Tjada D’Oyen McKenna (MBA 2002) sits in front of a photo mural on the walls of the Mercy Corps offices in Washington, DC

After a full-on morning of Zoom sessions from her home office in Potomac, Maryland, Tjada D’Oyen McKenna (MBA 2002) climbs into her SUV and plugs the coordinates of Mercy Corps’s DC office into Waze. She finds a parking garage on 19th Street and then, out on the sidewalk, double-checks the address. She knows she’s in the right place when she finds Hugh Donnelly in the lobby. The director of facilities is visiting from headquarters in Portland, Oregon, and this afternoon he’s hosting a tour of the space—and assigning McKenna a key card. Ten months in as CEO of the humanitarian aid organization, it’s finally her first day in the office.

One by one, a few other senior leaders assemble in the lobby for the 1 p.m. tour, including the new general counsel and chief of staff, both of whom started remotely in June. They have been collaborating with McKenna on any number of major issues over several weeks—onboarding a new leadership team, steering the NGO through the pandemic, finding ways to continue to deliver aid in the 40 countries where Mercy Corps operates—but this August afternoon marks their first meeting in real life. They celebrate with elbow bumps and a hurried hug or two before everyone squeezes into the elevator for the trip to the sixth floor.

The doors open to the welcoming scene of the Mercy Corps logo, splashed in red above the reception desk. McKenna’s face, or at least the half of it that’s visible above her mask, lights up at the sight of it. It’s been a long journey to this point. She and her family, including husband Joe and two young sons, have just moved up from Atlanta, where she had been working remotely since starting the role in October 2020. This is her first gig as chief executive, but it’s one she has long envisioned. As a little girl, growing up first in the DC area and then later in Connecticut, McKenna dreamed of running a Fortune 500 company.

As CEO of Mercy Corps, McKenna is leading a massive operation with half a billion dollars in revenues and almost 6,000 people providing aid and economic opportunity in some of the toughest environments around the world. On top of these baseline operations, which have been expanding since its founding in 1979, the NGO has rushed to the frontlines of the pandemic. The virus has reversed decades of progress, particularly in places that lack access to vaccines, worsening hunger, poverty, gender inequality, and conflict—the impacts of which could be more deadly than COVID-19 itself. The global picture is staggering: The United Nations predicts that 235 million people will need humanitarian aid by the end of this year, an increase of 40 percent over 2020.

Meanwhile, much closer to home, Mercy Corps is still recovering from a crisis of its own, after an abuse scandal in 2019 that led to the ouster of its previous CEO and a number of senior leaders. Now all eyes are on McKenna to lead the organization through the turmoil and out the other side. As she and her new executive team assemble in the DC office, touring the space that has been renovated and expanded for their presence, there’s a sense that the momentum is already underway. It’s the first time the CEO has been stationed on the East Coast, rather than its Portland headquarters, and the choice was deliberate. Between her presence and experience, as well as her particular brand of service leadership, McKenna is already shifting the organization’s center of gravity ever so gently, inclining it toward a new future.

“No Mercy” broke on a Tuesday and spread through Mercy Corps headquarters like lightning. Team members arriving at the office on October 8, 2019, sat down to read the Oregonian’s article and absorb the uncomfortable fact that Ellsworth Culver, a cofounder of the humanitarian aid organization, had abused his daughter over the course of many years. The trauma of the victim’s experiences was gutting; the way it had been handled by leadership amounted to a particularly bitter betrayal for staff.

The newspaper’s 10-month investigation revealed that Tania Culver Humphrey had met with Mercy Corps leaders in 1992 to report what had happened to her. But senior leaders, some of whom were her father’s friends, ultimately allowed Culver to stay on in a senior role at the organization until his death in 2005, when he was celebrated for promoting peace and human rights around the world. In 2018, the organization announced a new ethics policy, so Culver Humphrey came forward with her story once again. Leadership rebuffed her a second time, so she met with the Oregonian.

