Geraldine Cox, AM

Position: Country Director and President, Cambodia
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Geraldine was born in Adelaide in 1945 and attended the Mitcham Primary, Unley High School and Metropolitan Business College. She travelled extensively and worked at many jobs until she commenced a career with the Department of Foreign Affairs from 1970 to 1987, working in Australian Embassies in Cambodia, the Philippines, Thailand, Iran and the United States. She resigned and moved to Sydney to work with Chase Manhattan Bank in 1988.

She co-founded the Foundation in 1993, with the help of a Sydney couple, after a holiday in Cambodia and seeing the vast need of so many children. Geraldine left the corporate world in 1995 and moved to Cambodia to live and work with the then First Prime Minister, Prince Ranariddth in his administrative office, until the coup of July 1997, which ousted the First Prime Minister and his family, leaving her without a job. Until then, working on Foundation matters and spending time with the children at the orphanage, were what she did in her spare time. But from July 1997 the children became the centre of her life.

She was given Cambodian Citizenship in 1999 and made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2000.

She has written a book, Home Is Where The Heart Is, published by Pan Macmillan and was the subject of My Khmer Heart, which won the Hollywood Film Festival Documentary of the Year Award in 2000.

She now spends around nine months of the year living at Sunrise Children's Village 20 kilometres outside Phnom Penh and the rest of the time travels to Australia, Asia and the United States to raise much needed funds.

To read more background — how to order her book, documentary and engage her for speaking engagements, please visit her personal website — www.geraldinecox.org or download her curriculum vitae.