As Chey Mattner ends his role as head of programs for LWF World Service, he shares insights on how his childhood in rural Australia helped to shape his professional career.
Chey Mattner at the last World Service Global Leadership Team meeting in Prague. Photo: LWF/ M. Renaux
As he returns down under, Chey Mattner reflects on his journey to overseeing the coordination of World Service programs
(LWI) - For those accustomed to seeing Chey Mattner towering head and shoulders above his colleagues in the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) offices in Geneva, it may be hard to imagine him as a small boy on a bike, with his brother and two sisters, “getting up to a lot of mischief” as they played in the remote Australian outback.
But that is where his journey began, the eldest child of an itinerant Lutheran pastor, who took his wife and children to rural South Australia, New South Wales and Alice Springs “where there was nothing but desert for thousands of kilometers.” Though some may pale at the thought of raising a young family in such challenging conditions, Mattner remembers it as “a wonderful childhood, where we played Australian Rules football in the dirt as the sheep ate any patches of grass that grew.”
Back then, he recalls, “there was no technology and at one stage we had no TV either, so we had to make our entertainment on our own.” It was a childhood “that shaped me a lot and looking back, I can see how formative those days were,” he says, noting that there were “as many Aboriginal children as white kids in my kindergarten class.” He remembers how his father would go "walkabout" with Aboriginal elders for a week or two at a time, camping in dry riverbeds - and vividly recalls “the bad smell when he returned unwashed and my mother not allowing him in the house until he changed his clothes!”
Australian Lutheran World Service
Fast forward to the end of his school years and Mattner joined so many other young Australians backpacking around Europe, working in England for a while, before moving to Ecuador and then Japan to teach English as a foreign language. At one point during his travels, he dropped in to visit his great uncle, Brian Neldner, who was working as director of LWF’s World Service. While doing the dishes, 17-year-old Chey casually asked about finding a job for him too: his request was kindly but firmly turned down.
Undeterred, he returned to Australia and in 2008 landed a job as program manager with Australian Lutheran World Service, the overseas aid and development agency of the Lutheran Church of Australia and New Zealand. It was a fast-learning curve, with a boss “who threw me into monitoring visits to South Sudan and Mozambique, strategy reviews in Nepal and Kenya and evaluations in Cambodia, all within the first year, in order for me to understand quickly.”
In 2013, he moved up from program manager to executive director, where he recalls one of his proudest memories was completing “a two-year rigorous review to retain our partnership with the Australian government.” During the audit, he remembers, “the panel said it was the strongest review that had ever been undertaken in their experience and we acknowledged our valuable connections to LWF as part of that process.”
Mattner with Rohingya children in an DP camp in Myanmar, 2016. Photo: LWF
Not all his ventures have been quite so successful though. When pressed about the biggest challenges of that period, he recalls a trip he took with his fiancée (now wife) Libby to South Sudan to show her how well staff were taken care of. “My theory was that if I could take her to what was, and probably still is, one of the most dangerous countries, then she would feel comfortable wherever else I went.”
Together they travelled to the former LWF head office in Torit, then down to Ikotos where they stayed in a traditional straw hut called a tukel. During the night, their compound was surrounded by cattle raiders who exchanged machine gun fire with the cattle owner (“It was probably only a couple of minutes, but it felt like hours as we hid to avoid getting caught in the crossfire.”) Despite the failure of his strategy on that occasion, Mattner is quick to point out that “on the whole, you know you’re in good hands with LWF and especially now with our stronger safety and security approach.”
In 2018, he successfully applied for the job of head of operations with World Service, based in Geneva. As Mattner recalls, “it was a daunting move as it meant relocating our young family to a different continent.” Since then, he has been heading a team of experienced colleagues, working in the 26 countries where World Service is operating to provide humanitarian and development initiatives in some of the most challenging places on earth.
I knew we had to move quickly to ensure that people in our country programs were safe, had access to accurate information and could continue their vital work.
Chey MATTNER, former LWF Head of Operations
He says he has been “very fortunate to visit all our country programs, except the Central African Republic, Angola and Ukraine” – although he was part of a multi-departmental team which travelled to four countries bordering Ukraine to see how the churches could work together with World Service to respond to those fleeing from the war. That conflict and the earlier outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic have made his time in leadership particularly demanding: as head of a COVID task force, he says, “I knew we had to move quickly to ensure that people in our country programs were safe, had access to accurate information and could continue their vital work.”
After nearly six years in Geneva, the Mattner family are now headed back to Australia, where Chey will continue to work as a consultant for LWF, leading its new strategy process. What will he miss most (apart from his colleagues and friends, of course)? “Standing on a pier on Lac Leman with my son in the summer, catching perch and going for an evening swim – especially because nothing's going to eat you in that lake!”
Fishing is a favorite hobby and he’s already looking forward to trying his hand at fly fishing back in Australia. Most of all he is “excited to be reconnecting with family” and experiencing “the change of pace” that his native land can offer. "Small things like driving to the beach to swim with the family and a dog, those things really motivate me and give me energy for starting this new chapter of my life.”
