Management Committee
Chenda has an extensive background and experience working in the disability sector and community development, health management, and international development for more than 12 years within internal and local NGOs in Cambodia from technical practice to management and leadership positions.
She was an AusAid scholarship program recipient who obtained her master’s degree in Health and International Development from Flinders University in 2014 and holds an advanced diploma degree of Physiotherapy from Singapore and Bachelor of Law in Cambodia.
Her own experience of Australian tertiary studies helps her envisage what a Cambodian tertiary speech therapy program might look like. More importantly, it has given her confidence and discernment to interact with both local and international stakeholders and network to partner with her organization in Cambodia, and strengthen relationships and their commitment in supporting the work and vision of OIC Cambodia increasing the sustainability of the organization.
Her experience within the program and passion combined with her international trained qualification offered her an opportunity to take a leading position at the OIC Cambodia as the Executive Director in 2017. She has provided a tremendous capacity and ability to lead the organization together with the governance and management team toward the success of driving a positive change in the development of the speech therapy profession to bring the missing service in Cambodia. Apart from that, she is nominated by the Ministry of Health and the University of Health Science to be a module leader and a lecturer in the Cambodia Physiotherapy Bridging Bachelor program since 2017.
Ruth Bryce is an Australian Speech Therapist who has lived in Cambodia since 2006. She has been part of the OIC Cambodia team since 2016 when she joined as a part-time volunteer. In 2018 she became Program Manager, and since July 2019 she has been the University Strategy Manager.
Her role at OIC,Cambodia involves being in the management team, and working with government and other stakeholders to develop a quality Cambodian speech therapy program and profession, who can meet the needs of the 600,000 Cambodians with communication and swallowing difficulties.
Within her 13 years in Cambodia, she has been involved in community development projects in informal education initiatives, community-based rehabilitation, disability inclusion, preschool education projects and grassroots research within Cambodia. Her work roles include Technical advisor to local NGO’s, independent evaluation consultant, and governing board member of LNGO (2009-2017) and social enterprise (2015 – current).
Ruth holds a Bachelor of Speech Therapy (La Trobe University, Australia 2000) and a Masters of Transformational Development (Eastern College, Australia 2015).
Ruth’s speech therapy background is working with people with complex communication needs using alternative and augmentative communication to increase their participation within their communities. She is passionate to see an increase in the inclusion of people with communication disabilities within Cambodian society, as well as the development of a Cambodian speech therapy profession that can support all Cambodian’s to access the therapy they need.
Nita is a Finance and Administration Coordinator who is currently working on processing the finance and administration for cash management to implement activities of all project on Speech Therapy Developments of OIC-Cambodia which fund received from multi-donor. She loves to join the OIC team to learn on Improvement and Communication of difficulty swallowing and Speech Therapy to help the disability people, especially children who are facing with difficulty for communication and assist each other on Speech Therapy development as the part of the team as Finance and Administration coordination and management for processing the cash management to implement activities as the action taken. The team is very friendly and flexible to help each other for the project running smoothly and learning in multi-task. She has experiences to work with other organization that help the disability people, she contributed and participated to assist the disability people to find the accessible place to work as office, workshop, training venue and restaurant too, training them in finance sector for fund raising, visit them at the field work, personal care and career motivation, then connecting them with donors and ministry of social affair and vocational training center. However, OIC-Cambodia is specialized in Speech Therapy. She contributes in the part of development to help the vulnerable people of disability in the community for coronation on fund management to do the mission. She hopes that OIC-Cambodia team will build capacity in the development of local Speed Therapy specialists in Cambodia and in collaborate with universities in Cambodia and relevant ministries.
Chantara is an early childhood development program manager of OIC Cambodia. He is moved by the work of OIC to tackle the Communication disability which only a few organization have been working on this.
Tara has never experience of speech therapy himself but the situation of the children with communication disability touched his heart and keeping moving on to at least do his part to build the capacity of the duty bearers and community to tackle the speech therapy issues in Cambodia. He is very enjoy seeing the most children with communication disabilities access to services and draw people attention in part-taking in dealing with the issues.
Tara strongly hope that communication disabilities will be valued, consider and broadly addressed by Cambodian people.
STAFF
Danielle has supported OIC Cambodia from afar and was excited for the opportunity to join the team, work, and live in Cambodia while working to build a speech therapy profession here. People in Cambodia with communication and/or swallowing difficulties do not have access to speech therapy support and this has a direct impact on the individual’s quality of life. She really enjoys and believes in the profession and is enjoying seeing it develop in Cambodia.
