Sadie Foote, of Gainesville, GA, received her master's degree in International Relations from UNG in 2016. UNG is also the source of her two bachelor's degrees – one in International Affairs, the other in Chinese Language and Literature. In 2021, Sadie began working as the Africa Programs Specialist for Water Mission in Charleston, South Carolina.
Water Mission is a Christian engineering non-profit which works to implement safe water solutions in nine permanent country offices and in disaster response scenarios such as the most recent earthquake in Haiti. Water Mission has used technology to provide access to safe water for more than 7 million people in 57 countries.
Four of the nine Water Mission permanent country offices are in Africa — Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda. Sadie monitors the overall health the four programs, including financial well-being; shipping and inventory; remote monitoring of water flow on projects; and contract and grant administration with funding organizations.
Sadie enjoys working with Water Mission because they make a real impact on individuals and their communities. She says "not only do we implement sustainable water solutions, but we also engage in WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) education. Water Mission leads trauma healing and reconciliation workshops in refugee spaces as well. We are concerned about both the physical and spiritual well-being of the communities we work with."
Sadie explains how exciting it is to engage with partners she learned about while taking courses at UNG such as UNICEF and UNHCR. Sadie says that "taking classes in development at UNG and teaching Global Issues (while a limited-term faculty member immediately following her MAIA program) at UNG heightened my awareness of the global water crisis and now I get to make a direct impact."
Sadie offered some words of wisdom to students graduating with a degree from PSIA: "My only advice concerns how to prepare for the job market. It is competitive out there and you have to start somewhere. When thinking about a career, picture what you want your day to look like and how you want to feel at the end of the day. Along those lines, keep in mind the topics you gravitated toward in class or extracurricular. Also, [if contemplating graduate studies] I think it is a good idea to take some time between degrees to work and figure out what you like and what you're good at."