5 Reflections after 5 Years of Leading the Social Impact Organization Wish for WASH
Still reeling in the surreal. I was on stage with two other Georgia Tech women in STEM, wearing colorful dresses and talking about toilets. It was 2014, and we were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed undergraduates from one of the best colleges in the world. And we were driven by a mission — to bring innovation to sanitation with a gender equity and design thinking lens.
Then following the pitch, which I had overhauled a few hours before based on some last minute, deeply critical feedback, Emmy Award Winning CBS Contributor Faith Salie shouted our names on stage and on live TV that was being streamed across the state of the Georgia. We had won both the People’s Choice Award and the First-Place Award at the Georgia Tech Inventure Prize Competition, making us the first all-female team to win the largest undergraduate invention competition in the United States.
And from that moment on, I have continued speeding ahead full throttle across 10 countries, in the public, private and social enterprise sectors, and all in the name of inclusion and innovation in the sanitation sector. Still reeling in the surreal.
Six weeks after our astounding win, our team experienced our first “glow up” where we progressed from the on-stage foam prototype to nearly a dozen manufactured toilets which were shipped to a refugee camp in northern Kenya. Here, under the auspices of the sanitation enterprise Sanivation, we participated in our first usability pilot.
Our journey was launched in a beautiful display of love and community when our Georgia Tech peers, professors and individual families (Shout-out to the best parents and sister in the whole world!) hustled to help us. They helped us manually pull plastic toilet molds at strange hours in the Georgia Tech design shop, shipped the parts and construction materials to the refugee camp, and provided an enabling environment in which we could grow and thrive.
We concluded the summer with a series of learnings about how to improve our toilet based on user feedback, and we sought to iterate it in the name of design thinking, which has been integral to our work from the start. In the fall of 2014, I founded Wish for WASH, and I have grown by its side over the past 5 years.
While in this season of thanks, as I marinate and meditate on musings that are the Wish for WASH story, I want to share 5 notable reflections that are top of mind.
1. Defining What It Means To Be an Expert
I have frequently asked the people in my immediate spheres of influence about ‘what it means to be an expert’. Do you just wake up one day and feel that you have now absorbed enough knowledge in your interest area to claim the status of ‘expert’? Or do you immediately become an expert the day that you complete a degree or certificate program? Or if enough people call you an expert, is that when you become one?
I began grappling with this issue over the course of the past 5 years as I have increasingly been labeled as an expert when I myself had not yet claimed that professional status. Beyond talking and processing with my communities of support about this, I have also begun defining what ‘being an expert’ means to me and what things I will align with as well as what I will not align with.
For instance, my 5+ years of work in the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector in primarily the innovator, researcher, and communicator functions does make me a relative expert in a host of roles within the WASH space. However, while my extensive work in Sub-Saharan Africa over the past 5 years gives me a more realistic and nuanced picture of the realities of WASH-related work within the region compared to others who have not worked in the region as long, it does not, by any means, make me an ‘African expert’, which is a label that has been given to me quite a few times over the past few years.
I have come to align with, and increasingly claim, my growing expertise in my technical area of interest (WASH); however, I do not subscribe to the notion that non-African nationals can be ‘African experts’ as I believe that reinforces a pervasive neocolonial narrative and silences the voices of the brilliant minds that are actually from the region. These definitions that I have outlined for myself have helped me in both my personal and professional development, as I strongly believe that words matter.
2. The Importance of Claiming Your Space
Similar to my personal journey with the term ‘expert’ as described previously, Wish for WASH as an organization has experienced a bit of mission drift as we sought to find our niche within the WASH sector. We started as solely a product company and then pivoted to include research and education, which has been an incredible adventure in finding a way to have sustainable impact through a mission-oriented organization.
