Board Members
Marie Johnson is a native of Tibo District, Grand Gedeh County, Liberia. In 1990, the civil war interrupted her accounting and management studies at the University of Liberia and forced her to relocate to the United States, where she enrolled as a nursing student at a community college in Maryland. She founded and runs a nursing staffing agency in Baltimore.
Rufus N. Darkortey is a risk reviewer at KeyCorp in Cleveland, Ohio. Before joining KeyCorp, he worked in his homeland, Liberia, as project director for a United Nations-sponsored non-profit non-governmental organization (NGO). He has also been a foreign service diplomat on behalf of the liberian government. He is president of the Liberian Association of Cleveland and executive director of the Liberia Economic Development Initiative Corporation, a non-profit that seeks to provide start-up capital and other assistance to companies in Liberia and elsewhere as a way to reduce poverty.
Isaac Tarley Monah, born and raised in Grand Gedeh County, Liberia, is the founder of Doube River Presbyterian School. He left Liberia in 1990 because of the civil war. He is married with three children. He works at Cleveland Clinic and owns a cleaning company. He is an elder at Noble Road Presbyterian Church.
Tara Grove is the principal of Roxboro Elementary School in Cleveland Heights-University Heights City Schools. Roxboro Elementary is a K-5 grade elementary school that has built a partnership with the Dougbe River School in Liberia. Roxboro planned many fundraisers in the 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 school years to raise funds to help build the school. Through a Read-A-Thon, a Cleveland Orchestra-sponsored concert and bake sales the school community raised $5,200. Tara’s passion is promoting diversity in the school and encouraging interactions with international partnerships and educators around the world. Roxboro has a sister school in Shanghai, China.
John Luttermoser is an elder at Noble Road Presbyterian Church and a member of the JustReach (Justice/Outreach) ministry of the Presbytery of the Western Reserve. He has worked in the newspaper industry for 30 years and is currently an assistant arts editor at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland.
The Rev. Francis Miller is pastor of Noble Road Presbyterian Church in metropolitan Cleveland, Ohio, USA. His passion for this project has been nurtured by a family which embraces just and faithful solutions to a world broken by inequality. For Francis, the Dougbe River Presbyterian School and Church initiative represents everything that is right about the Christian Church’s involvement in the world: establishing relationships and using resources to help nurture the gifts of life, love, and peace that God wishes all humanity to share.
Scott McGraw is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Ohio State University. A primatologist by trade, McGraw has been conducting field research in Africa since 1991. He met Isaac Monah in 1993 and they have carried out a number of wildlife surveys in Ivory Coast and Ghana. He is deeply concerned with education and conservation issues in West Africa. Scott, his wife Cindy and their two children, Katherine and William, live in Delaware, Ohio.
Glenn Kaser is a retired member and official of the United Auto Workers, and a U.S. Air Force veteran. He is a member of the pastoral care committee at Hopewell Presbyterian Church in Holmes County, Ohio, a partner church in the Dougbe River school project. He worked on a farm as a teenager, before joining the Air Force.
Susan Rhee (info and picture coming soon!)