Why I quit my dream job.
I just left my role as COO of charity: water, and I have no idea what’s next.
I’ve spent the past 3,740 days — just about a third of my life — motivated by a singular goal:
Build an organization capable of solving the world’s water crisis.
Along the way, I helped reinvent the nonprofit sector, raised more than half a billion dollars, and brought clean and safe drinking water to more than 12,000,000 people.
But that’s not what I had planned for myself. I came to New York to chase my dream job. But, it turned out, my dream job found me instead.
And now, I’m giving it all up… again.
HOW IT STARTED: New York City, September 2010.
I’m sitting at a wobbly glass table in a bright white conference room of an early-stage nonprofit called charity: water. I’m wearing my New York City fashion publicist uniform: black stilettos, black jeans, black t-shirt, black blazer, and a black leather jacket.
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The walls are covered with scribbled notes and flanked with eight-foot glossy portraits of smiling children drinking clean water. A dozen trendy do-gooders, who apparently ride bicycles to work, zip around the open office. For some reason, there’s a ping-pong table in the kitchen.
A year ago you’d have found me in that same uniform, with that same swagger, but not in that room. I was living out my dream sitting inside the white tents at New York Fashion Week watching Betsey Johnson cartwheel down the runway surrounded by neon-clad models in sky-high platforms.
I’d had one goal for as long as I could remember. Move to New York and work in fashion.
At 15, I worked at a local boutique wrapping gifts. By 17, I was attending buying trips in Manhattan. At 19, I got an internship at French Connection in TimeSquare. I studied marketing, graduated college early, and left Ohio to intern for Zac Posen by the time I was old enough to (legally) drink. In 2007, I landed my first real job as a fashion publicist in a tiny agency. I started out inventorying samples. Eventually, I was representing designers and producing global campaigns for household brands.
I’D MADE IT.
I was on my path.
And it was not charity.
In fact, I’d dodged this meeting for months. My boyfriend (now husband — but that’s another story), Michael, first presented the idea earlier this summer while we were awaiting grilled cheese and crab cakes at the bar of our favorite Irish pub on the Upper East Side.
Michael’s been working at charity: water for a few months now.
“Why don’t you come work for charity: water?” he asks. “We really need someone to produce our annual event. It’s what you do. It’s right in your wheelhouse.”
“Thanks, but no thanks. I’m not a charity person.” I respond immediately.
“This is not your typical charity.” Michael insists.
The founder, Scott Harrison, a nightclub promoter turned humanitarian, had a poetic epiphany after volunteering on a hospital ship off the coast of Liberia in 2006. He learned that over one billion people on earth were drinking dirty water. That nearly 1 in 10 people worldwide were walking hours every day to collect water that makes them sick, threatens their lives, and steals precious time.
Scott returned to New York and started charity: water with a mission to bring clean water to every person on the planet.
But Scott didn’t want to build his grandparents’ charity. He knew he had to do things differently. Scott decided that in order to solve the water crisis, he’d need to reinvent charity. He’d use transparency to build a brand people could trust, restore hope, and inspire a movement of generosity.
AN UNEXPECTED TRADE: Fashion for philanthropy.
So here I am. Sitting at a wobbly table across from Scott in this hipster-meets-humanitarian office hearing about this big fundraising gala, charity: ball.
What am I doing here?
I don’t have a favorite charity. I know absolutely nothing about the water crisis. I’d be hard-pressed to find Africa on a map.
But I can’t ignore the fact that something here is calling me forward.
So I agree to produce the December gala as a part-time consultant. I do my real job as a fashion publicist during the day, and at night, I work on the charity: ball.
We’re on a shoe-string budget. We roll up our sleeves, design exhibitions out of metal trusses, light bulbs and dozens of 4x8-foot metallic prints that we hang ourselves. Amazingly, it works! We sell 1,200 tickets a week before the event. The room fills wall-to-wall with famous faces alongside families who have come to teach their kids about the impact of clean water. We raise more than $1M to fund water projects in Central Africa Republic, Haiti, and Ethiopia.
