Discovery @ Olin

Jayne Morgan Works for Social Change

Jayne Morgan graduated just four years ago, but already she has a world of experience. After earning her degree in accounting and passing the Certified Public Accountant (CPA) exam, the St. Louis native went to work for PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Morgan worked in the firm's auditing and litigation services divisions in Chicago, and a year later, she transferred to the company's Santiago, Chile, office. There she worked in the auditing division.

Morgan, who also majored in international business and Spanish, requested the transfer because she wanted to return to the country "What I love about my job is that in the morning I could be doing the monthly accounting, while later that same day I could be meeting with the directors and discussing the pros and cons of expanding into Croatia or Peru." where she had studied abroad while a junior at Washington University.

She had planned to stay with PricewaterhouseCoopers, but when Morgan returned to Chile, she began to feel a different calling.

"While studying abroad, I learned a lot about Chile's history of a brutal dictatorship and human rights abuses. I saw how these issues impacted Chile, and I knew I wanted to be involved in working for social justice," says Morgan. "Then when I returned to Chile, I had that feeling come back—and knew I had to do something."

Morgan began searching for community service opportunities, which led her to the Nonprofit Enterprise and Self-sustainability Team (NESsT), http://www.nesst.org/.

NESsT, which is an organization that helps other nonprofits develop self-financing enterprises to support their core missions and to make them more independent of limited donations, was looking for a finance and operations manager. Morgan took the position and joined NESsT's office in Santiago. (Besides Santiago, Chile, NESsT has offices in the United States and Budapest, Hungary.)

After two years with NESsT, Morgan can give many examples of how NESsT has helped nonprofits become more financially sustainable. For example, NESsT is working with La Morada, a Chilean nonprofit that provides counseling and other support services to underprivileged women, to develop services for full-paying clients to subsidize La Morada's outreach.

Morgan enjoys being a part of NESsT's social mission, but what she finds most rewarding about her job is the level of responsibility she has and the diversity of her daily routine. NESsT has only nine full-time staff members, thus Morgan's job description covers a lot of ground. She is in charge of NESsT's financial accounting, human resources, technology, and regulatory compliance.

"What I love about my job is that in the morning I could be doing the monthly accounting, while later that same day I could be meeting with the directors and discussing the pros and cons of expanding into Croatia or Peru," says Morgan.

At present, NESsT's activities are concentrated in emerging market countries in Central Europe and in Chile, but the organization wants to expand into other countries in Europe and South America. Morgan plans to stay at NESsT a couple more years to assist with this expansion. She doesn't have any specific plans beyond that, though she definitely wants to continue working on behalf of marginalized communities.

"Whether that is with a nonprofit, a socially responsible firm, or as a volunteer, I don't know," she says. "NESsT has taught me, though, that there can be a lot of overlap and sharing between the nonprofit and for-profit worlds—that there are lots of different opportunities to have a rewarding career, and there are many avenues through which one can work for social change."

by Brendan Watson, AB '04