Definitely a journey that I don't think when you go to university, you say to yourself, "That's the job that I'm gonna be doing [laughs] in 20 years from now." So tell me a little bit more on your path and how you ended up on this trajectory.

Yeah.

When I was a teenager, I grew up in Washington, DC area, and I got an internship my senior year of high school at a law firm that was working with refugees, mostly from Central America, doing pro bono services.

And the job that I had was doing intakes.

So people would come and they would basically share what they were going through.

They were applying for asylum, and then the law firm would decide whether to take them or not.

And so I would write down their stories, and the question I had to ask always was, "Have you or your family ever faced a threat from an armed group or a state military?" And one day a 17-year-old girl who was exactly my age came in.

So like, can you give me an example of some of the conflict projects that you worked on in the past and the impact that Common Ground has had?

all of their development indicators

and the presence of violent conflict.

Those societies have had a huge regression in terms of their core human development indicators are often societies, very often are societies where conflict has been actually at the very core of that regression.

So a place like Syria, the United States is experiencing a regression of of almost all of its, you know, core development indicators around health, education, you know, economic indicators for individual families, etc.

And that is something that correlates with the conflict dynamics that are manifesting in the United States, a society that's divided.

And so this is, to me, there is actually a real correlation between societies where conflict is handled and managed in a really powerful, constructive way.

And conflict is a source of progress as opposed to a destructive force.

both the human i mean i live in columbia it's messed up but how do you stay optimistic both given like the huge challenges at the macro level but also all the setbacks you see among partners and colleagues