An Eclectic History Leads to a New Career in Economic-Justice Work

My first true love was biology, and I went to college thinking that I wanted to do pre-med. I arrived at my Dad’s alma mater, Amherst College, which had just gone co-ed, and didn’t know enough to seek out allies as a mixed-heritage Asian-American female going into the sciences. So without even asking anyone or saying, “This is what I want to do,” I dropped pre-med and switched to anthropology, because it helped me apply my curiosity to the question of how people create their lives and find meaning in them. As someone with a Chinese mom and an American dad, I was always paying attention to how different groups of folks got along, or didn’t — how they bridged their differences or not.

Eventually Amherst got to be too small and I needed to make my own mark, so I ended up transferring 3,000 miles away to

JOANNA CHAO RITTENBURG Age: 39 First professional job: Executive assistant to department-director, BayBank corporate-loan processing department, Waltham, Mass. Current job: Economic-justice program manager, Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, Cambridge, Mass.

Stanford University. There I finished up the anthropology degree but also discovered the painting studio. It was the first place I found where I could explore how to put all the pieces of a new idea together in a “package” that communicated something powerful to people. I decided that I wanted to continue this work as a painter after I graduated, but I also needed to support myself. I ended up finding a job through a temp agency, working in the corporate-loan processing department for a bank outside of Boston. It satisfied the part of my brain that liked order but left me the emotional energy on the weekends and at the end of the day to paint. In 1990, I took another corporate job and moved to Mobil Oil. I guess you could say that I was working in oil and painting in oil.

I ended up working with an extraordinary group of about 100 people in an office in Boston who were overseeing part of the construction of Mobil’s biggest refinery in Singapore. My title was executive secretary, but I really became the gateway to the project director, dealing with all of these tensions between the engineers, the workers, and the company management. The experience gave me a deep appreciation for workers — the people who are the nuts and bolts behind what gets done.

By the time I left Mobil in 1992, I was painting like a madwoman, getting shown in a couple of galleries, winning some awards. I ended up going to work for a chef who wanted to start a business designing kitchens for institutions — restaurants, casinos, hospitals, hotels — and working with a lot of international vendors, clients, and service providers. I worked with him over the course of 12 years to build his international company.

My life really changed at this point. I ended up leaving a diverse community in Boston, where I’d felt invisible as a woman of color, for a small, homogenous town north of the city. I had a lot of challenges getting used to that, and I began doing trainings on racism and diversity through the local Unitarian Universalist church. I started an organization for people who’ve adopted Asian children and got trained as a mediator to work with the district courts. I founded some policy projects within the immigrant and Asian-Pacific Islander community and began to focus my activism and community organizing on racial and economic justice, and women’s issues.

But what I was still really hungering for was a community of activists who were wrestling with really big, difficult questions. So I applied to Harvard Business School.

This was a time when interest in corporate social responsibility was really starting to pick up, and I thought, “Aha! I can work in the private sector, apply my business background, and do good at the same time, and not starve and have to make it as an activist entrepreneur who is always having to fund raise.”

I didn’t get into Harvard Business School, and I realize now that I was pretty far out there for them. But at the time I was pretty depressed. I was really questioning, What’s the meaning of life if I can’t get accepted into the circles that I feel like I have to belong to in order to make a difference? I decided to apply to the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. I got accepted into their midcareer program in 2004.

It ended up being the best year of my life. I was surrounded by 220 amazing people from all over the world, who dedicate their lives to a mission in public service. The experience was both humbling and inspiring. I went in thinking that I would end up in the corporate sector.

During my year at the Kennedy School, I studied labor market and employment policy, focusing on living-wage campaigns as a new community-based form of workers’ rights advocacy, and on how to bridge communities of color and labor unions. I was finally pulling together all of the pieces of my background and experience: my work on nonprofit boards, my training in mediation, and my understanding of how the world of work and business was evolving.

Last March I applied for a job as an economic-justice program manager at the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. They had recently gone through a major refocus and were interested in an approach to economic justice that would really emphasize race, class, and gender, compared with the ad hoc approach it typically took to its human-rights work. I knew that it was what I wanted to do, and that I had a broad range of skills to contribute, but I was also hesitant about my zigzag background. Would they hold my business background against me? Was my community organizing experience legitimate? Would they share my values of the importance of bridge building?

I started working for the service committee in April, and the experience has been amazing. We are a hybrid organization — a human-rights group that does some grant making, but also has an advocacy and policy component and a mission to engage our membership in our work.

In the economic-justice program, we’re working with partners in Africa, Central and Latin America, Southeast Asia, as well as domestically to support the rights of workers, including the right to a living wage.

Moving into the nonprofit culture has been a bit of a challenge. I know that I need to establish a certain level of credibility on issues of economic justice since I don’t have a Ph.D. in economics and haven’t worked in the traditional development circles. And I don’t always know how people are going to perceive me. Do I look too corporate, too management? I just try to be careful and thoughtful. I know I can’t have come to the job with every single background box checked.

It’s important to keep some perspective too. I get these proposals from people in the field who’ve literally risked life and limb. I may have a little self doubt, but then I get perspective when I talk to our partners who have to be courageous in the face of a lot of oppression. They’re still fighting the good fight, and being creative and innovative about it. I want to help tell that story and support them in that process.