At fourteen, a scholarship opened a door I could not have opened myself.
It was a scholarship to study languages, in a city far from the northern Albanian village where I grew up as the eldest of five. It led to further education in Tirana, then the US, then a career that crossed continents. None of that was inevitable. It required effort, but it required access first. Someone deciding to make a door available.
That knowledge is hard to unknow. Once you understand that access, not just talent or drive, is often what separates who rises from who doesn’t, you start paying attention to it differently. You start noticing the doors that are locked for people who should have been through them by now.
Opening doors became the thread for me.
* * *
For twenty years, a demanding institutional career ran alongside that thread. The career enabled the giving — it built the expertise, the network, the financial means, the platform that amplified certain things. The giving was always its own thing, running alongside the career without belonging to it.
What I do has never fit neatly under one label. Part of it is financial and direct — a cousin’s four young children after their mother died in childbirth, a woman rebuilding her life after leaving an abusive marriage with nothing behind her, a refugee single mother in London starting again from close to nothing. These are not programmes. They are people. The giving is quiet and specific, which is partly the point.
Part of it is expertise and time — Future Ready, a programme I founded that connects professionals with charity beneficiaries navigating career and skill change. Enabling mentoring and education through Albanian Professionals in the UK Foundation. Serving as a patron for a free leadership programme for European youth. Mentoring young people and women when they need a trusted sounding board. Each is a door held open.
The career made all of this easier. But when I left last year, the thread didn’t break. It just became more visible — because it showed that the thread endures outside of the career choice.
* * *
The transition did something else too. It raised the question I had not quite asked directly before: does this giving — this collection of quiet, personal, mostly invisible acts — add up to anything coherent? Or is it just a series of responses to people and situations that happened to be in front of me?
I have not had a good framework for answering that question. Until recently.
A few months ago I joined a Women Emerging expedition, a seven-month leadership expedition for women philanthropists, led by Julia Middleton, author of ‘If That’s Leading, I’m In’. The group spans the globe and comes together each month to share and reflect collectively around one of the themes from the book.
What the expedition offers is not answers but a frame — and a peer group who take the question seriously enough to spend seven months with it. Women who have been giving for decades, in different ways, at different scales, asking the same questions about what it means and where it comes from and how it changes.
For the first time, I have a proper occasion to examine the thread. Not just follow it.
I will share my personal reflections through the Women Emerging expedition
here through a monthly dispatch. The first dispatch — on (leadership) Essence — publishes next week.