S1, E18: Courage is Contagious: Building a Movement to End Human Trafficking

Elca: [00:00:00] I always say that a dream is something you want to do and a calling is something you have to do and there’s a fine line and then a huge difference in what it looks like. Actually, many of us, most of us do have something deep down, which causes almost like a righteous anger for us, and it can be many different things.

Elca: It can be climate change, it can be teenagers with drug problems, it can be the elderly, but for me. I think it’s always been on my heart, was the injustice that women and girls found.

Georgi: Did you know the average person will work 90,000 hours in their lifetime? What if you could use those hours to find fulfillment and become a disruptor for good?

Georgi: Welcome to the Work That’s Worth It. Podcast. I’m Georgi Enthoven, and I’m here to demonstrate that an. Vicious, meaningful and rewarding career is not just a dream, it’s achievable. Each episode we’ll dive into conversations with global change makers who crack the code on combining income and impact. If [00:01:00] you’ve ever felt like you were torn between a paycheck and your purpose, or maybe you simply yearn for more purpose.

Georgi: You’re going to be exposed to the ambitious humans who have done it themselves, ready to make your work worth it.

Let’s get started

Georgi: today. I’m excited and honored to welcome Elca Grobler to the work that’s worth it. Podcast. Before we begin, I want to offer a gentle trigger warning, although we don’t dive into the worst of what holds and sees in her work. In this episode, we do discuss a difficult subject matter, including abuse and sex trafficking.

Georgi: Please take a moment to check in with yourself to see if this might be too triggering for you right now. Elca founded My Choices Foundation in 2012, which has grown into a national leader addressing domestic violence and sex trafficking in India. Under her leadership, the foundation has peacefully resolved over 20,000 cases of domestic violence and [00:02:00] equip more than 4 million people in high risk areas to protect themselves from human trafficking.

Georgi: They’ve established India’s first national helpline exclusively for trafficking, which has received over 80,000 calls and their spearheading coalition efforts to prevent sex trafficking across the country. I. What makes her journey even more remarkable is her background. Elca holds a CFA charter and an MBA.

Georgi: She spent seven years in financial services at South Africa’s largest financial company where she was on a fast track of leadership. With her background in econometrics, derivatives, and finance, she could have continued climbing the corporate ladder. But instead she chose a path of service. I’m thrilled to explore with elca how she found her calling and what sustains her commitment and how she balances meaningful impact with personal wellbeing.

Georgi: Elca, wonderful to have you on the work that’s worth at podcast. So

Elca: nice to be here, Georgi. Thank you. I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time. [00:03:00] Yeah, well

Georgi: great. We have another South African and I was wondering if we can go right to the heart of the matter and find out what makes your work worth it.

Elca: Yes, so the work we do is in India and it’s focused on gender-based violence. It addresses both domestic violence and sex trafficking of young girls. I always say that a dream is something you want to do, and a calling is something you have to do, and there’s a fine line, and then a huge difference in what it looks like.

Elca: Actually, many of us, most of us. Do have something deep down, which causes almost like a righteous anger for us. And it can be many different things. It can be climate change, it can be teenagers with drug problems, it can be the elderly. But for me, I think it’s always been on my heart. Whereas the injustice that women and girls face, it showed up in different forms during my life.

Elca: And then. Came to a big sort of point when my family [00:04:00] and I and young kids moved to India in 2011, and so what makes it worth it? I think, as I said, it’s what keeps you up at night. It’s what wakes you up in the morning. It’s something you want to sometimes escape, but you can’t because there’s a deep down, as I said, voice or calling for standing up for the injustices that women and girls face and yeah, that’s what we do.

Georgi: So it’s almost like you have a blueprint that you have to adhere to. Yes. And sometimes that can feel frustrating, but it’s already laid out for you to Yes, go on this path. Yes.

Elca: But having said that, the blueprint is there, but. It doesn’t mean necessarily that you always start early with it, in a sense that I was in the corporate environment in finance till I was 40, and then only moved sort of full-time into almost this blueprint.

