Meet Your Session 2 Program Leader: Brady Blackburn

Hi, everybody. My name is Brady, and I'm the third co-leader for the Legon, Ghana Service & Leadership program, session 2. 

I spent half my childhood in Kansas and half in Colorado, so I'm roughly from Denver, although I've been living abroad for most of the last two years. I graduated from Regis University in Denver with my bachelor's in English, during which I studied abroad in Ghana with CIEE. After graduating, I worked in a variety of fields, but got fed up with the rat race and decided to start a non-profit to advance literacy and writing education around the world, starting in Ghana. That led me to live in a rural village for seven months while helping to build a library and literacy center, an ongoing project that High School Summer Abroad students were able to help with last year. We focus on local language (Twi) education as well as English, because we believe that both are crucial to the students' futures. I returned to Ghana last year to lead both sessions of the CIEE HSSA program.

I now live in Germany with my fiancée, where I work as an English text editor. I will be attending a master's program this fall in African Verbal and Visual Arts where I will be studying African languages so that I can continue advocating for them. I'm an avid gamer, both video games and tabletop roleplaying games. I'm also a writer, with one published book and hopefully many more on the way. I have a black belt in Taekwondo, I enjoy running, and I spend most of my money on travel.

I've always tried to see new places "from street level", with the belief that spending thousands of dollars on travel and not coming face-to-face with authentic culture is essentially a waste of money and damaging to global representation. My hope is that I can help the students engage Ghanaian culture in a way that will impact their lives forever, as it did for me.

So here we go. Let's do this.