SEATTLE, Wash. — Collin Tong, senior director of news and westside communications for Washington State University, has been appointed to the National Peace Corps Association’s board of directors by NPCA board chair Pat Reilly.
Tong served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand from 1968 to 1969 and is a guest lecturer at WSU’s Edward R. Murrow School of Communication.
While in the Peace Corps, Tong taught at Phuket Girls School in Thailand and led teacher training programs at Mater Dei School in Bangkok and the General Educational Development Center in Songhla.
More recently, Tong established Returned Peace Corps Volunteers for a Better World and led a national advocacy campaign that resulted in two New York Times ads urging a peaceful resolution to the crisis in Iraq and condemning unilateral U.S. action.
The ad was signed by 1,850 returned Peace Corps volunteers and staff. The RPCVs represent a broad cross-section of Americans from 37 states who served in 56 countries over the life span of the Peace Corps, from 1961 to the present. For more information about that advocacy campaign, see www.epic-usa.org/rpcv.
Prior to WSU, Tong served as public affairs director for the Alliance for Education and worked in communications posts at the King County Department of Natural Resources, Municipality of Metropolitan Seattle and Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. A native of San Francisco, Tong was an education and general assignment reporter for the Eastside Journal American in Bellevue, Associated Press (San Francisco bureau) and editor-at-large for the African Forum News.
Tong graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Redlands, Calif., a master’s degree in Chinese studies at the University of Washington’s Jackson School of International Studies and did doctoral work in east Asian history at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a Michele Clark Fellow at the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education’s 1976 Summer Program for Minority Journalists, University of California Graduate School of Journalism in Berkeley.