Elca: But having said that, when you look back, so many of the things that you’ve done or learned or [00:05:00] got exposed to or got experience in, you know, set you up. For fulfilling this blueprint.

Georgi: Yeah, like the dots connected.

Elca: You get to do it when you’re 20.

Georgi: Yeah. Yeah. I would love to hear more about that transition, going from finance into this not-for-profit work and you know, how was that you picked up a family and moved to India.

Georgi: How was that for you?

Elca: In all fairness, I think when I look back, the kids were four, six, and eight, so they were really young and Roger and I. Although we were South Africans by that time, we were in Sydney for eight years, but when we moved to India, we sold, we had a small apartment and we sold our car and everything.

Elca: I think I’m glad we didn’t really know what we were getting ourselves into. Sometimes I think with going into a non-for-profit or completely transforming, especially in social justice, I think sometimes it’s good that you don’t. Always know what you’re letting yourself into. I think if you do, you might not do it.

Elca: Having said [00:06:00] that, looking back, I mean, there’s absolutely no regret. If you ask me, will I choose it all over again, then I can’t think of anything else I would do. And if some of the days are hard and tough, and I mean there were never moments that you regretted and there were never moments that you think you would’ve chosen otherwise, is it really hard?

Elca: Yes. Does it have an impact on your family? Yes. You know, does it change their perspective on life or how they view life or how it shapes them and transform them? All of those things you couldn’t predict, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. You probably very familiar also with Brian Stevenson and his work in the criminal justice system with incarcerated young.

Elca: Especially black teenage boys. But he has a quote, which really stuck with me for a long time, and it says, some things you can only understand when you get up close. So social justice is not one of those things that you can do from the sidelines. I mean, of course you can be a supporter or a donor [00:07:00] or a volunteer or all those things, but unless you get close to it, I think the impact that you can have.

Elca: It’s always from the sidelines. So for us to have moved to India, having our kids have never set fruit in India before the day we moved, when we moved to Hyderabad, none of us have been to the city of Hyderabad. We knew one person, which we’ve only met once before. So yes, I’m glad I did it when I was 40 and not when I was 20 or 50.

Elca: ’cause I think that was sort of the, yeah, you know, you, you’ve got a lot of energy and dreams. Still at that age.

Georgi: Yeah. Something that you’ve just shared about that quote, I would love to hear your thoughts on. I often talk to young, ambitious people that say, well, why not just earn as much as I can and I’ll donate to something.

Georgi: Yes. And one of the conversations that I have is they get to miss. The amazing people and the work brings so much joy, they get to miss that piece of it. So the money is great. Thank you. Yes, yes. [00:08:00] Wonderful. But they’re leaving so much on the table. Yes. And I wonder if you can share your thoughts on that, because obviously it’s hard too.

Elca: Yes, yes. I think there’s a lot captured in that thought is, I mean, obviously we live in a world where money yields a lot of. It yields a lot of allure. It yields a lot of attraction, but I think, I don’t know if it’s our younger people, but we’ve also seen that, you know, money is actually. I mean, you know all the stats that they’ve done.

Elca: And so, I mean, I don’t even wanna really actually quote it ’cause I might quote it wrong, but there’s a salary level, especially in the US where they’ve measured sort of that happiness of a family and it peaks very quickly after sort of something, once you can look after yourself, your health and your children’s education.

Elca: So this allure of money actually can be very conceiving. ’cause it shows that that’s not actually what’s giving people or individuals. Happiness. So I think your question is the social justice [00:09:00] world and non-for-profits will always need funds. So there’s a golden line between, and I mean, I wanna be a careful high, high position.

Elca: It, there’s a golden line between everybody joining Social Justice World or the non-for-profit world. Because if everybody joins it, then we don’t have people that can donate to it. But you know, even if you’re very young and you say you donating, I. I think getting involved in a course that really moves you, there’s a lot you can do to get yourself closer to it.

Elca: You know, whether it’s through volunteering or through getting to know the people who runs the NGO, and we might even get to that. The community support that we need in the NGO world is huge, so having young people with. Bright minds and a lot of energy. Of course, we appreciate financial support, but having the support almost of emotional support and support of people coming to volunteer or people coming to say like, this is a skill I have.

