Our Board

Bruce V Rydbeck, P.E., D.WRE

Bruce holds civil engineering degrees from Clarkson and Northeastern and worked for consulting engineering firms in the Boston area ten years, while completing his master’s degree.

Bruce has a wide variety of design and construction experience on overseas development projects and for 26 years developed and directed the clean water projects ministry of Desarrollo Comunitario Vozandes. As a rural water supply consultant for Life Giving Water International, he now helps build and rehabilitate community water systems in Ecuador and Peru.

Bruce is a Diplomat Water Resources Engineer, a registered professional engineer in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and holds engineering credentials in Ecuador. He is a member of the American Water Works Association, American Society of Civil Engineers, and the American Scientific Affiliation. He has presented a number of technical papers on aspects of international development at conferences.

Bruce enjoys mountain biking and has climbed several of Ecuador’s Andean mountain peaks including Cotopaxi at 19,350 feet.

Bruce and his wife Cherith are fluent in Spanish and have lived for most of the past 34 years in Ecuador with the exception of 15 months when they worked on the Tenwek Hospital hydro-electric power plant in western Kenya.

Cherith Brabon Rydbeck, M.Ed.

Cherith ministers to others with her gift of hospitality and her passion for developing others. In the early 1980s she taught missionary children in Pifo, and in the early 1990s she wrote articles for mission publications and led cross-cultural studies for new missionaries. A central theme throughout Cherith’s ministry has been evangelism and discipleship. In more recent years, Cherith’s ministry has focused on counseling, mentoring and training women leaders. She has spoken at international conferences and prayed with Quichua ladies in small groups, giving opportunities to deal with taboo topics such as sexual abuse. Alongside other areas of ministry, in their spare time both Bruce and Cherith dedicated a number of years to ministering among inmates in Quito’s high-security prison, Penal García Moreno, sharing the gospel and discipling new believers, often putting their own lives at risk.
Bruce and Cherith have two married sons, a daughter, and three granddaughters living in the US.

Wade and Sarah Daugherty

Wade holds both bachelors and masters degrees in Electrical Engineering from RIT and has been employed by the MITRE Corporation since 2008. Sarah holds a BFA in Graphic Design from RIT and is currently a stay-at-home mom to their two children, as well as self-employed as a freelance Graphic Designer. Sarah has served on three Grace Chapel short term mission trips to Ecuador, to partner with the Rydbecks on projects providing sustainable water, teaching, and encouragement to Quichua communities in the Andes. Her first trip in 2006 left her with the desire to go back and to share the incredible experience, and she gratefully accepted the opportunity to lead a multi-generational team the following year. In 2013 Wade was able to share the experience as well when together they joined the team serving the community of Achullay.

Ryan Edison

Ryan and his wife Megan served in Ecuador with HCJB. Megan worked in the hospital and Ryan worked with Bruce Rydbeck on water projects. Their experience in Ecuador, coupled with Ryan's desire to see the awesome power of God change the hearts of those who ask, compelled them to support the work Bruce and Cherith were doing on a long term basis.

Ryan is a civil engineer focused in the area of hydraulics - undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Michigan. During graduate studies he ran the hydraulics lab and did research in the area of surging in deep rock tunnels. For 20 years he's worked as a consultant for AECOM, working on major water project across N. America as a senior hydraulic engineering expert. Ryan and Megan have three children.

Tannia Lascano de Bowers

Tannia Lascano de Bowers is originally from Ecuador, where she had the privilege to serve Quichua indigenous communities for seven years as part of the clean water project ministry of Desarrollo Comunitario Vozandes. Her role was to facilitate hygiene and sanitation training alongside water projects, holistically improving the health of communities. Tannia graduated with a B.A. in Biology from Hope College and an M.A. in Transcultural Missions from FATELA Seminary. Her foundations in Community Development came from her two years of work experience at ECHO, an organization that specializes in finding solutions for world hunger. Now she is married to J. Mark Bowers who works for the Chalmers Center for Economic Development as Curriculum Specialist. Chattanooga, Tennessee is their home and the place where Tannia’s gifts of teaching, caring for people, intercultural communication and her experience in transformational development are being used in the clinic she is part of as Community Health Navigator, their multicultural church and neighborhood. As member of Life Giving Water she brings the Ecuadorian perspective not only based on culture but also on her experience in the field.

