The Path of Purpose with Jini Sebakunzi

Nicole: [00:00:00] Hi. Thank you so much for joining me. It would be great if you could start with, introducing yourself and telling us a bit about your nonprofit journey. What led you into this work and what keeps you inspired today?

Jini: Cool. Great. Thank you Nicole. It’s a pleasure to be here and, thank for giving me the opportunity to.
To share this to the Hive community as well. I’m kind of new to the community. I’ve been around a few months, so it’s a new, process for me to be part of community. So it’s exciting to share my journey and my experiences. So my name is Jenny. I’m actually originally from Rwanda.
Both my pastor from Rwanda. I basically wear three hats at the moment. I explain my journey, but basically today I wear three hats. I like to say, when I introduce myself my first hat is, I’m an expert in strategic partnerships, fundraising, and grant management. These are the three areas I really focus on my work with different organizations, different actors over the last 20 years.
And the second hat is I actually am a mentor, to entrepreneurs in Africa and social entrepreneurship, something I’m really passionate about. And I’ve been blessed to [00:01:00] begin opportunity to coach entrepreneurs throughout their journey to build their ventures, to SD Gs. And the third hat is a recently teacher at a business school.
Something that I never envisioned to be, but I was given the opportunity to teach to students, bachelor students, about, sustainability and social impact. I do this and I joke that my fourth hat is actually, I’m a father and a husband of three kids, where I actually spent 80% of my time doing basically, to be honest with you.
But it is still an important fourth hat of who I am, so to speak. And now I’ll probably explain to you my journey because I will probably make sense in terms of why I am doing these hats. How I got to wear those hats, through my journey through the NGO journey is ironically, I don’t have a typical, linear career path, so to speak.
I actually started working in the private sector, funnily enough, this was more than 20 years ago. I came out of a university college with in America, with a degree in economics. The statistics, and my goal at the time was to work in banking. That was what I was aiming for, and I got very disillusions with the sector very quickly.
I did a [00:02:00] six months gig and I hated it. It was for most boring job ever. Lot of speculation. I just didn’t like, it wasn’t a good fit for me, but what I knew is I wanted to travel. I wanted to travel around the world. I am from world, like I said, but I grew up in Switzerland, in the uk. You think that would be enough, but it wasn’t.
I wanted to mean more to more countries. And I remember the first job at the second job I got private sector. And I remember being very honest. My job interview, I told my hiring manager at the time, I just wanna travel. You asked me why do you wanna work for the company? You are an international company.
This was an American company all over the world, manufacturing company. They had an office in Geneva for Europe, and basically said, and I told him I would just wanna travel and he hired me and he said, the reason I hired is because you were honest. You didn’t just repeat what was on the brochure, basically said, so I was lugging a sense.
I got to travel. I did about six years of that and I loved it. I learned about business, profitability, operations, all those non, the style actually took me to live in the US for a year and work in the US for a year as well, which is lovely. Great experience, but I got to a [00:03:00] point, it was very interesting.
After six years of doing that, I wanted to make a switch and I wanted to go to the NGO space. Now I’m gonna give you a little bit of context why I made that choice. ’cause it’s for you. It’s good for you to understand that. It’s because basically I am from Rwanda. We all know the history of what happened in the genocide in the nineties when I started working, it was in 2005, I started my private sector career.
Between 2005, 2010, I would go back to Rwanda. I had money, I had an income, so I was, it was relatively expensive to go there at the time, so I would travel a lot and I would see my cousins, and I was amazed by the change of their mindsets. My cousins, my friends of Rwanda, went from a mindset of. I’m studying, not doing a Master’s, but my goal is to go to Europe or North America to get a job, to improve my quality of life.
And that was around 2007. In 2010, speech story changed. They’re like, I’m not interested. I wanna stay in Rwanda. There are jobs, security’s there. I’m happy. I was like, wow, how did this country rebuild itself? And I started reading a lot of books about development. I was curious like, how do [00:04:00] you, who are the actors that are helping local governments rebuild their own country when they go through war or conflict and so on?
So I did a lot of reading and two books I like to always refer is like, one is called Who Owes Who. Very Simple. The title talks about debt of emerging countries, all the debt that they have. And the narrative was about, basically saying that a lot of governments would love to invest in health education.
But a lot of those governments have to pay debt, a lot of creditors, so they can’t allocate funds to those sectors. That’s one argument. And then I read another book, which is Half the Sky. I don’t know if it’s known. It’s an amazing book that talks about the oppression of women in the world, specifically in the global south.
