Tjada D’Oyen McKenna

Chief Executive Officer, Mercy Corps

Where are you currently based?

I’m currently based out of our Washington DC office.

Is this the headquarters (HQ) location for Mercy Corps?

No actually – Mercy Corps was historically headquartered in Portland Oregon. However, of our US employee base, about half are in Oregon and another half are in DC or remote locations. We also have a European headquarters in Edinburgh, with additional offices and/or staff in the Hague, London, Paris, and Geneva. In this era of centering the populations we serve, I want to move beyond the idea of HQ and non-HQ offices. It’s a silly divide and doesn’t accurately reflect who we are and who we want to be. We are a globally distributed workforce with 90% of our staff working in the countries where we have programming and those staff include folks working in the country and those with regional and global roles.

I admire that you are taking a lead in tackling language in this space. So, how long have you been working in the humanitarian sector?

Full-time, I have been working in the sector since 2006, so for 17 years. I have an additional 2 years in adjacent work so almost 20 years in total. It hasn’t felt that long actually as I did enter the sector after a 10-year private sector career

Can you speak more on that? I feel a lot of people think they must enter development a certain way, for example straight out of university, or through an internship which isn’t always accessible.

Yes, my original path was to pursue a business career and I really enjoyed that. In fact, it was through private sector consulting work that I learned about agriculture and its role in African economies which ultimately led me to the Gates Foundation. I leveraged my knowledge to become an early employee of the Gates Foundation’s agricultural development team. My work was focused on bringing markets to smallholder farmers, so it was still very enterprise oriented. I assumed I would leave Gates and return to the private sector. I had no idea what a career in this sphere could look like for me and when I joined the Gates Foundation in the early aughts, not enough people had left the foundation for me to have solid role models.

I feel there are some real benefits when people spend time outside of the sector in seeing different organizations or other thought models that we can also apply here. In the early days of my time in this sector, I added value by translating and brokering relationships between the private sector and this sector.

As we hire people, we need to look at talent in different ways and understand the value that people from outside the sector can bring to our work. There are some jobs where we need someone with a PhD, but there are others where we don’t. We need to have some flexibility to continue to innovate and best serve our participants. I think there is a tendency in our sector to dismiss those who haven’t done a substantial amount of work on our priorities or within our geographies. I think that is a mistake.

“We need to at talent in different ways and understand the value that people from outside the development sector can bring to our work”

I agree! And I’d like to touch on your background working on market access with smallholder farmers. In much of your career, you’ve worked specifically on global hunger. What drew you to this topic and what opportunities can be best leveraged to combat global hunger?

I really had no business working on agriculture to begin with – I had never been on a farm until my work career! But as I started to travel within Africa for my work, I began to understand where poverty was concentrated and it was often within smallholder farmers, particularly women. I was drawn intellectually to the role agriculture played not only economically, but in household roles for example. The rest of my career has looked more broadly at global hunger and how food security affects many areas, since food is such a basic cornerstone of people’s day-to-day lives and economic activities.

In terms of opportunities, I think there is still more to be done to help smallholder farmers adapt to climate change and to incorporate nutrition more fully into the food security sphere leveraging research and behavioural science. On a macro level, we still have much to do to tell the story of how trade and debt policies can further undermine smallholder farmers.

Thank you for sharing. To shift gears here, as the sole Black American female heading an international aid organization, what does it feel like to be in spaces of power as a marginalized person?

As a Black woman the intersectionality of my experience is clear. But as a Black American woman there is an added dimension to ensure that I really do understand what people of colour in different countries are experiencing and feeling. It’s not all the same. I recognize the added dimension of not being African yet doing a lot of work within the continent. Sometimes, it’s just noticing the disparate treatment that people give me as opposed to a national Country Director just because of my nationality. I am very conscious of this, and my focus at Mercy Corps is to ensure all team members are heard. Every organization has a dominant culture and I want to make sure ours isn’t one of outspoken Americans talking over people.