Carolyn Lippmann

Carolyn Lippmann has taught Sunday school, led Bible Studies, is on the Missions Committee, is a Deaconess, and is a Stephen Minister at the Trinitarian Congregational Church in Wayland. She also helped lead short-term mission trips to the Dominican Republic and recently helped organize the 2013 ISI International Student Thanksgiving Conference. She has taught high school math and physics and university chemistry. Carolyn holds a BS degree in chemistry from Smith College and Master’s in Organic Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has four adult children and five grandchildren.

Dr. Richard Lippman

Dr. Richard Lippmann has organized and helped lead short-term mission trips to the Dominican Republic and recently helped organize the 2013 ISI International Student Thanksgiving Conference. He has taught Sunday school, been a mentor for confirmation classes, been the chair and a member of the Missions Committee, and is leading a Bible Study and on the Board of the Trinitarian Congregational Church in Wayland. He is a Fellow at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and has worked on Signal Processing for the Hearing Impaired, Speech Recognition, Neural Networks, Machine Learning, and Computer Security. He recently received the MIT Lincoln Laboratory Technical Excellence award and has authored or coauthored more than 100 papers, reports, or books. He received the first IEEE Signal Processing Magazine award for the article "An Introduction to Computing with Neural Nets," has supervised more than twenty SM and PhD students, and was a founding board member of the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference. Dr. Lippmann holds a BS degree in electrical engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn and a PhD degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has four adult children and five grandchildren.

Bill and Judy Long

Bill and Judy Long are honored to be serving as Board Members for Life Giving Water International. Bill has a PhD in Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he worked as a research scientist until retiring in 2013. Judy was a elementary school teacher in the Waltham public schools for 36 years. Both have been active in missions, serving on the missions committee at Grace Chapel for a number of years. They have had an active ministry with international students for more than 30 years, meeting and befriending them, mostly in their home but also working with a group having monthly dinners and programs for international students. The Long’s have been involved with the Rydbeck’s ministry in Ecuador for more than 30 years.

Craig R. Miller, PE

Craig got his start with Ecuador and the Rydbecks during their epic 1995 short term missions trip. As a practicing professional civil engineer, the adventure and engineering service opportunities presented by this trip began a 20 year journey for Craig in the use of his civil engineering skills to help others in developing countries. Since that time, Craig has worked extensively in Haiti, Rwanda, Nigeria, Ghana, and Paraguay. He has led over 300 high school and college age students to Haiti on short term service trips, helping advance the needs of some of the poorest people in the world. He served as co-instructor for the Capstone Engineering Course at the University of Massachusetts Lowell’s Civil Engineering Department where he taught new CE seniors how their skills can dramatically improve the lives of thousands through strategic infrastructure development. He is a founding member of the University’s Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure (ISI), an organization who is focused on the needs of developing nations worldwide. He has worked directly for the Prime Minister in Haiti and numerous international NGOs including World Vision, Oxfam, Catholic Relief Services, and the Inter-American Development Bank.

Dave and Erin Ripper

Dave and Erin Ripper are honored to be serving as Board Members for Life Giving Water International. Dave serves as the Lexington Campus Pastor and Pastor of Young Adult Ministries for Grace Chapel, a large, multi-site church in Greater Boston, MA. Additionally, he serves as the New England Regional Coordinator for the Made to Flourish Pastors' Network. Erin works as a licensed mental health counselor for an outpatient health agency just outside of the city of Boston. The Rippers hail from the Greater Pittsburgh area and are both graduates of Grove City College and Denver Seminary. In 2013, they led a work team from Grace Chapel to partner with the Rydbecks to serve the Achullay community in Ecuador, and are passionate about ensuring that more and more communities around the world have access to clean water.

David Suh

David was born and raised in South Korea. He holds an MBA from an American University.
As a CPA he has worked for a large corporation in internal audit and has managed his own public accounting practice. For more than twenty years, until he retired in 2012, he owned and operated a retail business with his wife Esther in Boston. He has made mission trips to Haiti with Grace Chapel, Guatemala with Impact Ministries, and Philippines with PEER Servants. He and his wife are members of Grace Chapel in Lexington, MA. They have two married daughters and three grandchildren.