WASHINGTON — Michelle Risinger, innovation director at Pact, joined the international NGO in 2013 from the American Red Cross, where she worked in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“All we did was real-time problem solving and firefighting — ‘I have to solve this problem right now because someone’s life depends on it’ — but we don’t have that same type of real-time urgency in development,” she said.
Working with the Red Cross, Risinger was dealing with matters of life or death that required decisions in the moment. She expected that moving from humanitarian response to international development would allow her to focus on innovation in a way that was not possible in the midst of a crisis zone. But since joining Pact, an NGO working with impoverished and marginalized communities in 40 countries, she has discovered that bureaucracy and a lack of funding make it hard to pursue innovation even outside of a crisis zone.