“A Desire to Give Back”

If you were to ask Rebecca Chandler Leege where she was born, she might just answer, “The United States.” This non-specificity is not because she doesn’t know the city or town of her birth, but because she has lived in so many countries and considers herself a citizen of the world, more than of any one country—so regional specifics feel a little less important. While this could be understood as the natural result of her highly mobile early life in a missionary family, it doesn’t diminish the value that such a perspective brings to her current role as the newest member of the SIL LEAD Board of Directors.

Rebecca may have been born in the United States, but her earliest years were spent with her parents and siblings in Dakar, Senegal.

Photo of Ngor Beach, Dakar by Jeff Attaway, on Flickr

During her upper primary education years, her parents lived in Florida. Then, during her high school years when her parents were based in Brussels, Rebecca went to a boarding school in Germany. All these experiences served to ground her interest in international development work, cement her respect for different cultures and what they have to offer, and expand within her a desire to give back.

“A desire to give back” is common among those raised cross-culturally, because they often feel that their varied experiences are a gift—an expansion of the richness that all individual cultures grant to their participants.

From Germany, Rebecca went on to a Political Science degree at Taylor University in Indiana, and then a Master’s in Multinational Commerce at Boston University in London. Maintaining her global approach, from there she went to Japan to teach English.

While in Japan, Rebecca realized that she was not going to be an English teacher for the rest of her life. She looked at a map of the US and asked herself, “What is the most multicultural city I can go to?”

Rebecca picked New York and ended up living in the metro area for five years. When the 9/11 terrorist attack happened, all her childhood cross-cultural gifting came burbling to the surface. Driven by a desire to give back more, she dove into the nonprofit world of NGOs. Off she went to Rwanda to work with World Relief, as their Director of Programs.

From there she moved to World Vision, which led her to live in the Washington D.C. area while supporting their work in the Caucasus and particularly in Armenia, a country she describes in glowing terms as being rich in history, culture, and natural beauty. Armenia has become one of her favorite places in the world, she says—the one place she would most like to settle.

Photo of Armenian contryside by Andrey Filippov, on Flickr

The need was elsewhere, though, as she shifted at World Vision to a position as their Director of Child Development and Protection, then as the Director of their ACR GCD: All Children Reading A Grand Challenge for Development—which is where she first came into contact with Dr. Paul Frank and the work of SIL LEAD.

Rebecca immediately appreciated the creativity of the work Paul was leading, and the passion and drive to do high-quality linguistics work with minority languages. She says that SIL LEAD’s winning of two of the ACR grant challenges was very well deserved.

Another grantee of the program was Worldreader, which Rebecca was drawn to for the way they pushed the envelope in terms of getting people to read more, and the way they were using digital as part of a social entrepreneurial approach. When the opportunity came two years ago to join Worldreader at an executive level, Rebecca was happy to take it.

It has been an exciting challenge for her to help lead an organization. That challenge, coupled with a recent family move to Atlanta for her husband’s nonprofit work, led Rebecca to hesitate the first time Dr. Frank asked her to join the SIL LEAD Board of Directors. But he persisted for over a year and a half, and last month she attended her first SIL LEAD board meeting.

Now she and Worldreader, along with SIL LEAD and all other educational organizations around the world, are preparing and waiting, hopeful about the future as we navigate a new landscape of education programs as a result of Coronavirus.

Rebecca’s multinational experience and education, coupled with her desire to give back, make her an excellent source of wisdom and guidance in this uncertain era we have entered—an era that can best be met by pooling resources and insights from across the globe.

We are grateful to have her with us.