Can you speak about the impact on beneficiaries you have witnessed while working at WE?

One of the things our leadership team did an exceptional job at doing was building safe spaces, or even brave spaces for young people to learn together. We created environments—be it at camp, during a school workshop or during a trip—that made young people feel comfortable learning about injustice and supporting their struggles to make sense of how they—and we—can do something about it. I believe our programs let young leaders learn about themselves, their peers, their communities and the world—all by teaching them about hope.

I now run a facilitation consulting firm in New York City, and there is no I would be as good at it without my work experience at WE. WE was the kind of place where you were given a wild amount of opportunity—and if you had the kind of personality that loves a challenge and is addicted to problem solving then, like me, you’d thrive there. Its as if I put in the 10,000-hour rule (Malcolm Gladwell’s concept) into learning how to build a high-functioning team and develop badass programming that multiple stakeholders truly cared about. And for me, it was fun!

At my consulting firm, I work with a lot of different organizations and I get to experience their organizational culture. The way I see it is that personality is to a person the way culture to an organization. If WE were a person, her personality would be kind, clever, effective and entrepreneurial. Not all organizations have this culture, but the people who work there—in my time and now—have always seemed to embody these personality traits. And these same people seem to build really high-functioning teams. I miss that about working at WE because when you are exposed other team cultures, you realize how rare it is.