Danielle is a speech therapist from Australia and provides speech therapy technical support within the team.
She studied speech therapy at a university in Melbourne, Australia for 4 years and has worked with children with communication difficulties and their families for over 13 years.
She is very happy to see a family and their child connect and communicate with one another effectively! A child is always communicating and it is very powerful when the family knows how to listen, understand and respond to their child’s communication.
Danielle hopes that the speech therapy profession is developed in Cambodia’s public systems, professionals are able to study speech therapy in Cambodia and everyone with swallowing and/or communication difficulties has access to support!
Suné is Speech Therapy Technical Advisor in OIC Cambodia. Her role is to share and transfer my knowledge, experience and skills from a Speech Therapy perspective into a way that is understandable and transferable to the context of Cambodia. This can come in many forms from developing training packages, creating resources and problem solving communication disability related challenges with innovative ways.
She join OIC Cambodia she wants to be apart of this significant project and share the mission to grow Speech Therapy in Cambodia, learn from the team here and their experiences and explore a different component of the role of the SLT.
She enjoys constantly discovering, exploring, learning and experimenting. It is ever-changing and continuously evolving. There is so much potential and opportunity in what can be done!
She never had experience speech therapy herself, only ever on the side of the provider. However, it would be really interesting to experience it from the side of the receiver, mostly to experience what it feels like so she can relate better to those who experience these challenges.
Being apart of change, learning from others and being able to share joy with all beings alike.
That Speech Therapy practice will shift away from the medical model and integrate holistic, integrative and naturalistic methods to supporting people with communication disabilities so that it can be more inclusive and accessible to all people from various backgrounds.
Kunthea worked at Happy Kids Clinics before joining OIC Cambodia. She didn’t study Speech Therapy at university before as we don’t have the University of speech therapy in Cambodia yet.
When she was working at Happy Kids Clinic and she had learned a lot from the speech therapist from other countries and she also has experience working directly with children who have difficulties with communication and/or swallowing.
She really enjoys working with OIC is supporting the teacher/parents to help the people who have difficulties with communication and swallowing (especially with the children).
She hopes that Cambodia will have the university of speech therapy soon, as now we have a lot of people who have difficulty with communication (especially the children) in Cambodia, so we need speech therapist in Cambodia, and I also hope the people to understand more about the speech therapy and what is autism?
Meak is a program assistant in OIC Cambodia. His work is to assist and support program managers in administrative and operational activities within different programs.
As for OIC Cambodia, we have a small team but a big dream. He said that he is happy and enjoys working at OIC because he has an opportunity for personal learning and development from some experts on speech therapy and swallowing difficulties. He has learned about communication and swallowing difficulties until he joins OIC Cambodia.
OIC Cambodia trying to make accessible services for people with communication and swallowing difficulties by working in collaboration with government institutions and key stakeholders/partners. He believed that his involvement in OIC work would significantly contribute and help to an individual’s health, social inclusion, and quality of life for people living with disabilities.
In the future, Meak hopes that Cambodia will have many specialists in this area. The service would be largely affordable and accessible in many public facilities
Borey is a year 4 student doing Computer Science. She started working with OIC Cambodia as a Communication Intern and now she is part of OIC Cambodia as full-time staff.
As a university student, She hasn’t known about speech therapy before until join with us. Being part of OIC, Borey has learned a lot and she has been developing herself as well.
She has learned what are the communication and swallowing difficulties which she hasn’t known about communication difficulties before joining OIC Cambodia.
Borey hopes that her involvement as Communication and IT Support Staff in OIC Cambodia would help people learn and know about Speech Therapy through social and she hopes that Cambodia would have more local specialists in this area.
In the future, She hopes that Cambodia have more local services with affordable and accessible to Cambodian people. She also wishes to have a digital device for people with communication difficulties to make it easier for them to communicate with people around them.
Srey Mom is an Admin & Accountant at OIC Cambodia.
The reason she wants to work at OIC is that she loves and wants to help people with disabilities in Cambodia and also wants to use her knowledge to benefit society.
The most enjoy about working with OIC are helping with preparing the document and doing accounting work. She also joins training and learns about speech therapy as well.
She didn’t have experience with speech therapy herself but working in OIC Cambodia helped with growing to understand more about communication difficulties.
She hopes for the future, She can help other people and all the people in Cambodia will know of speech therapy.