Team members were stunned by what they read. For many, including the NGO’s managing director of digital marketing, Mark Jacobs (MBA 2007), working at the international organization reflected a choice: to do innovative work and “to feel good about waking up to go there every day,” as he puts it. The team of 260 in Portland supports more than 5,000 others spread across 40 countries in the day-to-day work of its mission to alleviate suffering, poverty, and oppression by helping people build secure, productive, and just communities. In 2020, their efforts reached 37 million people. That senior leaders had so profoundly failed this survivor—and put the organization ahead of her well-being—was unthinkable.

As Tuesday tumbled into Wednesday, CEO Neal Keny-Guyer hosted a town hall meeting; apologies were issued. Jacobs remembers the week as “unlike anything I’ve experienced,” he says. “On Thursday, what felt like all of the employees at our headquarters spontaneously gathered on the top floor, where our CEO’s office was, and one by one passionately voiced their thoughts and feelings about the situation to each other and our local leadership team. People did not hold back,” Jacobs recalls. “Not even a little.”

Gisel Kordestani (MBA 2003) was also among those gathered on the fourth floor that day. The “expectations of integrity and display of compassion really reflect Mercy Corps team members around the world and how they show up for work every day,” says Kordestani, cofounder of the tech startup Crowdpac and a former director at Google. She had served on the Mercy Corps board since 2014 and was preparing to take over the role of chair later that month. When she found out about the Oregonian’s report, she dropped everything and got to Portland as quickly as she could. By the end of the day on Thursday, Keny-Guyer had resigned. Kordestani was left holding the bag.

Straight away, it was clear they would need to hire a new CEO. “But we couldn’t bring someone on until we knew what we were looking at,” Kordestani explains. The board asked CFO Beth deHamel to step in as interim CEO, a role she filled for a year while the leadership team, cleared of those who had been involved in the mishandling, commissioned independent investigations to understand exactly how things had gone so wrong. They interviewed employees, partners, donors, and competitors to tease apart what was working, what wasn’t, and what the NGO’s future should look like. “A lot of stuff came out of the woodwork, and there was a lot of strife,” Kordestani says. “We decided to make the most of this crisis and change everything that needed to be changed, all in one go.”

McKenna had followed the story as it unfolded in the news. She had long admired the work of Mercy Corps, especially during her time as COO of the aid organizations CARE and Habitat for Humanity. Before that, she had worked in the public sector (at USAID), philanthropy (at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), and the business world (with roles at General Electric, American Express, and McKinsey). Mercy Corps saw in McKenna’s candidacy precisely what they needed: a doer rather than a figurehead, with the deep sector experience and the business expertise required to recover from the crisis and set a new course for the future—and to lead the way with integrity and compassion.

In truth, McKenna didn’t know the full picture of what she would be stepping into if she were to take the job. By the time the CEO search was coming to a close, the results of the latest internal investigation hadn’t been publicly released yet. “I wouldn’t let Tjada accept the offer until she knew what was going on—but we couldn’t tell her what was going on because it was confidential,” Kordestani recalls. Once they felt confident that McKenna was ready to accept the role, Mercy Corps leadership shared the detailed findings of the investigation with her. (As a group, they revealed organizational mishandling and a greater scope of abuse than was originally realized.) After that, Kordestani says they gave their candidate an out. “Bravo to her, she came anyway,” she says. “And I’m so grateful that she did.”

On a Wednesday afternoon in early August, McKenna is Zooming from her home office with her head of strategy when the door bursts open behind her. “Is Uncle Sean coming over tonight?” Her son Colson, 8, has bounced up the stairs and straight into her video frame. Dad catches up seconds later, gives Colson an about-face, and closes the door gently behind them. McKenna is patient about the visit, and she makes no effort to conceal it. “Part of what I’m doing is just acknowledging the realness of what we’re going through,” she explains. This is what leading with transparency can look like in the day-to-day.