There is a unique pressure to being an “only” and I want to do my part to end my status as an “only.” I feel an extra responsibility not to misstep or fail, for fear that my missteps could be held against another Black candidate. I was raised by parents who came of age during the Civil Rights movement. I was taught that any embarrassment or failure that I had was a dishonour to my race. That’s heavy, but that’s how many Black Americans were raised. 

“There is a unique pressure to being an ‘only’ and I want to do my part to end my status as an ‘only’”

Those are some great points. People tend to think of us Black folk as a homogeneous group.

Exactly – I can't assume when talking to my Kenyan female colleague that our experiences are the same. But on the other hand, at our latest regional meeting, so many Africans came up to say, “we’re so proud, it’s great to see a Black woman as CEO”. This was very humbling and touching to me.  There’s so much of this work that's been a joy. Every career has its challenges, but I would take ours over anything else. My life has been so enriched from people I have met either on our own teams or participants.

On the flipside of this, it's fair to say that the international development sector is still having a reckoning with regards to racism and the white saviour complex. What areas do you think that we can build momentum on for sustainable change?

First, promote leaders that truly represent the areas that we serve. I am careful when I say this – we have an Ethiopian national as the Ethiopian Country Director, for example, but I want us to think of that person as the global CEO of Mercy Corps too. I would love for my successor to be from the global South. Second, we should recognize different communication styles and cultural norms and what unconscious biases may be present. A good degree of humility is needed, as well as collectively challenging each other in this sector to make sure that our decisions are being made with those we serve, and not just for those we serve.

The image of the expat aid worker is shifting as well. The reality is one of the largest groups of expats in many organisations are from Kenya or Nepal, not the US or Europe. That’s a beautiful thing. But I’d like to see these people becoming the CEO or COO of their respective organisations, not just Chief of Party or Country Director – if they choose to.

“Fighting the saviourism trope is a daily battle for us, so it’s important to challenge it where we see it”

So given your impressive career, what is one piece of advice you give to your younger self?

Work to put yourself in environments where you can thrive. I have found if a place doesn’t have the same cultural values, then it is hard for me to be proud of the work that I do in that organization. I’d also add, figure out where your strengths lie, where you stand out and actively seek out those people, values, and opportunities. At one point in my career, I realised that I work better at a global level and that I am better served looking at food security across multiple continents than being the expert in a specific country and I have stuck to that path and honed my skills in that area.

Be confident – especially in this line of work. Development is not like the corporate world where it matters if you hit your numbers this quarter or not. We are dealing with people and sometimes emotion or hunches carry as much weight as data, so if you’re not confident, you will get destroyed because everyone will argue with you about everything. People have strong opinions, but it doesn’t mean theirs are any more informed than yours.

What advice would you give to Black folk who are the few in the room? How do you thrive in those situations?

I think sometimes when we are the only person in the room, we may feel the need to just fit in and not stand out too much. Instead, we should think, ‘ok I’m the only person, how do I take advantage of this? What unique voice and perspective am I bringing’ In addition, sometimes your statements will have even more of an impact because it was said by the only Black person in the room. It can be hard sometimes, because I grew up in the generation that said you had to be twice as good to get the same thing. I think this generation doesn’t buy into that which I’m so happy about. You don’t have to be perfect – people shouldn’t be scared or feel the need to censor themselves or their experiences as a Person of Colour.

We shouldn’t be scared to take up thornier topics, to say ‘hey, are we thinking about this as Americans or as people who are from this context?’ We do this work because we care, and that in and of itself has a saviourism aspect. Fighting this saviourism trope is a daily battle for us, so it’s important to challenge it where we see it.

A lot of people come into this path through the Peace Corps. I had student loans to pay out of college, I wasn't going to the Peace Corps. Clinton White, who is serving at the most senior foreign service level position at USAID, is a Black American. There are, and throughout history there have been other great Black American foreign service officers. I wish they had been present and visible to me much earlier to me in my career. I think there's a lot of rewarding work to be done in development and it remains a sector that's invisible to people.