Meet 2023-2024 Alliance President - Sana Saleh

Sana Saleh has been a Kansas Citian since September 1992. She has been an active county, state and national Alliance member since 1996. Sana brings an array of skills and experiences from the work that she had done both overseas and as a volunteer in her community.

She was born in Amman, Jordan, and at the age of three her family moved to Beirut, Lebanon, where she attended a girls’ private school established by missionaries learning both English and French secondary to her native Arabic language.

In 1975, upon the civil war breaking out, Sana’s family moved back to Amman where she finished high school. She traveled to the U.S. and earned a bachelor’s degree in Biology at Mills College, in Oakland, California 1983.

Back in Jordan, in the years that followed, she worked for the City of Amman’s Urban Development Department (UDD) involved in the poor neighborhoods and conducting surveys to assess the health status of the population following the provision of clean water supply.

This kindled her interest in public health, so she returned to the U.S. where she earned her Master’s degree in Public Health/International Health at Johns Hopkins University in 1987 and she began working for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Regional Office in monitoring and evaluation. Her work entailed assisting many countries in conducting national surveys to establish baselines of health indicators such as immunization levels, infant, child, and maternal mortality.

During her UNICEF years, she travelled to Algeria, Djibouti, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen. Her stays in some of these countries required prolonged periods to ensure the successful completion of conducting a national survey. As a published author, Sana co-authored scientific papers with UNICEF and the London School of Tropical Medicine on methods of measuring childhood and maternal mortality in the field.

She planned to pursue a PhD in Public/International Health on a full scholarship at Johns Hopkins when she met George Saleh, DO, an OB-GYN, which changed her plans. They married in Amman in 1992 and moved to Kansas City, which they have called home ever since.

Sana has been active in her children’s schools throughout their upbringing, chairing many positions through PTA and events as well as her community. She has been involved with her church and served on the Vestry. She currently is a member of the Kansas City Ballet Guild and the International Relations Council of Kansas City.

Sana is a part-time substitute teacher, and enjoys knitting, gardening, entertaining, travelling, and above all being involved with the Alliance. Her goals this year are to focus on expanding “Stop the Bleed” program in the Kansas City Metro Area and around the state, and promote and encourage Alliances throughout Missouri in forming new partnerships and strengthening the existing ones.

George and Sana have three children and two grandchildren.