Haley Jacobson was born and raised in Missouri, living in the St. Louis suburb of University City from four years old on. Haley graduated from John Burroughs School in St. Louis in 2009 and earned a B.A. in Linguistics from Reed College in Portland, Oregon in 2013. While in college, Haley earned certificates or licenses as a wilderness medical first responder and bus driver and served as the lead carpenter for her college’s theater program.

Haley is fluent and literate in German, Mandarin Chinese, and Kymer (the language of Cambodia), and can also converse in Mongolian and ???.

After graduation from college, Haley worked a number of jobs internationally, including on a farm in Portugal and both in education and as a bartender in Fuzhou, Fujian Province, China. While living in Fuzhou, Haley organized the city’s first women’s rugby team, competed on a Chinese TV game show, and became the official native English-speaker voice for the audio component of the Fujian Province public schools’ English textbooks.

Focusing on her love of the wilderness and languages, Haley next found work with an internal tour company as a guide to groups of high school and gap-year students on cultural immersion and wilderness trips to China, Mongolia, East Africa, and Southeast Asia.

Unhappy with the huge salary difference she witnessed between the tour company’s expat (mainly American and European) employees and local, indigenous staff, Haley and her boyfriend started their own sustainability-focused travel company based out of St. Louis and Siem Reap, Cambodia. Insight Tours, Haley’s company, paid its local staff the same as its expat staff, helping to develop deep connections with local communities throughout Cambodia and providing a platform by which individual Cambodians were able to launch their own businesses to serve Insight Tour’s clients. Insight Tour’s business was gaining traction and a good reputation on major travel websites when the Covid-19 shut down air travel and destroyed the tour business globally.

Returning to St. Louis after air travel resumed, Haley obtained roles in nonprofit organizations focused on community development in St. Louis. Haley led ReVitalize STL as interim Executive Director and worked at the International Institute of St. Louis as a business development specialist and loan officer. In these roles she wrote grant applications, developed business plans, and helped empower legal immigrants and refugees through financial literacy classes and micro-loans for their small business ventures.

Haley continued her formal education while working, earning a certificate in conflict transformation from the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies in Siem Reap, Cambodia, learning additional tools to implement her dedication to fostering social harmony and peaceful resolution of conflicts. Haley co-authored a published peer-reviewed paper in linguistics and contributed to research on bilingual education and accent perceptions.

As the Covid-19 pandemic receded, Haley transitioned into medicine, working at the St. Louis University Hospital’s Emergency Department, first as an EMT and now as a nurse, having earned a B.S. in Nursing from the Goldfarb School of Nursing at Barnes Jewish College. She earned her nursing degree as a fulltime student while working fulltime in the Emergency Department.

Haley lives with her Cambodian rescue dog Mazie in her house in St. Louis’s Clifton Heights neighborhood, although she often stays with her mom Sandy in University City because of the long hours at the emergency department.

Haley knows ho