As a highschooler, Richard Choularton volunteered for a disaster relief NGO in his hometown, loading medical supplies onto pallets in aircraft to be flown to the site of earthquakes and other rapid-onset disasters.
When Choularton graduated from college, he decided to pursue a career in emergency relief. After discovering that most of the available positions were with the United Nations, and required both a master’s degree and fluency in multiple official U.N. languages, he enrolled in a master’s program in risk, crisis, and disaster management and moved to Cuba to learn Spanish.
“I’ve done everything from running emergency food assistance programs on the ground to running early warning systems for food crises to leading [the World Food Programme’s] climate and disaster risk reduction program,” said Choularton, who is now director of agriculture and food security sector at Tetra Tech.