But what I love about the book is it talks about solutions. It talks about how can we help those women in these tough situations? And talked a lot about the NGO work. Doing that on the ground. Really concrete examples of NGOs on the ground, helping women in desperate situations. That inspired me. I was like, well, I wanna work in that space.
I wanna work in that. I wanna do that. So I quit my job in the private sector. I took a [00:05:00] sabbatical, a very bit crazy again, a lot of cultures and countries. I went to Brazil to learn the Afro Brazilian culture, living in favela, learn Portuguese. We can probably do another interview on that, but I’m not gonna go into much detail on that.
And then after that, in 2013, I found a job at the ngo. He was working for climate change NGO, based in Geneva, Switzerland, and I was looking after East African region and I was pretty much doing program management, grant management. We just had a half of my job was managing a grant, a small grant, a community of women.
Trying to improve the livelihoods. And the other halftime of the job was basically getting mandates from governments to do climate change projects. I got to learn, I was working with UN agencies. I got to learn all the whole landscape of the NGO world. I was really, insightful, but three years into it, I got a little bit discouraged.
I saw a lot of rate projects, but it was all funded by donors. And you got an impression that if donors leave or if the money stops. The project stops and I felt, wait a minute, this can be the only way to do this. I was really frustrated. [00:06:00] I was sharing this to a friend of mine, of a dinner and she said, you need to read a book again.
I’m gonna talk about another book. And the book was called Blue Sweater, and it’s called by Jacqueline Novogratz, the founder of Acumen for those who don’t know, and she just shares a story about how she discovered that you social entrepreneurship is basically, you can invest in local entrepreneurs that try to do good on the ground.
And they want to make money, but they also want to create impact, and this is actually doable. She managed to raise a lot of philanthropy funds to fund this, and I got inspired by this and, I applied to work for there every year. Got rejected every year until around year three. I finally got a job interview and I got accepted to do a fellowship.
And that took me and my wife and two kids to Nigeria for three years. So for those three years, I got introduced to the social and entrepreneurship, ecosystem. I was in Nigeria for three years, but it felt like 10 years ’cause I went through so many things and that was my third career almost after private sector NGO social entrepreneurship.
And then 2019 we moved back as a family to Switzerland [00:07:00] and I wanted to do, remain doing that work. But it was difficult to find organization based in Europe doing that work. I still got to link with incubators, accelerators who asked me to coach, like, okay, we don’t really have a position for you, but if, would you be open to coaching?
’cause we have a lot of cohorts of entrepreneurs that we are trying to support them. We do technical training, but we also have a platform of mentors that come in once a week just to accompany them through their journey. So I love doing that. I was doing this and then fast forward to 2021, my fourth career started in philanthropic foundation.
So it’s a grant maker. Global Solidarity Fund at the time was the name, and it was all about alliances. Alliances and collaboration and thinking about how can we collaborate with different actors to improve the livelihoods of refugees, migrants, and eternity. Displaced people in Africa and Latin America.
And I was their first grand manager. We’re a small team, you know, it was literally seven, eight people. And basically I helped them set up all the process of the grants and then I even eventually, manage all the projects and [00:08:00] over the. Past four years, we managed to raise about $10 million. We developed like co-designed 20 projects around the different countries.
Rich, about 200,000 people. It was an amazing experience just learning about how. You can add the governments, the private sector, the angels, the church, even working together for the common good. So that was an amazing journey as well. So that’s kind of my fourth career, and I said I’m exploring that for my fifth career.
What do I do with all this, experience and insight? And I think the second part of your question is what inspires me today? A lot of things inspire me today, but I think what inspires me today is, the people that I met and the work that’s been done is when you do a project and two years later you go back to the same community trying to understand what changed.
It’s amazing how little can transform somebody’s life, basically. And sometimes, and when you get everybody on board to do this work, it can really transform people’s life. And that inspire me that it can be done. There’s a lot of challenges around the world. There’s a lot of complexities, with climate change and et cetera.
Something, it can be very [00:09:00] doom and gloom because all you see is the bad stuff happening and corruption so on. But I always remind myself of all the great organizations on the ground, doing good with limited resources and amazing, creating amazing impact, I always go back to that. It can be done. It’s not like a doom and gloom situation where there’s no hope.
Yeah, there’s a lot of great things that are being done. It’s just we need to do a better job of communicating it around the community that there’s a lot of great things happening, guys. There’s a lot of challenges, but there’s a lot of great things happening. So that inspires me today. Every time I meet people, I found different initiatives and I remember all the things that I’ve done to inspire me, like we, this can be done, so to speak.

