Papers of Linda Worthington, ca.1935-2019 (inclusive), 1960-2019 (bulk)

Linda Maxine Worthington was born on January 22, 1932, in Eaton Rapids, Michigan, the daughter of Hazen Joseph and Burtriece Iris Warner Crandall. She graduated from Kalamazoo College in Michigan in the early 1950s and received a master's degree in theological studies from Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. in 1985. She married Karl Henry Flessner in 1954; Flessner died in 1960 and two years later she married Paul Franklin Worthington. She had four children, Laurel, Judith, Kirby, and Melissa. In 1963, the family relocated to Vietnam, where Paul Worthington served with the United States Overseas Mission (later USAID, or United States Agency for International Development). Worthington and the children were evacuated from Vietnam in February 1965. They spent the next six years in Thailand, where they lived in Ubon and Bangkok while Paul Worthington served another tour of duty with the United States Overseas Mission. Laurel, Judith, and Kirby attended boarding school in Chiang Mai. Upon their return to the United States in 1971, Worthington and the children lived in Michigan while Paul was on temporary duty in Washington DC; the entire family lived in Washington from 1972 to 1976. In 1976, Paul rejoined the foreign service, serving first in Bangkok and then in Senegal, where he died in 1981. After his death, Worthington settled in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Worthington was involved with a variety of organizations focused on women, faith, hunger, and poverty. In 1972 she worked for the Emergency Relief Fund and coordinated the "Airlift of Understanding," taking seventy people on a mission to the newly formed country of Bangladesh. While in Bangladesh the group met with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Indira Gandhi, as well as with Bangladeshis who spoke about their war experiences. While in Thailand in the early 1970s, she conducted field research on the effects of the sale of Nestlé infant formula products to the poor; this work continued under a USAID contract when she and Paul Worthington were based in Senegal and grew into a multi-country project. In the mid-1970s, she worked on the Center for Science in the Public Interest's "Food Day" program. She was also involved with the World Hunger Education Service from 1978 to 2017, serving first as an editor and then as a member of the board of directors. She joined the communications office of the United Methodist Church's Baltimore-Washington Conference as a copy editor and writer in 1999, becoming an editor for the organization in 2012 and remaining in this role until 2019. In 1996 she became chair of the Commission on the Status and Role of Women for the Baltimore-Washington Conference and continued as chair until 2004. She was the co-director and eventually alumni association vice president of International Voluntary Services, an overseas development organization, between 1991 and 1995, and continued volunteering with the organization until her death in 2019.