how we got into this whole OF thing

I started moonlighting.  In the days I managed finances and spent the evenings and weekends working with local people in my company to set up giving committees in Australia, the Czech Republic, Germany and India that still distribute more than $200,000 into their communities annually. 

My experience in international giving, combined with a trek through the villages of Northern Thailand convinced me that I wanted to work with communities in the developing world.  Their resourcefulness impressed me most about people in the global South and their ability to leverage whatever they had was most acute in medical endeavors. 

This observation inspired me to turn my first trip to Africa into a fundraising trek to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro.  Summit for Smiles raised nearly $40,000 from more than 250 people in 29 countries with all the money going to The Smile Train. The effort funded 160 cleft palate corrective surgeries and gave me the confidence to leave a promising career track to start my own social venture. .

When my friend Shannon told me about OF, I was shocked that such an inequity existed in our world.  After months of reading everything I could find on the topic, I believed that my background in cross-cultural process improvement could help transform the space. I left my job at the end of March 2008 and launched OperationOF at the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford University.

on a snowy road in Utah in 2005 when an emotional revelation spurred by an audio book about the American Civil Rights movement inspired me to act.  You see, I wanted to do something that mattered -  make a positive impact in the world.  Only problem was that I had absolutely no idea what I could do or how to even begin.

There were endless opportunities to volunteer in my community, but I was ready to make a career shifting move and couldn’t really visualize the tangible reality of what that actually meant.  Volunteer for a year? Was that the best use of my skills? What about after that?  In need of some answers, I started reading and talking to people and devoted most of my spare time to the exploration possibility.

At some point in my journey, I learned about social entrepreneurship, which breaks the mold of traditional charity and approaches social value creation from a business perspective.  Perfect!  I decided this sounded like my cup of tea.

With a general idea of function, I needed to figure out which social cause to champion. As if on cue, an opportunity popped up for me to help grow my employer’s corporate social responsibility actions internationally.

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