“I’m a generalist at heart and really like being able to work on a variety of causes. I haven’t felt particularly attached to any one cause area, so I’m most excited about projects that are broadly good for many worthy causes.”
Former Operations Officer Marisa Jurczyk recently left Rethink Charity to pursue an exciting new opportunity: a Master of Public Policy degree at Georgetown University.
We are a small team, and Marisa worked closely with us all. Dedicated, kind, and creative, Marisa approached her role with integrity and enthusiasm. Her drive to improve is inspiring, and her departure from the team is a significant transition for us. As we dive into the next chapter for Rethink Charity, we benefit from Marisa’s initiative every day, from the virtual coworking space she set up, to the thorough portfolio of bus-proofing guides she put together so that her many projects can be learned by others, to the automation of numerous processes from the small to the significant.
Marisa cares deeply about improving the world and puts careful thought into the actions she takes to achieve this. So, as much as we’ll miss her, we’re excited to witness her apply her perspectives in this new stage of her life.
Before she left, I interviewed Marisa about how she came to work in operations and how this work has shaped her accomplishments and perspectives.
Megan: How did you come to work in operations?
Marisa: I started working as a Student Leader Coordinator for Rethink Charity’s Students for High-Impact Charity project back in 2017. Not long after, 80,000 Hours had written their post about the operations management bottleneck, and I was excited by the idea of it. I’d done some work earlier for my university on event planning and realized I liked making things happen from behind the scenes, but I never knew if or how that would translate into a job title. Discovering the operations career path was very much an “a-ha” moment for me.
After about a year of volunteering with SHIC, Rethink Charity was looking for some operations contractor help, and they asked me if I was interested. So I did that for about a year and a half before I started doing operations full-time in January 2020. It was really lucky timing, and I feel pretty fortunate that it fell into place the way it did.
Megan: Do you think your role would have been different had there been a physical Rethink Charity office space? Do you think the remote aspect of your role affected it?
Marisa: I wouldn’t say that it’s dramatically different from having a physical office space, but there are a few differences. In some ways I think being remote saves me some time. Operations staff at physical locations tend to do a lot of physical office management, so because we’re remote, I don’t have to spend time on that and instead I can work on other exciting projects. But on the other hand, being remote presents some challenges with team communication and feelings of belonging, and part of my job in recent months has been to work on improving that. I think the time I spend on remote workspace management is probably less than what I would have spent on physical office management though, and I also enjoy how much room for creativity there is in improving the virtual workspace, so overall I don’t mind having this type of role in a remote workspace.
Megan: At Rethink Charity, it seems like your work has benefited several cause areas: there’s SHIC, the incubation of Rethink Priorities, all the partner charities on RC Forward. When you started with our team, did you have a particular cause area in mind that you wanted to focus on?
Marisa: When I first started at SHIC, I was really passionate about social justice education, which is part of what drew me to the process, and I remained interested in moral education for a while after. However, I eventually read an article about the limits of activism and education, which persuaded me to think more about how to create systems that make it as easy as possible for people to have the impact they want to have, which fits well into what Rethink Charity is focused on now I think. Both of those aren’t so much cause areas as they are methods to impact I think, and I think that’s in large part because I’m a generalist at heart and really like being able to work on a variety of causes. I haven’t felt particularly attached to any one cause area, so I’m most excited about projects that are broadly good for many worthy causes.
Megan: I infer that operations work can feel pretty detached from the actual positive impact that others experience. Did you get “warm fuzzies” in your day to day role, and if so what from?
Marisa: Not really in my current role, and certainly not that correlated with the actual impact I had. But I’m not someone who needs or even craves that in my job, so I’m okay with that. I generally get more excited about seeing evidence about impact than feeling “warm fuzzies”.
Megan: What accomplishment are you most proud of from your time at Rethink Charity?
Marisa: Reviving our volunteer program is probably the accomplishment I’m most proud of. I think our volunteers have added a lot to our organization that my colleagues and I couldn’t have done as well on our own, like polishing up the RC Forward website and using our data to get a better sense of who our donors are and how to serve them better. And, in general, I think volunteering for an organization like Rethink Charity can be a great launching point for other high-impact careers, as it was for me and other past volunteers. I’ve heard a lot of conversation in the effective altruism community recently about how difficult it can be to bridge the gap between nonprofit employers’ needs and passionate people looking to pursue more impactful careers, and I think volunteer programs like ours play an important role in bridging that gap.
Megan: Can you tell me about what you’ll be doing after Rethink Charity?
Marisa: I’ll be starting my Master of Public Policy degree at Georgetown University!
Megan: Do you think that your experience with operations will affect how you approach what you’re doing next?
Marisa: In a lot of ways it already has influenced my work outside of Rethink Charity. There are smaller moments when I notice what I call my “ops brain” turning on, for example when thinking about the legal implications of collecting data through a sign-up form. But more generally I do think I find myself asking, “how can we make this work more smoothly?” a lot more often after working in this role for a while.
Megan: How did you go about deciding to pursue this new opportunity, and do you want to give a shoutout to any decision-making processes or conversations with others that helped you decide?
Marisa: Back in 2019, I attended a conference where I had a conversation with someone working in AI policy, which got me more excited about the field, in large part because I think the scope of policy’s influence is huge, and so for someone who cares about improving the world, if you’re able to influence policy, you can have a really big impact. I started volunteering with a few policy-oriented organizations after to test my fit, and I just found myself getting more and more excited about it. Graduate school seemed like the next logical step to dive deeper into the field, get connected with peers also interested in policy, and to open up more opportunities in the space.
Megan: You’re frequently exploring and suggesting ways that we can use apps and systems to improve how we do things. What’s a lifehack or app that you’re excited about these days?
Marisa: I have so many! Lately one of my favorites is Amazing Marvin, which is a task management app, but way better than most task management apps. Essentially, they have a bunch of features and workflows that you can turn on or off based on your preferences, so if you find yourself experiencing friction with your todo list, you can just look through their features to see if there’s something you can turn on to lessen that friction, and if your workflow changes significantly, you can easily switch workflows without having to migrate your tasks to a brand new app.
We were very lucky to have Marisa on our team, and we wish her the very best in all her future work!
This interview was inspired by Wild Animal Initiative’s interview with Jane Cappozelli.