I’ve never seen anything like it.
ALL IN: January 2011.
charity: water is growing fast. If I’m going to get a seat on this rocket ship, the time is now. Scott is looking for someone just like me.
The job is mine for the taking — as long as I’m willing to trade it for the dream I’ve been chasing.
Am I ready to give up on a career in fashion? Will my family and friends think I failed? That I can’t hack it. Or worst of all, that I’m not cool! And what if I’m not even any good at this whole charity thing.
Why am I living in a studio apartment, alone with my fat cat, eating cereal for dinner in the loneliest city in the world, if I’m not pursuing my dream to work in fashion?
I stand there at the edge of that cliff, staring into the unknown with fear in my belly. I’m not a risk taker. I color-coordinate my closet for fun! None of this comes naturally to me. But I feel something begging me to look closer.
So I take the step forward.
And just like that — a conversation I never planned for in a room I never expected to be in — turned into ten of the most defining, impactful, gratifying, and as it turns out, fashionable years of my life.
THE NEW ME: Chief Get Sh*t Done.
In January 2011, with the gala behind us, I left my agency job and joined charity: water as Executive Producer. The made up role was best described as get sh*t done (except there’s a strict “no cursing” rule at charity: water). I was the youngest member of the newly-formed Executive Team.
I started by auditing the people, systems and processes. I developed a project management function and designed tools that increased the capacity of our nimble team.
charity: water turned five at the end of my first year. We’d grown the team by 50%, crowdfunded a tweeting drilling rig, launched our core proof product, received a shoutout from President Obama, and doubled our annual revenue.
I made my first of many trips to sub-Saharan Africa. I met our heroic local partners and the joyful people whom we exist to serve.
There was no going back.
I produced our marketing campaigns, annual gala, and product launches. I took Will and Jada Smith to Ethiopia and hosted a camping trip in the hills of Northern Ethiopia for 40 of the world’s most influential entrepreneurs and founders.
By my 4th anniversary with charity: water, we were raising more than $40 million and reaching over 1 million people with clean water every year. Every single day we came to work in 2014 another 3,000 people traded dirty water for clean water.
I was ready for more. Scott noticed:
“You got the things working pretty smoothly around here. Why not do that for me now?”
I became the Chief of Staff.
My job: Make the CEO as effective and efficient as possible.
That meant I took over the internal aspects of running the day-to-day business, so Scott could stay focused on the future.
We moved to a new office 3x the size, developed the first-ever remote water sensor technology in partnership with Google, and created a Virtual Reality film set in Ethiopia that we simultaneously showed to 400 people in New York. We moved our gala from the Met Pavilion to the Met Museum, and hosted exhibitions around the globe.
We only knew one direction. Up!
We were on fire.
Or so we thought.
THE REBOOT: “Just Fix Everything”.
In December of 2015, for the first time ever, we missed on our annual revenue targets. We raised 20% less than we had the prior year. 20% down wasn’t just a bad year for us — it meant 200,000 fewer people got clean water.
It was a turning point for our adolescent organization. We were cute but we weren’t invincible. What got us here, wasn’t going to get us there.
I was ready to work even harder. So was Scott.
But he was also really tired. He took January off, casually asking me to fill in:
Scott came back recharged and ready to go on February 3rd, 2016.
And I became the COO.
This theoretical operating partner was a mirage Scott had envisioned over the years. Every 6 months or so, he’d ask me —
I think it’s time to hire a COO? What do you think?
It felt like we were always looking for this person. We worked with recruiters, interviewing and sometimes even hiring proven leaders who knew what they were doing, who’d been successful before, who had experience.
But they never clicked. So we gave up and went back to work.
And eventually, that phantom business partner Scott had always searched for, turned out to be me.
