We welcomed Sarah Bouchie as Helen Keller Intl’s President and CEO in January 2024. With nearly three decades of international development experience, Sarah has been both an implementer and advocate for prominent global nonprofits and a leader of the philanthropic investments that shape humanitarian and development efforts. She has held leadership roles at the LEGO Foundation, ChildFund International, CARE USA, Save the Children, and the Aga Khan Foundation. Sarah is a mother of two creative, inquisitive daughters and lives in Harare, Zimbabwe, with her family.
What would you like donors to know about you as you settle into your role as President and CEO?
First, how excited I am to be at Helen Keller. This is an organization that has a tremendous legacy of helping people to realize their full potential and live healthy lives. Something that I feel strongly about is equity and promoting how we share what we have to help provide the best kind of life for everyone around the world.
Who is Helen Keller, the person, to you?
My second grade teacher wanted to make sure that we saw role models around us who really made a difference in the world, particularly female role models because maybe there weren’t enough of them in our small community. I remember learning about what Helen Keller did to overcome her personal challenges and help others in the world. She broke new ground and changed perceptions about what people could do for one another. This legacy is what Helen Keller Intl continues to take forward.
Something that I feel strongly about is equity and promoting how we share what we have to help provide the best kind of life for everyone around the world.
Sarah Bouchie
Do you have a favorite Helen Keller quotation?
“I believe the welfare of each is bound up in the welfare of all.” I feel deeply that what I have been given in the world is a tremendous privilege. And I have a responsibility to share that because I expect and want the future to be different for my own children. I want them to live in a fair and just world, and that requires me to act.
Why does Helen Keller partner with communities, other organizations, governments, and donors?
Helen Keller also said, “Alone, we can do so little; together, we can do so much.” Global health issues – including the need for greater equity around the world – are big problems that no one organization can or should be working on alone. This work requires as many voices as we can gather to sing the same song, and as many feet on the ground to do the work with us. We have skills and competencies that others don’t, while others certainly have skills and competencies that we don’t.
Why is Helen Keller’s work so important in the world right now?
Helen Keller’s mission is to help people to realize their true potential. The pace of change and threats we face are increasingly global. Climate change, global pandemics, volatility in our interconnected economies – we all feel the shocks. But it is families who are already struggling who experience these challenges most profoundly. Helen Keller is addressing globally important issues with simple solutions that allow us to help resolve big problems. Take nutrition – we know five proven ways to help kids along in their journey to live healthy lives, and there’s no good reason every child shouldn’t have access to them. Helen Keller offers the expertise, the partnerships, and the hope to make this happen.
What excites you about the future of Helen Keller Intl?
There’s so much. We are rapidly changing as a global community. Helen Keller and its sister organizations are spotlighting the voices of proximate leaders – leaders in communities, in nations – not only to solve problems, but to make sure that we don’t slide backwards. A great example is what happened in Mali: we’ve eliminated trachoma as a public health problem. And that’s not because somebody in New York said, “This is how you do it.” It’s because the Ministry of Health in Mali set its sights on this goal, and organizations – including Helen Keller – have supported that effort. There’s a greater awareness today of the global inequities in healthcare, and this is something that Helen Keller will continue fighting for.
Help people create lasting change in their own lives and communities.
