Colleen Dougherty

M.S.W. George Warren Brown School of Social Work, Washington University in St. Louis
B.A. Spanish Language and Literature, B.S. Wildlife and Conservation Biology, Ohio University

Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, Colleen has enjoyed working with young people nearly her entire adult life (or longer if you count being an oldest child). Rarely having traveled outside the Midwest before college, her mind was opened to social justice and cultural exchange by a Latin American Studies class and working in residential life. She has since been able to combine her passions for youth engagement, teaching, and travel and has worked as a resident assistant, a school social worker, a high school teacher, and with nonprofit organizations such as Invisible Children and World Learning. Colleen’s nonprofit experiences have allowed her to learn from and connect diverse groups of people, from helping to rally American high school students to raise over a million dollars to rebuild schools in northern Uganda, to working with an immigrant advocacy organization to bring together and form positive relationships between immigrant constituents and Missouri lawmakers.

Colleen began her formal teaching career through Teach for America in the Mississippi Delta region and has continued teaching as an international educator for three years in South Korea and two years in Colombia, spending a summer collaborating with a partner teacher in northern Uganda. She has managed to travel to nearly 30 countries during this time and has most recently led cultural exchange trips for US, Chilean, and Argentinian high school students through World Learning.

When not teaching and traveling, Colleen loves hiking, salsa dancing, scuba diving, rock climbing, reading personal development books, writing poetry, painting, and crashing on her siblings’ couches.