Nicole: I love that. I love how intentional your journey was. Like you went to school, and I think your schooling actually probably has informed a lot of the decisions and the trajectory that you’ve gone. But it feels very intentional about how you’ve moved through the sector and these spaces. And I love that.
I think a lot of us find ourselves that we’ve fallen into the nonprofit space, [00:10:00] but you have this path that you’re taking and you’re using your skills, your knowledge, and building it into these next steps. So I’m super excited to see where your chapter five goes, and what that looks like for you.
I also agree, we often focus on that doom and gloom or that polarization or like seeing the negative. And you’re a hundred percent right if we can hone in on it’s so simple, but some, the smallest things can change the path for somebody. And I love that you’ve highlighted that because I think it’s so important to see and celebrate the good work that we have done as a sector to celebrate those and just stop to take a moment to see that and live in that moment and then.
To like that uphill battle, it sometimes feels like, but we are making big change and we’re impacting one life at a time. And I think that is crucial to remember. So thank you so much for that reminder. Absolutely. Yeah. So one question. The one question, that I’m gonna ask next is, [00:11:00] what’s one challenge or shift you’re currently navigating in your organization or the sector and how are you approaching it or what kind of support would help?

Jini: I was thinking about this and I think I love networking, so I do love going to events, conferences, workshops around that. And I think what we know, let’s know, be a bit around the bush, the Trump decision at the beginning of the year had a huge impact on the space. So what’s interesting though, a lot of people, when I start to rethink and I think the biggest challenge is to figure out what is the right model in terms of funding.
I think what I say to a lot of people is when I was young and naive, my career, I used to believe there is poverty because there’s not enough money to spread around the world to support people. And I think I’ve come to realize the money’s not an issue. There’s plenty of money around the world that’s being generated.
The issue is not the money. The issue is funding the will to do this and finding the right model because a lot of people are asking, if you look at the aid system in the last 20 years, it hasn’t worked ’cause we’ve poured billions of dollars and yet we still have those complexities and people are like, what’s [00:12:00] going on?
So people are decided to rethink, okay, maybe we need to do things differently. And I think the biggest challenge in the sector is how do we do things differently moving forward. It’s not about how much money do we need, it’s like how do we invest the right money in the right approach? For the right goals.
How do we make this more intentional and more curious? So when I go to conferences, I always ask that question to panel speaker, what are you thinking? What have you tried differently in the last year that was totally out of the box for you that you wanted to test? And what have you learned from that?
Basically. I always try to do that and I think it’s interesting that, it always take people by surprise. ’cause they never prepare for that type of question. I know this, but they always have a, come up with something. I think it forces people to rethink, to really think about, and what I try to do is I try to tell people, please share your failures.
Don’t be, tell us what mistakes you made in the past that you look back now and we didn’t do this right. We had right intentions, right thought. But then when you look back at it, it wasn’t the right way to do this. We could have done this differently. I think that as a sector it’s important to be open about this.
’cause you know how it is in a sector we all want to look good. Of [00:13:00] course. Yeah, for sure. So we talk about our wins all the time. But I think it’s also very courageous to go out and say, listen, this is what we tried. And Acumen as an organization, I’m inspired by it. ’cause they did that two years ago they released a report about all the mistake they made as an organization and they said it was their responsibility because
we don’t want people to keep making the same mistakes. That’s it. If we’re all transparent about it. Because what you sometimes have to realize that people making the same mistakes ’cause nobody’s open about it, that you shouldn’t do this way if you open about it. Hopefully as a sector, we actually learn from each other and we actually innovate it.
I think that’s one of the biggest challenges for people to own up the mistakes and the failures and or even share their lessons. Here’s what we learned from what we tried, basically. And I think it’s gonna help a lot if you could start doing that.

Nicole: I love that. It’s something I feel like in my core, that we don’t do enough of that in the sector.
And it’s like you said, it’s frowned upon. Like you’re not gonna tell your offenders oh yeah, we try, but it didn’t go as well. Right? We aren’t encouraged to really be innovative as a sector. [00:14:00] Think like we want to be innovative, but that funding doesn’t always get funded, or those projects don’t always get funded.
And if they are focused on innovation, they don’t wanna fund what you’re currently doing. So it’s almost like scope creep or like you’re just trying to think of this new concept, but then you don’t share the results. You don’t share the challenges. You don’t share all these things and then it’s not fundable in the future almost.
I love that you’ve said that, and I think it’s crucial that we actually share these types of failings and or how to be , truly innovative by understanding what has gone. Wrong in the past and not just even like our funder reports. We sometimes to make it sound maybe like, it’s almost like a bias report that we’re sharing basically.
And really let’s just talk about this honestly, what’s actually working and what’s not. And then share that with that. And it doesn’t just live in a funder’s office because who else is that report going to Yeah,

