A Love Letter To My Career
Since it’s Valentine’s Day and all, I want to profess my love… of my career….
I started out producing fashion shows for kids and attending toy conferences at AOL (yes, that AOL). I moved onto National Geographic Society, where I helped produce games, content, and educational videos for kids. At Nat Geo, my team won a Webby and at the after party, I got to experience how it feels to be tightly embraced by Buzz Aldrin.
I realized that I wanted to expand my portfolio—I wanted to use content production and storytelling to make the world better than how I entered it. I entered the nonprofit world at No Kid Hungry. I wrote scripts for food-shaped puppets advocating for kids to receive food stamp benefits, ghost wrote blogs, oversaw the production of websites promoted on talk shows (and once asked to touch up an unnamed spokesperson’s hair to make it a little less gray).
I moved onto another mission-driven organization after three years, the National Endowment for Democracy, where I helped to elevate the voices of activists around the world. I remember feeling the weight of this important work while interviewing a Pakistani political cartoonist who survived an assassination attempt.
For the past three years at the International Rescue Committee, I have had the honor of leading a team dedicated to telling the stories of displaced people and refugees worldwide. If even one person’s perception changed about the 120 million people forcibly displaced, then it’s all been worth it.
The recent cut to USAID have put our client’s lives, programs, and critical aid efforts at risk, and much less importantly in the grand scheme of things, I now find myself placed on unpaid furlough for the next 30 days.
And yet, despite the frustration, heartbreak, and cruelty that sometimes overshadows the good, I still have the audacity to believe that we can make a difference.
I love my weird, unpredictable, deeply meaningful career, and I hope I can continue to use my voice, my skills, and my unwavering belief in change to keep making an impact—wherever I land next (or if I’m brought back at the IRC!).
*If any of my furloughed colleagues want to comment on this post so my network sees your LinkedIn page/portfolio, I encourage you to do so.
