection of economic development, policy and international affairs.

The names of the new additions will be familiar to Georgians in the international sphere, but their decision to join the firm gives it an increasingly international dimension as it expands its profile while remaining rooted in the state.

Louise Blais joins the firm as a strategic advisor after having recently retired from the Canadian foreign service, Global Affairs Canada. Her most recent full posting was as Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, after which she served as the country’s acting consul general in Atlanta for about six months through December of last year. She had returned by choice to to the South, where she’d served three years before heading to the U.N. in 2018.

She will be joined in the Pendleton ranks by Charles Shapiro, the former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela who recently retired after seven years as president of the World Affairs Council of Atlanta. Before that, the Atlanta native was president of the Institute of the Americas in San Diego after a career in the State Department focused on the America that made him a recognized expert on Western Hemisphere affairs. Mr. Shapiro will serve as a consultant, fulfilling one of the goals he laid out in a farewell call with the council. The other? Extended travel.

Read the full article at Global Atlanta.