Elca: Is [00:10:00] it something you need? So for young people, I’d say. Yes, be involved financially because that’s something you can do while you maybe still build up your skills and your expertise and your experience. But then there comes a point where we actually need more than just your financial support. We want your intellectual support.

Elca: We want the community support. We want you to engage with us. By engaging your community and what you, as you say, it’s you don’t do it for what you get, but I can promise you what you get by getting involved in your community or something in your community that you care about is so much more rewarding, substantial than just having, I’m not saying having a small world, but not.

Elca: Looking outside of your world. There’s another quote, which we have in one of our centers that says, you’ll find that you have two hands. One to help yourself and one to help others. And I think people, you know, this is not judging. I think people who only use one hand really actually never get [00:11:00] to see the pleasure of using the other hand.

Elca: So it transforms you.

Georgi: What a

Elca: beautiful

Georgi: way to think about it. And I was hoping you could share a little bit more about the impact that you are having and more about your not-for-profit and what does that look like? What have

Elca: you built there? Yes, so there’s actually literally this morning, and I just wanna share, was a, Gloria Steinem is one of the.

Elca: Women warriors that I look up to quite a bit, and I wanna start by saying, she said this thing in one of her books, it says, which I think is very relevant now for us as society. It says, we might have known sooner that the most reliable predictor of whether a country is violent within itself or will use military violence against another country is not poverty.

Elca: It’s not natural resources, it’s not religion or even degree of democracy. It’s violence against females and that normalizes all other violence. So before I [00:12:00] just talk a little bit about what we do at My Choices Foundation, and this is not to overwhelm with the numbers or the reality, but I think sometimes.

Elca: People, and especially ’cause we are talking about gender-based violence, it sometimes just helps to put into perspective that globally one in three women in their lifetime will experience physical sexual abuse or violence. And in India where we work. It is every 20 minutes a woman in India gets raped and child rape have increased by more than 300% 7,000, and this is always 7,000.

Elca: Unborn Girls are selectively every day just because they are girls. In India, we have 40% of all the child brides or child marriages happen in India. And if a girl gets married under the age of 18, then 76% of them will experience physical or sexual violence in their marriage. And then just because we do a lot of work in sex [00:13:00] trafficking, I think which is just important is that, I mean a lot of people on this podcast ’cause they are interested in social impact as well, might know that currently we have in the world more.

Elca: People in modern slavery than we’ve had ever before. But what people might not always know is that 75% of these are women and girls, and 99% of them are for sexual slavery. And in India, the average age of a girl being trafficked is only 12 years old and only 1% of them will get rescued. So that’s our reality.

Elca: So that’s what we work with every day. So when we started My Choices Foundation, it was initially. Because domestic violence in India, it’s such a tricky matter because women are ashamed of it to share it. So it’s something that they keep behind closed doors. And I always say why it makes it so tricky is because everybody’s ashamed and afraid.

Elca: So you have both shame and fear to bring it [00:14:00] to the forefront. It’s not like, you know, I say this with so much respect. It’s not like we are an NGO. Almost has the, I don’t even call it privilege of digging wells in Africa. ’cause that’s beautiful. The whole community get it involved. Everybody wants to be in there.

Elca: The school is there. Mm-hmm. The parents are there, the teachers are there. Everybody’s excited. This work is very, very dark and there’s a lot of greed and lust. So you sit with all these factors that contribute. That makes it so difficult to talk about. So when, when we moved to India, because my background is in finance, I.

Elca: Initially was hoping to get involved with financial literacy and actually join an existing sort of microfinance organization. They all work with females and that’s where my background was, in course skillset. But the first, and I think this is something we might touch on later also. Literally the first eight months I just listened to as many women groups.

Elca: I would just go into the slums and go and meet with a women group. Then they will [00:15:00] introduce me to another women group, and then I’ll go sit with them. Or I’ll go sit in the sewing centers where they bring the women’s in, with the women in the slum together and listen to them. Like literally just listen on what’s going on.