Jini: exactly. And I think 1, inspiration I recently saw [00:15:00] is that I went to a conference and I saw one NGO doing that.
As an example of somebody trying to do this differently is Save the Children, which is a very well known institution around the world. Yeah. Who have the model of A service delivery to help the health of children, which is very noble. But what they’ve tried to do now is they set up a different entity, which is called Save the Children Global Ventures.
With a different approach is basically using philanthropy funds, but now towards social enterprise. So they’re looking for social entrepreneurs that are helping children’s health. So they want to focus on doing it that way rather than doing service delivery. What’s interesting is I met some of the people there, they said, what’s interesting when you trust something different like this, you actually get access to new types of funders that you never had access to.
That also challenges you, makes you think differently , how can we do this differently? That’s an example of Android. They only started this two years because it’s very new. So they’re only figuring out is this gonna work or not, basically. But they took the bold decision. Let’s try a different way of funding, to get richer impact.
The traditional way we’re doing it works of course, to a certain point, but they knew the landscape [00:16:00] of, philanthropies that would funding this was going down basically. Sure. So they looked for different type of funders to fund different types of ways. We still have the same impact, just different methodology.
That inspires me to see that somebody’s trying different, they’re trying out and they’re open about it, they’re piloting this. We’re try and see how, if it’s gonna work out somebody two years and then see, they go out proactively to conferences and share this because, they could easily say, oh, , we’re gonna keep it up to wraps.
Don’t tell anybody about it after 10 years. Then when it works out we go.

Nicole: Like, we always think we’re in competition instead of in collaboration with one another. And I think we’re just, missing the mark there. I think we can really learn from each other so much more.
I love all of this. Thank you for sharing those insights. You’re welcome. Brilliant. So the next question, how have conversations or connections through The Nonprofit Hive helped shape your worker perspective? This could be a person you met, an idea that struck that kind of collaborative, framing. I’d love to hear that.

Jini: I’ve had some really interesting connections. I think one of the things that’s interesting is I was talking to a lot of people in terms of that transition from a full-time professional to a consultant, and I was [00:17:00] curious. I mean I saw a lot of my peers doing that. I’ve seen good friends of mine who have successfully done that, and I was asking, and I met one woman who’s a consultant actually, and she did that transition.
It was really interesting to hear her journey, how she did it. The project comes with it. And, she tell me the mistakes she made, of course. It was really insightful to hear in that sector how, the landscape with how does that work when to a consultant, what, how is that perceived?
How do you get your clients, especially in a year now with budget is tight, are they willing to take a consultant, and all that. And she gave me tips like, if you wanna do this is how I did it. Very simple way, but I was really insightful to get access to people who have that.
And also I met another person who was really interesting, insightful, was about leadership and I love leadership as well. Something that’s a topic I’m really passionate about. I met one of the half committee member who wrote a book about leadership NGOs ’cause of his experience. And it was interesting to hear, and he does coach a lot of leaders in NGO space.
I was interesting to ask him, what are the leadership challenges that the people have in the NGO space? And that was interesting to get insight from him, his experience and it’s funny, I was just listening [00:18:00] to a podcast about this and somebody was saying how it’s interesting if you look at VCs, the way they look at, they’re willing to give millions of dollars to 25 year olds to be a CEO of an organization, but they will give only a hundred K to a 50-year-old leader and NGO.
And they’re like, wait a minute. That doesn’t make any sense. Like it is for some reason, it’s in the space where NGOs leaders are not well res, as respected as in the private sector. We can have somebody who’s really experienced, but for some reason. Then they’re willing to take a bet because it’s an angio field, which is a bit of a shame.
But yeah, so it was interesting. All these types of different conversations I’ve had with different people has been really, insightful.

Nicole: Amazing. I love that. I think there is something brilliant around that peer learning component too. Oh yeah. Everyone’s so much more willing to share where they’re at.
Within their career. It’s almost like a non-threatening environment where you honest and you like people understand the sector. I always say that a lot of people don’t. I can’t talk to my husband about the nonprofit space. I would talk to somebody at the nonprofit hive, right? Of, because they already know that we deserve to get a paid, a [00:19:00] fair salary.
We have to debate those things. Right. So I find it’s like a safe space or a soft spot to land to like just jump into some of the challenges right away. So I think. Those were great examples there.

Jini: Kudos to you for doing this community, for studying that up. I mean, that’s a great, initiative and I think we live in a world where everybody’s always looking for community.
Yeah, for sure. And it’s true that sector, we needed a community of people that understand each other. We can talk about the elephant in the room and share out frustration and successes. And I think it’s great. So thank you for that.