For all its potential messiness and vulnerability, transparency is a key page in McKenna’s playbook for rebuilding trust. “We have to make sure our actions always match our values,” she says, and that means being as open about the little things as the big ones.

Here’s a sense of what that can look like when the stakes are higher: The second phase of the investigation into organizational failures was released in May 2021, seven months after McKenna’s arrival. It differs from its predecessor in one significant way. It’s all out there, with links to complete findings (and warnings to the reader, due to the disturbing details). Once the survivor had given her permission to share her story, McKenna pushed the board to share everything and to be as inclusive as possible. Now every official communication is also closed captioned and translated into three languages. McKenna is adamant that the path back to trust starts with “acknowledging where we screwed up,” as she says. And it’s wholly non-negotiable: “I told my team that I won’t be able to lead if we’re not transparent.”

That openness is especially important at a place like Mercy Corps. “People don’t come here for the salary or the promotions or raises,” McKenna observes. “It’s a different compact that they have with the organization, in terms of feeling like they need our values to be on display. As leaders in purpose-driven organizations, we have to remember that it’s not always driven by a hard business decision or legal decision; we have to look at our values and find the right course based on that.”

The board of directors and executive team have been chipping away at a list of commitments designed to strengthen governance and build in mechanisms for when things go off track. (The list is publicly available and reported on twice annually.) High among those items was the hiring of Steve Linick. A former federal prosecutor who served as an inspector general at the State Department until he was ousted by President Trump, he started at Mercy Corps on the same day as McKenna. His mission, which is independent of the legal and HR departments and an important fixture in the new set of executive offices in DC, is to create systems that allow people to safely voice complaints or report abuse.

Some of these compliance structures are really about keeping up with growth, McKenna says. Up until very recently, Mercy Corps was the kind of place in which an internal memo might list people on a first-name basis. But it has since grown into a massive organization, with vast logistics and all the risk that comes with that. McKenna sees her task as stewarding the NGO to its next lifecycle phase, out of accelerated growth to a phase that’s sustained for success, and shifting from a culture that’s familial to the institutional.

“That may sound cold to some people,” she acknowledges, “but the truth is that too many things can go unsaid in a familial setting, and shifting away from that will also bring in more diversity and efficiency. We’ve gotten where we are today because we’ve been very entrepreneurial, and we like giving people space to thrive.” The key, she says, will be maintaining that ability to innovate while putting a few guardrails in place.

Mercy Corps has enjoyed a good deal of attention for its entrepreneurial approaches to aid over the years, from building resilience in climate-vulnerable communities with the help of NASA satellite data to delivering assistance to refugees via cryptocurrencies. It takes a certain brand of ambitious, out-of-the-box thinking to tackle a mission as big as ending poverty, and Mercy Corps has relied on partnerships to get there. Its global team members, 85 percent of whom are from the countries where they operate, collaborate with local leaders or communities to co-design solutions, often partnering with other NGOs or companies like Cisco, Microsoft, and Airbnb to scale their impact. Since its programs are driven by local needs across 40 geographies, they run the gamut, from agriculture and financial inclusion to food security, market development, policy, and much more.

This grassroots approach is its secret sauce, according to board member Gayle Tzemach Lemmon (MBA 2006). “It’s championing agents of change in a given country and pushing for innovation that’s in harmony with, and led by, people on the ground,” says Lemmon, an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of the New York Times best sellers The Daughters of Kobani, Ashley’s War, and The Dressmaker of Khair Khana. (Lemmon started working on Dressmaker during her second year at HBS; she first encountered Mercy Corps in Afghanistan while researching the book.)