When I first showed up at the charity: water office back in 2010, I wasn’t there looking for my dream job. I wasn’t even sure I should be there at all. But I started doing the work. I did what I did well so that Scott could do what he did well. And more than anything, we just showed up. Year after year, week after week, day after day.
In the end, it was a shared passion, a trusting partnership, and plain old hard work that turned me into the COO of charity: water.
It wasn’t what I planned. But it was meant to be.
THE REDESIGN: Rebuilding for resilience.
That first down year in 2015 put the spotlight on a serious gap in our business — our revenue wasn’t repeatable. Every year we started over at zero.
As the COO, I redesigned the org structure around new goals, rebuilt our operating and revenue functions and hand-picked the right leaders for each team. We made a bet on pivoting to a subscription model and then we spent the next six months designing a new monthly giving program.
September 2016, on the organization’s 10th birthday, we launched The Spring with a 20-minute film that I promised Scott no one would watch.
I was wrong. Like 55 million views kind of wrong.
Meanwhile, we invented The Pool, a first-of-its kind equity program that uses proceeds from IPOs to retain and reward nonprofit employees. We were recognized and awarded by Fortune, FastCo, Time Magazine and NYT. We expanded to the UK and launched a New York Times Best Seller, THIRST.
And along the way, The Spring took off.
In just 4 years, the community grew to more than 70,000 passionate monthly donors from 120 countries. Our repeatable revenue from The Spring skyrocketed from $0 to $22M ARR.
We grew 40% in 2017.
40% in 2018.
And then another 30% in 2019.
We celebrated a huge milestone: bringing clean and safe water to 10 million people.
Heading into 2020, we projected yet another record-breaking year. We put up our first $100M+ annual budget — and more importantly, a goal to serve 1.5 million NEW people around the world.
Nothing could stop us now!
ENTER COVID: The uninvited visitor.
But, of course, 2020 had something different in mind for all of us.
On March 4th, we shut down our NYC office, moved 100 team members to an indefinitely-remote work life, recalibrated our plans, and reduced revenue projections by half.
We slashed our budget, took pay cuts, and prepared for a devastating reduction in workforce.
But we couldn’t stop now. Our mission was more important than ever as COVID-19 blew across the globe and began infiltrating the countries where we work in Africa and Asia. These communities would have to fight the virus without clean water to wash their hands.
By the end 2020, with the help of our incredibly devoted supporters and the most talented, passionate team in the world, we raised just shy of our original $100M goal. We came out of the hardest year in our history even stronger.
It was the proudest moment of my career.
And just as 2020 showed us what we were made of, it also reminded me what I’m made for.
As 2020 came to a close, I looked around our now virtual organization, and for the first time in ten years, I said to myself;
“We actually did it!”
No person or company is immune to pain, uncertainty or disappointment. But, I’d come to realize this organization — one that I was lucky enough to fall into a decade ago — was now strong enough to withstand anything that came our way.
HOW IT’S GOING: My job here is done.
I’ve spent the past decade at charity: water scaling a bold vision into the country’s largest water organization.
It’s been the greatest honor and most formative experience of my life. I could stay here forever. I love my role, our team, our supporters and our mission.
But, I’m giving it all up.
Because I believe that in order to grow, I must be uncomfortable. That the smaller my lens, the smaller my potential. So it’s time to forge a new path.
Because if I don’t look for it, it won’t find me.
Ten years ago, before I took a leap of faith, I was driven by my ego. By the idea of what it meant to live in New York City and to work in fashion. By how I described myself to others, and by what others thought of me. My world was narrow and my perspectives were limited. I valued myself on what I had, not what I gave.
I’m more optimistic, grateful, humble and courageous because of charity: water.
I’ve seen what’s possible when you push yourself to the other side of your fear. I’ll never replace the experience I had at charity: water. But that doesn’t mean I get to stop now.
As I wander off into the unknown this time, I can’t wait to uncover what the future is waiting to give back.
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