Nicole: Yeah, it’s a Tasha Van Vlack special, but I’m just the support person that I love to play that role for sure, especially in the nonprofit.
Hive. So what’s one insight, resource or mindset that’s helped you recently and might help others in this community too? So something others might, be inspired.

Jini: Yeah, I think it is probably, I go back to what I was saying earlier. I was thinking about what in problem of an insight that I think of a few resources, but an interesting insight that I think about is impacts and how we measure [00:20:00] impacts.
Before the projects earlier my career in the NGO space, when it were impacted was, with the donors, it’s about like, let’s increase income for women. Let’s increase justice. It’s so on. And one thing I learned very quickly about meeting those community members we’re supporting and having that conversation with them, very honest conversation.
Hey, we did this project. It’s been a year into it. What’s the biggest change for you as a person? It was never income. Ironically, ’cause I’ve worked a lot on around livelihoods and getting people outta poverty, that’s gonna be my focus. And we tend to think, people to get outta poverty, they need a higher income, which is true.
Of course, economic mobility gets you outta poverty. That’s a no-brainer. But when we ask people, what’s the biggest change is never income. It’s something totally, unmeasurable, so to speak. And I always seek for that. So I’m gonna give you a couple of examples just to be more precise. I remember working with.
Community woman. This is a project in Burundi, widows women who lost their husbands through war or even through aids. They were running a bakery. It was funded by the UN at the [00:21:00] time, but the bakery ended up being closed because they were, getting out of woods to bake the bread, as you can imagine.
But there was a lot of deforestation around the area. So they had to keep purchasing wood further and further from where air from, so it was higher. Cost. So they were losing money, so they closed it. RNGO came in and said, Hey, we have an innovating idea. We can reopen this bakery, but it can be a solar bakery.
So we removed the cost of wood and use and make a solar oven. Very simple concept. And so we did it. It was a two year project. It was a lot of work, to be honest with you around awareness, expanding solar energy to community. It was, didn’t know what solar energy was. There wasn’t even a rumor that solar gives you cancer.
So we had to explain. No, it doesn’t give you, I mean there’s a lot of things we had to basically dismantle in terms of beliefs. But anyway, a couple years, we did it, the woman who was 13 women, relatively small project. And when I remember going to the field and asking these women, okay, what’s being the biggest impact?
And we had data, we knew they were earning more income. ’cause these women actually before the bakery were farmers predominantly. They were just farmers. So we had an idea how much they earned farming, how much you earn in the bakery. So we knew the increase of income and I [00:22:00] just wanted to get their perspective about this.
And they all told me something that I never thought of. And one woman said the biggest impact is now a few part of a community. Because my daily life as a farmer is eight hours on the field under the sun. It’s physically hard, but it’s lonely. You’re basically on your own just doing crops and that’s it.
But at the bakery, people come in, buy bread and we get to a conversation. I feel part of a community because we get to know each other. For her, that was like priceless and she didn’t realize until she did it. And that for her was the biggest change for her. Yes, she got more money. She’s thankful for it, of course.
But the thing she gets the most satisfaction is that. As being part of a community. And that just opened my mind like, wow, I never thought about that. That’s what people want basically. And like how, and we never expected, we never planned. But that’s not something you can measure, so to speak.
That’s a very, impactful, outcome basically. And it’s something that you tell the donors, they understand it. They don’t really need the number to it, but they understand the value of that, so to speak. [00:23:00] And that, for me, was really insightful early in my career. This was back in 2015.
Of always seeking that, you know, what is that intangible outcome that you, and sometimes I don’t even ask them, it becomes unnatural from them, to be honest with you. You can always do it in a certain way when you have a conversation to get that information. But always trying to look for that and be attention to it, you know?
And just simply ask, not go straight to the money. How much money do you earn now? Like, go to the first, what’s the big, simple, open question? What has been the biggest change for you in this intervention? And they can free to say whatever they want basically. And you’d be surprised at what they say.
It might come up with something you never thought of. And I thought that was really insightful.

Nicole: It’s such a human approach to it too. Like a genuine curiosity and you’re asking somebody like, what is actually meaningful for them? ’cause it, you’re right, it’s totally different for everybody.
I love that. Thank you so much for sharing that. I grew up in a farming community, so. Is hard. I can fully respect that. And the idea, we used to have a market [00:24:00] as well and that was my favorite part of it actually. So Yeah,

Jini: exactly. When

Nicole: I totally get it. That’s amazing. Thank you so much for your insights.