We were refugees. Mom scraped together all we had (three suitcases and $3,000) and bundled my three siblings and me onto a plane bound for Idaho. My father was captive in Iran’s Evin Prison. This was the result of Iran’s state-sanctioned persecution of Bahá’ís, which continues to this day. I was two years old.

It was freezing in Idaho Falls when we landed but the local Bahá’í community welcomed us at the airport with warm coats. They held a banner inscribed with a Bahá’í quotation: “The Earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.”

After a few months we moved to Knoxville, Tennessee. We all got to work, and my oldest siblings enrolled in university. In Tehran, Dad had been an accountant and Mom was a teacher, a singer, and an entrepreneur, but with limited English, Mom and my siblings took any jobs they could find: disinfecting shoes at a bowling alley, cleaning hotels, and serving free samples at Sam’s Club. I got busy learning English so I could become Mom’s interpreter. After two years of torture in prison, bruised and exhausted, but with faith unbroken, Dad eventually joined us in Knoxville.

We endured because we had each other, determination, and a lot of help. This help came in different shapes and sizes: We depended on food stamps and leaned on our local community. I applied for every scholarship I could find. Over a period of 15 years, we slowly climbed out of poverty.

I promised myself that I wouldn’t forget what want felt like and how hard I had found it to prop up my dignity. My mom went shopping at night to have a smaller audience and fewer dirty looks as we rifled through our food stamps. She did this with grace, and it taught me a lot. The morning after one such grocery trip, I decided to crowdsource the money I didn’t have from my sixth-grade peers to get our teacher an end-of-year thank-you gift. This was my moment of clarity. The more my agency grew, the less the want stung. I decided that my job would be to do this for other people.

This is why I’m obsessed with financial inclusion, economic equity, and global development. I learned about the potential of community and collective action because of this initial poverty, and I have spent the last 20 years working on both sides of the fundraising and grantmaking table. I am a better funder because I was a beneficiary and grantee, a better innovator because limited means tend to force creativity, and a better multilingual leader because I wore different hats—social entrepreneur, field researcher, program and operations leader, corporate intrapreneur, and development finance, policy, and regulations designer.

Despite my childhood poverty, my upbringing was full of love and joy. While my parents have since passed, I continue to act on the lessons they taught me about resilience. “Make your life count,” Mom always said. In the Bahá’í Faith, work can be a form of worship. Those words, and Mom’s commitment to making our lives better, continue to motivate me. I hope I can continue to use these experiences, having lived on both sides of poverty and finance, in corporate board rooms and communities, to lead collective action toward systems change and a more just and equitable world.

Photos from Rosita’s childhood and career:

Rosita Najmi is executive director of the Micron Foundation. In addition, she has been a leader at the World Bank, the Gates Foundation, Omidyar Network, Accion, Mercy Corps, and the social impact arms of PayPal and UPS. Her TED Talk on multilingual leadership has been translated into 13 languages.

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