Solutions that Scale

Tell us about the journey you took from World Vision to United Way and now Opportunity International. Did that journey reflect your own personal evolution about your personal mission, your convictions and how to make an impact in the world?

That's a complex question. You ask hard questions, Thuy.

I enjoy asking people hard questions!

Yes, it does. Yes, it does. I have to think about how in that, you know, the if I look back at it all now, 40 years into my career, what do I do well? What I think I do well is, is to get a group of talented people together and focus them on very, very complex problems and find effective, scalable solutions to these problems and then build, if you will, a machine or a process to deliver those solutions predictably at massive scale. Right. That's it. Now, it's something that I have picked up over many, many years of just working in the international space. And I've done it in the public sector. In the private sector now. In the community sector. The second thing that I do know, I'm a banker, you know, I spent many years and I do know the good that good bankers can do in this world. If you doubt me just look back at the last financial crisis. At what cost? So, yes, you need good bankers. And if you have good bankers in a country, in a community, that community does well. So in terms of my own point in life and as I look at this part of my life and that's what I look at is, oh, if I can bring in my opportunity, if I can bring all of my skills of figuring out how to build complex institutions with talented people to deliver very hard things. Make them look straightforward and do them repeatedly on the one side. But then, frankly, use my personal skills and the craft that I have learned of banking and now take that and apply it at the very, very bottom of the pyramid to people who have never dreamt of things that you and I take for granted. You know that we have a living wage, that we have spending power...

That we have food on the table, a roof over our heads.

A roof that doesn't leak. We have motorized transport, and things like that. We can catch a plane. Our kids can go to school. We have assurance about tomorrow. Some people never have that and give them and let them own for themselves and build for themselves the economic means to realize a part of that life. I can't think of a better way to spend my time.