Elca: And you couldn’t spend more than five minutes in one of those groups. Then they start talking about the abuse that they face at home, and that no amount of financial freedom will actually give them any freedom because that money just gets taken away anyway. So unless they have a way of addressing the constant abuse and violence every day, they live in a prison.

Elca: And there’s another sort of that we say that the most dangerous place for women to live or to be is not actually on the street. It’s actually in our own home. So when we designed and developed our programs from scratch, because there was, what we realized is, is that unless we get behind the closed doors, like unless we get.

Elca: To speak to those women [00:16:00] and get to them where they are, they’re not gonna know. And I just wanna say one thing. India is actually has one of the most progressive domestic violence act that was brought out in 2005, and I, I won’t go into too much of the detail, but they’ve made it so that it’s not initially a criminal offense, it’s a civil offense.

Elca: So for the first time, the women can actually. Bring to the fore the abuse without having the fear that a husband is gonna get a criminal case, which means the family won’t allow it. But having said that, none of these women know about it. So none of these women actually knew that it is actually legally wrong to be abused.

Elca: So there were so many things that we realized when we developed and designed our programs that first of all, it needs to be in the community. Run by the women. For the women, they are not gonna listen to somebody else. There’s no point in us coming in having a meeting with them. And so we developed this program and we call it peacemakers.

Elca: So it’s women, they change agents, they like [00:17:00] mini. Social workers and legal sort of, I mean, they’re not lawyers but paralegal. I mean, what this women need was just to be able to read and write, and most of them actually didn’t even finish high school, but they are the same women that face the abuse. So we equipped these peacemakers and we’ve now done 12 years of training of these peacemakers.

Elca: The other thing that we realized is. What we really did not wanna do is to equip the women in the community or face abuse about the fact that, listen, this is wrong and there is a way to address it. And then we leave them there. Like now what? They’re too afraid to go to the police and they can’t get counseling.

Elca: So we really wanted to close the loop. So currently we have six, what we call counseling centers, but they’re like counseling crisis centers for. Once if our peacemakers work in the community and a woman comes and she stands up for a girl saying that she’s been sexually abused, we need to be able to then assist her by actually closing the loop, by counseling, being able to take her to the police.

Elca: And so the model that we [00:18:00] designed was, as I said, for the women by the women. And we have the peacemakers, then we have the counseling centers, and then we have lawyers. So a woman or a girl coming to us, we are able to help them all the way through from getting an order to stop the abuse, to get the protection order to take them to the court if needed.

Elca: And then we also open up a safe home. So having set that, just what’s quite important for us, for everybody to know is that a boy who grows up in a home where he. Experiences or sees abuse by mostly his father is five times more likely to perpetuate the abuse growing older. So for us, it’s about breaking that cycle of violence.

Elca: We don’t have a magic wand. It’s not a fairytale. We are not able to immediately just give you a happy marriage. What we try and do is. Equip the women to be able to stand up to the abuse and then have their children not grow up in abusive home. And the other thing that we do, which is quite different from some [00:19:00] of the NGOs that work in the gender-based violence space is we never end up just seeing the women or the girl alone after about three months of just getting her to be able to stand up, speak up, get some confidence back, get her to the hospital if needed, we always bring in the perpetrator.

Elca: So otherwise you just, it’s like off the sky. If you then just sending the woman back with one hand behind her back if we don’t bring in the perpetrator. So our model has been developed over years. We’ve learned, we’ve seen what works, what doesn’t work, but not bringing in the perpetrator is not helping us in actually breaking the cycle of violence.

Elca: And we currently work on about a resolution rate of 87%, meaning about 80%. And we’ve done over 20. 1000 family cases, 87% of them has been peacefully resolved, meaning we didn’t have to go to court. There’s no more police cases, and the perpetrator and the survivor have been equipped to deal with the [00:20:00] violence.

Elca: I. I mean,

Georgi: you’ve shared so much and I am feeling everything that you have shared and the complexity and the depth of the work that you do is extraordinary. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about needing to be close to the problem. It sounds like even when you talked about the civil case and that being a critical part, I would’ve thought it would be the flip.

