The Perfect Place to Serve

This is the helicopter industry’s first production tilt rotor aircraft, the V-22 Osprey:

It’s an impressive, beefy looking machine—a wonder of technology and engineering beyond the comprehension of your average Joe or Josephine.

This is Steve Woolston, the most recent addition to SIL LEAD’s board.

Steve is not your average Joe or Josephine—he’s the guy who, just out of engineering school at Rochester Institute of Technology, landed a position as an engineer at Bell Helicopter Textron and served on a design team that developed the rotor system for the V-22 Osprey.

Steve describes Bell as a “utopia for a mechanical engineer.” Although most of us would be terrified at the responsibility of building a flying machine like the V-22 Osprey, for a guy who grew up with a passion for taking things apart and putting them back together, it was the perfect place to be. 

But even though he loved engineering, for Steve—an athletic extrovert whose early childhood and teenage years had revolved around team sports—a life spent at a desk began to lose some of its luster. 

Fortunately, Bell offered him the opportunity to move through several distinct careers within the same company. So over the next twenty-plus years, Steve progressed through a variety of leadership assignments in Program Management, Sales, Business Development, and Customer experience. He excelled in each of these positions, his background in engineering lending him additional credibility as he worked for Bell in over thirty countries around the world, gaining a wide breadth of experience as he dealt with governments and organizations at a high level. 

High Altitude Flight Testing in Jomsom, Nepal

Although Steve was grateful for his time at Bell, he felt the tug of something more—believing as a matter of faith that his professional career at Bell had been preparing him for a second chapter of life. A life of service.

But where?

After closing the Bell chapter of his life, Steve took a year to figure that out. In addition to going on a mission trip to Thailand with Habitat for Humanity—an organization he thought might be a good fit for someone with his engineering background—he also completed a certification program in non-profit management; competed in a sprint triathlon; and spent time with family, friends, mentors, and loved ones as he tried to answer the question: “Where can I best serve?”

Home Building in Chiang Mai, Thailand

Now, you may not know that Bell Helicopter Textron is based in the Dallas/Fort Worth area — where Steve met his Texas-native wife, Lisa, (at the gym, unsurprisingly). They have now been married for 25 years.  Dallas is also where SIL International is headquartered. 

Although Steve had been unaware of the work of SIL before his post-Bell Sabbatical, his quest to find a place to serve introduced him to SIL and, ultimately, showed him the perfect place to put his accumulated knowledge and abilities to work. Steve has served as Innovation Portfolio Director at SIL International since 2019 and, in the course of that work, has collaborated with SIL LEAD on several projects.

So when SIL LEAD recently asked Steve to join the board, he was already familiar enough with our work to know that he could help.

Steve still considers himself to be in the “observe and learn” stage of his relationship with SIL LEAD. But when pressed to envision ways in which he thinks SIL LEAD could improve and expand our reach, he spoke of the growing awareness in the world of the value of minority language communities, and how that awareness will lead to opportunities for exciting new partnerships—such as working with governments and NGOs to provide linguistic support for their efforts to spread critical health information, support local commerce,  or perhaps even end human trafficking. 

To speak with Steve about his past life and work with Bell and his new life helping SIL and SIL LEAD grow their ability to serve is to hear a man who enjoys nothing more than taking things apart, tinkering with them, and figuring out how to put them back together in a way that will work even better.

We’re grateful to have his perspective on the board, and eager to hear his innovative ideas for our future.