She cites as an example the way team members helped 300 Afghan farmers sell raisins on the international market with a coveted Fairtrade label. This was a decade ago, but even then the task looked impossible. The certification process required an in-person audit to ensure producers were meeting the label’s agricultural and environmental standards, but the UK-based program wasn’t keen to send its auditors to a war zone. Mercy Corps staff, positioned there since 1986, bridged the gap by providing pages of documentation attesting to the farmers’ ability to meet the Fairtrade requirements. USAID kicked in $2 million to cover three years of training and education for the farmers, who, as a result, were able to provide for their families in one of the world’s poorest countries.

Across its many programs, Mercy Corps has provided about $4 billion in assistance. That figure is largely the result of McKenna’s predecessor, Neal Keny-Guyer, who for 25 years enabled the organization to grow fast and in whatever direction was needed. He believed in running into any burning building—but he didn’t necessarily believe in org charts or anything that was constraining. “Mercy Corps had always seen strategy as a compass, not a map,” McKenna says.

That’s also on her to-do list. After an extensive RFP process, she is leading the organization through a full strategy review with McKinsey. It’s a first for the NGO and a major investment. But it’s time to start shifting from a pattern of opportunistic growth to one that’s more deliberate, she concedes, to bring more focus and intention to the organization’s future state.

Over a two-hour strategy session with the McKinsey team and her regional directors in August, McKenna takes notes in a Moleskine notebook. (She prefers the ones lined with graph paper, a habit she picked up from her own time at McKinsey.) She floats an occasional observation: “I think the answer for a lot of these questions is going to be in how we do things as much as what.” But largely she creates space for the directors to share their perspectives, gently challenging them: What’s the distance between who we’d be if we were to control our own destiny and what our funders might want to prioritize? What makes our work distinctive, and what competitive advantages can we sustain over time? If we give ourselves permission to change the way we present ourselves to the world, what might that look like?

McKenna got her first glimpse of what charity can look like the summer after college. With her Harvard degree in government in hand, she signed up for a service trip and was shipped to a remote area of South Africa to help with a construction project. As she unpacked her bags and got her bearings, McKenna realized the enormity of what she had failed to bring with her, namely any language or construction skills. It made her question the underlying premise of the project. Would this building really serve a useful purpose in the village when there were more pressing needs, like running water or electricity? Could a skilled person from the community have been hired in her place to do the work? “The experience made me realize that I had work to do to understand what communities need, and that I needed to pick up some skills and learn how to add value,” she recalls.

Now at the helm of one of the leading international NGOs—and the only Black person in that role—McKenna continues to explore what it would look like for the sector to decolonize aid. Mercy Corps was founded as an evangelical Christian effort to help Cambodian refugees; it’s no longer a religious organization, but it did emerge from a missionary mindset about charity. “That mindset is very sincere and well-meaning, but it also presumes that people need you to save them,” McKenna notes. The sector has evolved to understand that people and communities should be the architects of their own growth, and the role of charities is to support that: “Our job is to make sure that the distribution of the money leads to increased sustainability and voice for the people we serve, to make sure that the flow of money doesn’t equal power.”

It’s a perspective that she holds close as the day-to-day work grinds on. In August, after the withdrawal of the United States from Afghanistan, scores of Mercy Corps staff members (also the organization’s longest continuous international presence) were left scared for their lives and uncertain of their future. It wasn’t clear if the women would be permitted to continue working, whether they would be targeted for their ties to an American organization, or even if the funding could get through. The team paused programming at the height of the upheaval but McKenna hopes they’ll be able to deliver aid again, as soon as they can find their way through the tangle of laws and policies around banking and operating in such unprecedented circumstances.

This is the part of the job that weighs most heavily on her heart, and McKenna acknowledges losing sleep worrying about the safety of staff who have committed to delivering support to people in the most challenging of environments. She honors their work by focusing on hers, that of the service leader. “My job is to enable my staff to do the best work that they can,” she emphasizes. By that she means not just her senior team, but every last driver in Afghanistan or program manager in the Democratic Republic of Congo. “What do they need to do their jobs safely and effectively? It all starts with the communities we serve, what they need, and how they need us to be of service.”

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