Georgi: But I would’ve thought you want to have these people behind bars, but that means that they don’t get reported. So yes, I just really appreciate how close you are and how much listening you’ve had to do. Yes, to be creative on a solution.

Elca: And I think what leads quite nicely into this is, and I just wanna confirm with, as I said, the way they’ve now designed the act.

Elca: So your first is a civil order that’s being taken out. So once the woman comes to us and, and reports the abuse thing, you report a civil case. If the perpetrator then. Breaks that order. In other words, the moment the abuse occurs [00:21:00] again, then it does become criminal. So, yes, agreed. You know, if the abuse doesn’t stop, then it becomes, you know, penalties.

Elca: Um, you can take out a police order, they, if everything works well, you know, there’s, but in theory then yes, it becomes criminal. So you are absolutely right. Yeah. You can’t just civilly the way I explain it always just to say, listen, so the first time you. You come to us and it happens. We send you to the principle.

Elca: So you know, you get your civil order, there’s your papers. We take it home. We say to the women, this is how you take it home. You can explain to them if that order then gets broken. Then you’re not just at the principal anymore, then we take you to the police. So, but we give you a fair chance anyway. So that just to to, but to come to your point of being close to the problem, so what we, and I think maybe this is an example of what we’ve done is, so we started getting about two years into doing the domestic violence and child sexual abuse work and, uh, child rape work.

Elca: We started getting calls on our helpline for. [00:22:00] People reporting their girls missing. I mean children, but it’s mostly the girls. And we realized and we, we started doing a lot of work around sex trafficking. Is that in on India’s child helpline? The majority of the children that are actually reported missing are actually children that are then trafficked.

Elca: But I mean, for the first thing, the parent doesn’t know. The child is trafficked. They think the child’s gone missing, which I mean, they have gone missing. We realized that we will have to start, and I have to. I mean, I think it gets back to that righteous anger because the depth and the prevalence of sex traffick in India is so, so, so deep that we realized that we have to start work on that as well.

Elca: But what we did is because we were no experts on it. We’ve learned a lot in our gender-based violence work and community work and how you work within the community and how you listen to the community and then develop your programs. It wasn’t develop your program and then you go implement it in the community.

Elca: But we didn’t have a program to implement. We had nothing, but we [00:23:00] came across this behavioral. Scientist organization in Mumbai who’s done amazing, amazing work on different things on condom usage in Africa, on suicides, on the railway line. They do absolutely amazing work and we sat down with them and say, okay, this is the challenge we face.

Elca: Most of the girls that get trafficked from the villages. Are not done because the parents are malicious. It’s because they’re ignorant and illiterate. They don’t. When the trafficker comes to the village and promises jobs, uh, security, schooling, education to these village girls, I. The parents, especially father, actually think this is the right thing to do.

Elca: So we then literally for 18 months did research in the villages. They developed their behavioral, as I said, scientist organization. So they developed these focus groups going into the villages, sitting with the fathers, the mothers, the school teachers, the children, to really try and get an understanding of how it happens that these girls go missing.

Elca: We worked in [00:24:00] also with the strategic partners who have safe homes with the goals. If, and as I said, only 1% gets rescued, but the girls that do get rescued that are on these safe homes, they allowed us to go and spend time with these girls and their caretakers to find out the journey of, you know, how they got trafficked.

Elca: But after 18 months of research, and we didn’t set out to do it, but that research paper in 2017 actually won SMR as a big marketing. Agency. It won the world’s best research market paper. Like we beat Coca-Cola and Yahoo, Google, and all those people. We actually just needed to figure out how are we gonna design and develop our programs.

Elca: And that research then led to developing. Of our save program, which we’ve now run over 10,000 of them and in 10 state in India, and we’ve equipped and educated more than 4 million people. But coming back to what you said is it was in realizing that we don’t have the solution or the answer to everything, why?