Due to high manufacturing costs and the complexity of overall logistics, with the support of our organizational advisors and my individual mentors, we have needed to redefine ourselves several times over the past few years. But while that process was often ambiguous, for me as the lead, it is really amazing to reflect back and see where we are today: a network of 100+ young and diverse professionals, all under the age of 30, who have been a part of the Wish for WASH journey since 2014.
And we now can claim our space as our growing mission is to bring more diverse minds, talent, and innovation to the problems of global health and water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) through the lens of research, design and education because #everybodypoops. With this change of our mission statement, it is clear that our organizational impact is no longer tied to the impact of a single toilet design, but it is captured by the youth-led and women-led movement that we have created to help the world reach the 6th Sustainable Development Goal. Claiming this space has enabled us to be more clear internally as we seek to grow in the future. I am incredibly grateful for the people who walked with me through all of these iterations and helped us reach this point of clarity and purpose.
3. Applying a Design Thinking Iterative Approach To Yourself
As a product designer with deep professional roots in the Design Thinking Methodology, I am quite familiar with the concept of not being married to any professional products that I create but being married to the process. The goal of approaching work in this way helps me to reframe ‘failures’ as just a part of the process of iteration and implementation until the output (be it a piece of design work, a research proposal, a manuscript, communications strategy, etc) best meets the needs of the end user or audience.
However, over the past few years growing as the leader of Wish for WASH, I have realized the importance of internally applying these same principles to myself. As a human-being who happens to be occupying a leadership role, I do make mistakes. And for me, some of those mistakes have hurt and felt more personal than others.
I am still working on truly internalizing this reflection into my life’s practice. However, I think the idea of approaching personal or leadership ‘failures’ as parts of the journey (and reframing them as opportunities to iterate and continue to grow) is a healthy way to strive to be both a responsible and servant leader. And in this increasingly polarized world, I have a deep respect for those who strive to lead with these leadership approaches.
4. The Need for Leaders to Lift As They Climb
Over the course of the past 5 years, it has become increasingly clear to me that ‘with great power comes great responsibility’. I have been blessed with incredible communities of support that have enabled me to grow and thrive as blossoming innovator and thought-leader in the WASH sector.
The opportunities that have been afforded to me by my communities of support have given me a platform to better advocate for increased representation of diverse voices in the WASH sector with a particular focus on women, youth, and people of color. I firmly believe in the notion that responsible and servant leaders seek to lift as they climb to amplify not only underrepresented voices in the sector, but the voices of their team to ensure their professional development and ownership of products.
The decentralized and remote nature of Wish for WASH has facilitated an environment where our team members have had the opportunity to own products and processes rather than having it all led directly by me. While there have been some logistical challenges, overall, our 5 Year Wish for WASH Impact Survey revealed the value of the professional development opportunities and autonomy afforded to our team members.
5. Family Over Everything
And last but not least — family. As a person of faith, this mantra has always been central to my ethos, and as a young and growing leader, I could not align with it more. For those who know me personally, you know that my family is my rock. They are my biggest cheerleaders, support system and enablers, despite how crazy my ideas may sound. My family is always there for me, no matter what the topic is or which time zone I am based in. And as I have gotten older, this blessing is not lost on me and I am so thankful for it.
Because of this, I have sought to create a family environment within Wish for WASH. While not completely successful and with room for improvement, I do think that my team members feel seen, heard and valued. The work that we do is important, but the people doing the work — and their stories, visions, and needs — are equally as important.
My biggest realization over the years is the value of loving your people. Seek to love your teammates, your co-workers, your supervisors. Despite hardships, obstacles and differences. Show up for them. And approach them with respect and grace. It is not always easy and is a space where I am excited to continue growing. But overall, family — no matter how you define it — is everything.
So with that, I am ecstatic to still be reeling in the surreal. It has been 5 years and we are just getting started. Happiest Birthday, Wish for WASH! I am forever grateful for the person you have inspired me, and continue to inspire me, to become and the amazing people that I am blessed to work and grow with.
Onwards and upwards. The best is yet to come.
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