Ownership, Labour, and Erasure at Reach To Teach Recruiting

I Know What I Built at Reach To Teach

There is a particular kind of grief that comes with losing access to something you spent 16+ years building.

It is not only the loss of a job, a company, a website, or a professional identity. I lost an entire body of work. It is the loss of systems I developed, relationships I valued and cultivated, communication channels I built, professional reputation, history, and public trust that were built slowly, carefully, and often invisibly over many years.

For close to two decades, Reach To Teach was a major part of my professional life.

I was there in the early days and helped launch and grow the company’s public presence as it is known today.

When I took over Reach To Teach Recruiting in 2010, I took over from the person who owned it but had not yet legalized it in Taiwan.

I became responsible for overseeing our Taiwan, China, and South Korea programs. Within a year, I brought on a major contract with the Ministry of Education in the Republic of Georgia. Then I found and worked with schools in Vietnam, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Middle East. What began as a scattered company, with everyone working from home, became a structured operation with a level of efficiency that helped Reach To Teach become one of the biggest names in the ESL recruitment business.

I built our first online scheduling system before tools like that were commonplace. I navigated recruitment software such as Taleo, MaxHire, and JazzHR to determine what would best support schools and teachers.

My goal was to capture as much useful information as possible so the hiring process would be easier for the 200+ schools I worked with. I then trained staff to use those systems.

The website was completely overhauled by me, with the help of my friend Brandon. I wrote content, managed communications, supported applicants, maintained the website and social media pages, planned events, developed business strategies for onboarding teachers and working with new schools, and helped grow the company’s reputation across Taiwan and beyond.

The icing on the cake was meeting my teachers and getting to know them.

Many of them are trusted chosen family today in 2026. These people became a part of my life in the most meaningful ways. Marriages, births, family visits, and sadly, I saw many teachers through illness and death alone in faraway lands.

South Korea was part of my regular business travel because I travelled there to meet EPIK teachers. I travelled to Shanghai to visit schools there. My trip to the Republic of Georgia to secure our MOE program was a pivotal moment for Reach To Teach. It marked a period of rapid growth from 2010 onwards.

Visiting schools across Taiwan was a regular part of my work.

Teaching overseas can be isolating. I wanted our teachers to know they were not alone.

While doing all of this, I also organized monthly events for teachers in Taiwan to ensure they had community, friendship, and support.

Some of that labour was invisible: writing, editing, scheduling, SEO, troubleshooting, platform management, applicant follow-up, backend organization, and the daily work of keeping the machine running.

But much of it was public too.

There are reviews that mention my name and events I planned. You can find videos and photos of me at work and enjoying every minute of it. There are years of teacher communication, school relationships, recruitment support, and public-facing content. Websites, interviews with international newspapers and magazines, social media pages, LinkedIn posts, articles, graphics, emails, and campaigns exist because of me.

This was not “side work”.

This was THE work that helped cement Reach To Teach’s reputation.

I also brought my ex into Reach To Teach as a part-time interviewer in late 2011, more than a year after I had begun working with the company.

He entered Reach To Teach as part of my interview team for South Korea. Eventually, I passed the South Korea program to him to manage.

In 2012, we had an opportunity to buy the company and make it fully established. My sweat equity was already evident. He matched with a loan, and by 2015 the business had earned enough to pay that loan back.

Ownership does not capture my full role in the business. I owned Reach To Teach Recruiting, but I was also the operator, strategist, recruiter, writer, webmaster, and public representative behind much of the company’s growth.

As a spouse inside the business, I carried years of unpaid and under-recognized labour, including systems management, applicant communication, content creation, reputation building, troubleshooting, and daily operational support.

These details matter because timelines matter and public history matters.

In total, I wrote more than 900 articles and pages for RTT. I created a large portion of the company’s written infrastructure from 2010 onwards, including website pages, blog posts, recruitment articles, country guides, school information, applicant resources, and RTTGlobal author content.

That writing was not decorative. It was part of the company’s search presence, applicant pipeline, public reputation, and long-term authority in the ESL recruitment space.

Many of those articles and pages continued to create value long after they were first written, published, optimized, or shared. They helped teachers find the company, understand their options, prepare for interviews, compare destinations, and trust that Reach To Teach was a legitimate and knowledgeable recruiting organization.

This was part of the work I built. It was not only the visible relationships and events, but the actual architecture of Reach To Teach Recruiting LLC and Reach To Teach LTD.

Women’s labour is often minimized after the fact, especially when it was the scaffolding that allowed something else to grow.

Looking back at the site now is revealing. Some pages still carry the history of that work, while other parts show what happens when old digital infrastructure is not properly maintained. Websites do not sustain themselves. Content archives, themes, pages, plugins, SEO structures, and applicant resources all require care. For years, that care was my job. I maintained a 20-year-old website because that, too, was part of the work.

I was functioning as the webmaster, archivist, troubleshooter, strategist, and caretaker of the company’s digital infrastructure.

Additionally, I know that my work continues to create value long after it was first written, scheduled, published, optimized, or shared. As one of the public faces of Reach To Teach, I know what kind of public reputation the company had. Our programs are highly rated five star programs in countries around the world. We have 500+ 5-star reviews on FB and Google.

Like any long-running company, Reach To Teach had a few negative reviews. Some came from people we chose not to work with because they were not a good fit for our business or our schools. That was part of my responsibility too. I protected my schools, my teachers, and the company’s standards. When someone was not a good fit, I was often the person who made the decision about whether we continued working with them.

These facts are not vague memories. They are visible online and show who was present, who was doing the work, and whose name kept coming up.

That is the thing about digital labour. It keeps working long after you stop.

A post scheduled months earlier can still publish. A page grown over years still attracts traffic. Reviews from teachers reassure the next applicant. Articles still rank. A reputation still generates trust.

Plain and simple, Reach To Teach would not exist as it is today without me.

I am writing this because I am no longer willing to erase myself from my own professional history.

Women are often expected to be graceful about the loss of their work. We are expected to move on quietly, to avoid sounding bitter, and to accept language like “helped” or “supported” when the reality is that we built, managed, sustained, repaired, and carried.

Guess what? I am not doing that anymore! I am proud of what I built at Reach To Teach Recruiting. I’m also proud of the teachers I helped. The systems that I created speak for themselves and the trust that I earned belongs to me.

The labour does not disappear just because someone later tries to minimize the person who did it.

I am proud of the years of work that connected schools, teachers, and communities across borders.

When my health was at its worst, the company did not stop needing care. I was sick, disabled, and struggling to function. But I still kept Reach To Teach going in every way.

I was left to carry the company in ways that were not sustainable. And I am allowed to say that.

Reclaiming my work at Reach To Teach Recruiting is not about living in the past. It is about refusing erasure.

It is about saying this happened, this mattered, and I was there.

I built a company that has outlasted many others of its kind. People benefited from my help, guidance, and support. I built systems that continue to function and generate value because they were planned, organized, written, maintained, and cared for by me over 16+ years.

Even now, the boundaries are blurred. Platforms I created and maintained through Reach To Teach still overlap with my public life, even though my access has been removed.

Work I helped build still exists, carries my name and history, and reaches into the life I am trying to rebuild.

That is part of why reclaiming my authorship matters. This is not only about the past. It is about naming the work, the history, and the boundaries I produced while my role was being erased after I left a 23-year relationship, a 17-year marriage, and the life I built over 20 years in Taiwan.

The painful truth is that my labour did not vanish.

Neither did the value, the systems, or the reputation I helped build.

But my access to the life, stability, and security that work helped create has been severed completely.

I know what I built. And I will not let anyone write me out of my own story.