Elca: Should [00:25:00] we, there are, you know, who can we talk to that can help us in developing it, not alienating ourselves. So we really, right from the starts, spoke to everybody that was willing to speak to us who are already in this field. And because most of them in, in the sex trafficking sphere or anti-sex trafficking, you know, there’s prevention, there’s prosecution, there’s rehabilitation, and there are the safe phones.

Elca: And we soon learned that. There are almost nobody doing prevention. Most of the focus are in the rescues and the rehabilitation and the prosecution. And so again, having spent 18 months to design a program of how best can we do prevention if the majority of these girls get traffick because the parents just don’t know how can we equip them?

Elca: What do we need to equip them? What can we design? Most of them are literate, so how do we design the SAGE program? So. It’s getting close to your challenge, your problem, um, working with as many people as you can that know more than you do, [00:26:00] and then use our experience and expertise of working in the field, working with women, working with girls, designing the program.

Elca: So I think, yeah, and this is not to be, it’s just that we do know that in the aid world, a lot of programs have failed because a lot of. Agencies or even people, sometimes donors or have a program that they take to the community, but it doesn’t work because that’s not actually what the community wanted or it’s not what the community could sustain.

Elca: You know, they might bring in a electrical pump or something, but nobody in the community knows how to fix it once it breaks. This is just a small example, but

Georgi: yeah,

Elca: I think what we really did is spend. So much time in trying to understand the challenge and then develop the program.

Georgi: Yeah. I wonder if you can share with us what is your reward for doing this work?

Georgi: Yes. And maybe even touching on the [00:27:00] monetary piece or lack thereof, that is part of the package of doing the work you do. Yes.

Elca: Yes. For everybody. It’s something else that really keeps them up or wakes them up in the morning. I think the reward for me personally, because my, the thing that is almost the most special place in my heart is a young girl.

Elca: Like, you know, she could be any ethnicity or race or culture or anything, but there’s something about the beauty and the value in young girls that so often gets. Not unlocked. And the reward for me is being able to know that in a small way, everything we do. Unlocks this force, this potential in the world.

Elca: These are Melin Gates book, the Moment of Lift. There’s a saying there that says, sometimes all we have to do to lift women and girls up is just to stop pulling them down. Once you unlock the potential, once you give them the freedom of voice, the freedom of choice, the freedom of just standing up, the freedom of [00:28:00] speaking.

Elca: They will do the heavy lifting. The reward for me personally is, is knowing that in some way we are able to speak into thousands and thousands of families and girls lives and provide them with a choice to live a life free from abuse and or sexual exploitation. That’s the reward. It’s knowing you unlocking something with.

Elca: Such beauty, such power, such, I mean, we all know, you know, once even finances goes into a, a female, what it does to her family. Once education goes into a young goal, what it does to, for her in terms of just maternal health, fewer children, her income, the GDP of a country that gets left. So the reward is knowing that you unlock a potential which will change the world.

Elca: One thing I wanna add to that is, which, because I really believe in it, is that courage is contagious. So just as much as we get courage from our team [00:29:00] and our team members, and we call ourselves Dragon slayers, we get courage from the women who are willing to stand up against the lifelong abuse or the goal was willing to stand up against sexual abuse.

Elca: So that courage is in between us. And my reward is courage gets given to me. Like I get courage from these women and girls and I can’t think of a bigger reward.

Georgi: Yeah. I thought you actually first said character. Oh, sorry. And I thought that probably counts too.

Elca: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Character is contagious too.

Elca: Character is also contagious. That’s true. And I just, before I get to the monetary thing, I think maybe just sometimes. Before we as a team got to understand it. But I mean, I think I personally had to learn, so initially, the first couple of years I think the. So the, the grief that I experienced by being so close to so much grief and so much hurt, and so much [00:30:00] violence and so much fear, really got to me and I, at first, I.

Elca: I thought it was a sign of weakness. Like I thought if I can’t handle this grief and they have to like handle it every day, but I, you know, I struggle with it. What does it, you know, am I not strong enough for this work? And it took me quite a while to actually, I. Come to, to realize appreciate is a strong word, but I think appreciate that the grief is part of the journey.

