Patricia Reed

I completed MBAs with UCLA and NUS, and received a B.A. in Liberal Arts from Austin College, in Sherman, Texas, spending a year studying French at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1990, which indirectly, thanks to a broken leg, led me to meeting my French speaking husband a few years later.

Subsequent to volunteering at a charity event for a children’s home, we signed up to become a foster mother, and fostered a 15-year-old boy, and now a 14-year old girl, who we raise alongside our two children. American, I have lived outside of the US in Oslo, Paris, Brussels, and one edifying year in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo. I have been a resident of Singapore since 2006.

For longer than I’d be like to admit, I have worked in sales in the tech industry. I once had a boss complain that he couldn’t put me into a box. Another who said I needed to choose whether work or family was first. Another told me, when I told him I was pregnant with my second child, that he expected I would quit then, after giving birth? For women who stand to benefit from Lucy, I can imagine some of the same, and greater, challenges. Access to opportunity, recognition of potential, access to finance, the ability to legally own property and land, in some cases, are all too often struggles for the women Lucy aims to serve.

Artist: Wanda Almira, from Finland