Wade Chilcoat
Wade Chilcoat is the owner and administrator of Tilden Memory Care, a luxury eight-bed residential assisted living home in Alexandria, Virginia specializing in dementia care. Tilden is at the forefront of a paradigm shift in senior living with a new generation of fully licensed care homes providing all the safety and security of larger facilities in the comfort and intimacy of a family home. A limited number of residents and much smaller resident-to-caregiver ratios lead to less anxiety and confusion for those living with dementia as well as much higher levels of care and personalized attention.
Prior to creating Tilden Memory Care, Wade spent most of his life as a vagabond traveling the world. His taste for wanderlust started in 1989 when he was awarded a full congressional scholarship at fifteen to spend his junior year of high school abroad at what was then West Germany. This experience inspired him to double-major in German and Sociology at Emory University in Atlanta, where upon graduation he served as an associate envoy for the Danish Olympic delegation for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Europe shortly beckoned once again, and Wade was fortunate enough to win a Fullbright English teaching scholarship to teach in Vienna, Austria. Wade loved teaching and sharing his knowledge and skills to help others, and this first foray into being an educator would later form the backbone of his professional career.
After returning to the USA Wade quickly found work in the Mergers and Acquisitions Department at Goldman Sachs performing document creation and editing. Although he loved being surrounded by some of the most intelligent and driven people in the world at Goldman, the work itself was not igniting his passion. September 11th, 2001 changed all of that.
With all of Wall Street shut down due to the World Trade Center bombing, Wade moved to South Korea with a one-year contract to teach English to children. What was meant to be a one-year sojourn to do explore Asia and do some soul-searching ended up being a sixteen-year love affair with teaching and Korea. Wade enrolled in UMBC’s online graduate TESOL program (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) where he earned a perfect 4.0 GPA while still working full-time teaching business English to adults at a private language school in Seoul. It was at this school during a 7am business English class where Wade met a shy Korean nurse named Dongjin who would later become his lovely wife and partner at Tilden Memory Care.
Upon completion of the master’s degree, Wade then finished out his teaching career in Korea working as an English professor at several Korean universities before getting a full scholarship to study in the US-accredited MBA program at Solbridge International School of Business in Daejeon, South Korea. Wade graduated from Solbridge as valedictorian and then shortly thereafter moved back to the DC-metro area with his family to be closer to his aging mother in Maryland and raise their two young sons in the USA.