Elca: I think for people who wanna go into this and for young people listening to it, or that wants to stake that step of saying, okay, I wanna get closer. I. Closer comes with grief, like, but that’s okay. It’s not a sign of weakness. It’s, it’s really a sign of how you are able to step into somebody’s life and say, we are not gonna get pulled on with this.

Elca: We are not gonna get overwhelmed. We’re actually gonna use this grief to fuel our courage, or to fuel our work, or to fuel our thinking or our creativity. Or say, well, there has to be a way. So [00:31:00] it became a force of. Courage in a way, or a force of strength or a force of sustainability.

Georgi: So it wasn’t ignoring the grief or putting it disconnecting from it, it was channeling it into power.

Elca: Yes, yes, yes, yes. But as I said, I had to realize it’s not a sign of weakness. It use it for driving what you are doing and fulfilling you at.

Georgi: So the work you do is really shaping the life you live and the person you’ve become.

Elca: Yes. Yes. And for that I am internally grateful. It’s still a journey. It still transforms every day.

Elca: It still molds me. It molded and shaped my family because they were so, or are so close to it. And as I said, you know, my children grew, basically, they formative years almost were spent in India. I wouldn’t change it for the world. I, but again, I have to say, and, and I’m saying this with. [00:32:00] I’m really not saying this with leave a sense.

Elca: I don’t think you can do our specific work, which is gender-based violence. If you it transform you, it makes you softer, then it makes you harder. Harder in a good way. So they say you have to have a soft heart and a hard feet. You need to be able to go with a soft heart into a difficult places. So you need a hard feet or soles and a soft, yeah.

Elca: Somehow to remain tender. Yes, but focused. Yes. Yes. There’s another quote that we also have in one of our centers. It says, in a gentle way, you can shake the world. So for us and our team is we need to be able to keep on shaking the world without ourselves becoming better. And we’ve seen that.

Georgi: And elca, we talked a little bit before, but the realities of doing this job financially, how do you make it work?

Elca: Yes, yes. I have to say, I think the non-for-profit sector [00:33:00] has become better in actually also now have a, like your KPMGs and your Earnest and Youngs and all of them have a scale for that people can use in the commercial sector for professionals at this level of skill with so many years of experience as a scale.

Elca: So we do actually have that now in the non-for-profit sector or social justice impact world. So I think the non-for-profit sector. Has become better in not even explaining to their donors, but saying that if you wanna have the best people for this role, doing this work, avoiding in some way burnout and keeping the passion and the compassion for the non-for-profit sector, we need to remunerate them accordingly.

Elca: So you won’t, you know, leaving a financial sector salary remuneration, you’re not gonna get the same. So by no means, don’t kid yourself and don’t expect it because you’re not gonna get it. Having said that, we do [00:34:00] try and rerate all our people at a level that is respectful to the skills experience in the non-for-profit world.

Elca: Having said that as well, for me personally, I at some point started foregoing a salary. Um, luckily in the, well, in a sense, I have a partner that has a income and I could forego my income. But having said that, that still means there’s one less income. So.

Georgi: Yeah, it’s a choice that you’ve had to make, but having a partner in life has allowed you to do this deeply impactful work that you are rewarded by in so many ways, yes, but financially is not

Elca: part of it.

Elca: No, no, and I wanna say that there’s two sides of the coin. So yes, the financial remuneration will never be the drive. I think for people that really step into the social justice world like it, it can’t be. You need that righteous anger or that dream that’s more than just a dream. [00:35:00] But it’s not like you will not get paid anything, you know?

Elca: Yeah. So it just means you’re making a choice. You’re making choices. This is what I wanna do with my life. This is what drives me, this is what fuels me. This is what makes me get up in the morning. Yeah.

Georgi: The last thing, ’cause I know we are already over time, but I have so many questions for you, is the last thing I want to just get a sense of is how long you’ve been doing this work.

Georgi: I always think of. When I am coaching young people, the most important thing is that you’re able to sustain your energy. Yes, the average career is 90,000 hours and doing something because you are passionate about it or feel the injustice, yes, is amazing, but not if you burn out in two years. So how long have you been doing this and what keeps

Elca: you sustained?

