Pat Reilly was a volunteer Peace Corps English teacher at Bassa High School in Buchanan, Liberia, from 1972-75. On returning to the United States, she was a Peace Corps recruiter in New York City and at Ohio University, where she earned a master’s in Journalism. She has been on the executive committee of Friends of Liberia for more than 20 years as the former Peace Corps alumni group transformed itself into a force for advocating peace in Liberia throughout the 1990s.

Since 1998, Pat has helped design and secure funding for education interventions. The Liberian Education Assistance Project sent master U.S. teachers annually to Liberia for 14 years to train primary grade teachers. She is now on the Education Working Group that will oversee the Family Literacy Initiative. During the Ebola crisis, she helped raise $100,000, which was awarded in small grants to communities working on prevention. She was also on the Ebola Task Force of the National Peace Corps Association (NPCA), which awarded $80,000 to communities fighting Ebola in three countries. Pat worked as journalist on five newspapers, including more than a decade at the Washington Post. She was a public affairs officer for the EPA and Homeland Security. She is a former chair of the board of the NPCA. She lives in Virginia.