Elca: So I’ve been doing this now, going on 13 years, and it’s still what I do every day. So it’s been 13 beautiful, beautiful years. In terms of burnout, I think you really, really have to make sure that I. [00:36:00] You carry the load with your team. I think for some nonprofits, obviously not, not all of them, you sometimes get a leader or a founder that is so driven that they leave almost the team behind.

Elca: Like they, they so focused and become so overwhelming, you know? And the desire to make a change almost overpowers them taking the time to sow into their team. And as I said, we refer to ourselves as Dragon Slayers. At My Choices Foundation and we, I cannot do this without them. They can’t do this without the rest.

Elca: There’s also that old, I think it’s an African proverb, you know, if you wanna go fast, go alone. If you wanna go fast, go

Georgi: alone.

Elca: Yeah. Yes, go far. Go in a team. So I think for anybody, I would say yes. It’s not easy that the challenges are big and complex. As you say, the rewards are immeasurable. But really, really make sure you and your team, you, you surround yourself.

Elca: A team of people, and I mean by [00:37:00] that I mean not one, because they need to be able to look after one another as well. Yeah, it’s a marathon. It’s a marathon. And make sure you don’t run alone. Make sure you take your team with you and make sure that the vision becomes the vision of the team. It can’t just be the leader of the founder’s vision because they can’t carry it and they can’t sustain it, and I wouldn’t be able to sustain this if it was.

Elca: By now, just my vision. It’s no, it’s no longer my vision. It’s the vision of My Choices Foundation. Yeah.

Georgi: Well it’s so lovely to hear of all this, and it sounds like so much of your previous business experience brought probably best practice and those kind of things of like data assimilating, vision.

Elca: Yes.

Georgi: And all that. And what a wonderful episode and chance to get to talk to you. So thank you so much for being on the show.

Elca: Georgi, thank you. So I really appreciate it. Thank you for you sewing into the next generation and the young people and what they wanna do. I’m not yet ready to hand over the baton to any young person, but at some point we [00:38:00] need to.

Elca: But I say it’s another 20 years. I’ve got 20 years in me still, but start sewing into them now. So yeah. Thank you very much.

Georgi: Yeah, well

Elca: thank you and we’ll

Georgi: be in

Elca: touch. Thanks,

Georgi: Georgi. What a powerful story and mission. Elca is someone who has built a life completely aligned with her desired contribution, and in her case, answering a calling that wouldn’t let her go otherwise.

Georgi: Let’s take a moment to highlight her team of Dragon Slayers. We are never doing great work alone as Elca states, she wouldn’t be able to sustain the intense work without her team who share both. The burden and the mission, the weight and horrors of abuse and trafficking are too heavy for one person to carry alone and require a team of angels.

Georgi: Our world deeply relies on people with these kinds of brave hearts, even though their work often happens behind the scenes and far from the spotlight. They’re creating safety and possibility for women they serve in India. Also, I [00:39:00] appreciate Elca’s honesty and acknowledgements regarding the financial realities of not-for-profit work, although her work provides profound purpose and impact.

Georgi: In her case, it does require partnership at home to make it sustainable. Her husband’s income creates the foundation that allows her to fully commit to her mission. This balance between purpose and practicality between individual calling and shared support is what makes her work truly sustainable. It reminds us that the most fulfilling paths often require thoughtful trade-offs and the courage to build your life differently than others may expect.

Georgi: And that’s a wrap for today’s episode of Work That’s Worth It. Remember, every conversation we share is designed to empower you to build a career that’s truly worth your time and energy. There are future disruptors out there just like you, who would appreciate the conversations in this podcast. Please support me by spreading the word and sharing this episode with a friend or two, or visit my [00:40:00] [email protected].

Georgi: That’s spelled G-E-O-R-G-I. E-N-T-H-O-V-E-N.com. Until next time, ask yourself, what problems am I solving and are they worth my valuable time? Your intentional choices today can lead to exponential impact tomorrow.

Thanks for listening.