Mercy Corps' Tjada D’Oyen McKenna on paving the road for others

On a recent afternoon in Mogadishu, Tjada D’Oyen McKenna visited the Mercy Corps staffers at the Somalia country office — in what was her first trip to the African continent as CEO of the organization. She was there to witness the organization's programming in response to the nation’s severe drought and meet with those impacted.

During a lunch meet-and-greet, a gender specialist on the Mercy Corps team stood up and said that coming from a country such as Somalia where women are often not given access to opportunities, it's been an inspiration to see McKenna reach the highest echelons of the organization.

“You are our role model,” she said.

And that’s something that has been a key ambition in her career — pushing herself to rise to a leadership level where she can, in turn, open up opportunities for others, McKenna told Devex in an interview.

McKenna took the reins of the Portland-based Mercy Corps at the end of 2020, right after the global humanitarian organization was rocked by a sexual abuse scandal. Since then, she has been restructuring the organization, leading a team of nearly 6,000 people globally in over 40 countries, predominantly in complex environments, and managing a budget of nearly $600 million.

The journey toward Mercy Corps

McKenna grew up in the suburbs of Maryland and Stamford, Connecticut. She is the daughter of two public servants; her mother worked for the federal government and her father in management of community colleges.

From a family of extreme extroverts, she described herself as the “quiet, subdued” one in the family.

Her interest in foreign countries piqued as a child. Growing up, their home was filled with artwork and artifacts from when her mother owned an import-export shop of African goods. When she was about four years old, her sister brought out an encyclopedia, showed her a map of Africa and told her this is where her ancestors originated.

“I think I stumbled into this career because I was looking for ways to visit different African countries,” she said.

McKenna was gifted from an early age. She skipped two grades — attending high school at 12 years old, where she was the only national merit scholar in her class. She enrolled in Harvard University at 16 years old where she received both a bachelor of arts and master of business administration.

She is currently 46 years old, but due to this leapfrogging, she often was the youngest person in the room at many points in her career.

“I also was usually the only Black person in a lot of situations — so always like, not quite fitting in,” she said.

McKenna originally pursued a corporate path. One of her early gigs was at an agricultural company, where she initially became aware of the challenges facing farmers in lower-income countries in bringing their products to market. She also worked at global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, American Express, and General Electric.

Following her work in the private sector, she served as a senior program officer in the agricultural development program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

“When the Gates Foundation started investing in agriculture, and really took the market aspect of it seriously — thinking about what are the long-term sustainable ways — I joined,” she said. “I took like a 50% pay cut, moved across the country, and kind of gave up everything to follow that.”

When U.S. President Barack Obama was elected, his administration pumped resources into global food security. McKenna served as deputy coordinator of development for Feed the Future and assistant to the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Bureau for Food Security.

“That was an exhilarating time. I've never worked so hard in my life,” she said. Compared to the private sector and philanthropic world, she had to sharpen her management skills, working to motivate people without incentives such as raises and bonuses.

She said this experience helped advance her conflict resolution skills: learning to argue her points with either The White House, Congress, or other agencies.

“I owe a tremendous amount to my government experience,” she said.

Following her time in government, she worked for Habitat for Humanity, as chief operating officer and then in the same role at CARE — having predominantly worked in development in the past, this experience helped deepen her understanding of how a large international aid organization works in conflict settings.

She started the role as chief executive officer at Mercy Corps in October 2020.

Mercy Corps is ‘growing up’

Her predecessor, Neal Keny-Guyer, led the organization since 1994, resigning in late 2019 surrounding allegations of the organization’s severe mismanagement of allegations that a now-deceased co-founder of Mercy Corps abused his daughter but was allowed to stay in a senior position. The organization now faces a lawsuit that it mishandled the investigation, which was released last year. McKenna has described the lawsuit as a “distorted and untrue characterization” of the investigation.

McKenna has restructured the organization since she came on board — of a 12 person leadership team, only one is in the same position. One of her new hires includes a new chief operating officer — which is the first time the organization has had this role, as well as a recently hired chief financial officer.

The organization has seen exponential growth in recent decades, yet areas such as finance and operations haven’t kept pace, she said, adding that headquarters has not always been in sync with what happens at the country level.  

“Mercy Corps has grown really quickly. And so now we're at that stage where we're really growing up,” she told staffers in Mogadishu.

McKenna wants the organization to focus on areas it excels in: food security, water access, peacebuilding, conflict avoidance, and economic opportunities. And that means partnerships in areas where it doesn’t have as much of a competitive advantage such as health.

"We still have a lot of room to grow in the things that we're really good at, and the things that we can uniquely do well,” she said.

McKenna spends a good share of time on advocacy and fundraising, which includes meeting with U.S. government officials. The organization has a strong relationship with USAID, she said, and is considered a government “thought partner.”

But she also wants to diversify the organization’s funder base on private donations to access more unrestricted money “to give us a little bit more room to be innovative and to support staff and do things that aren't tied to projects.”

"We don't have child sponsorship, we're not getting money from churches. So our core funding is lower,” she told staff.

McKenna lights up when she talks about programming aimed at building community resilience to withstand the changing climate — such as strengthening communities in Somalia to respond to recurrent drought.

The organization has framed its new strategy, launched midyear, around resilience and is hoping it can “lead the pack” to “shift the focus in emergencies, toward long-term, durable solutions, and breaking down the silos between humanitarian and development.”

‘Never an option’

McKenna’s warmth strikes you straight away when meeting her. She carefully listens to those around her and speaks thoughtfully.

She said she sometimes catches people off guard because she can talk just as easily about resilience building as she can about reality television.

“I just have a hard time being too formal or too stiff at any point in time,” she said. “I also giggle a lot — and it's been a problem for me since third or fourth grade.” When she was a 20-year-old working at McKinsey and Company, she was told it probably wasn't reassuring to clients if she giggled in meetings.

“Which is fair — but at the same time, it also probably wasn't the right environment for me either,” she said.  

Fourteen years ago, McKenna married her husband Joe. The couple has two neurodiverse sons — aged 7 and 9 — on the autism spectrum.

She said this has taught her about managing employees with different gifts, making her “more thoughtful and open about accepting people in different ways.”

“If someone really hates turning on their camera in meetings, I'm not going to be swift to say you have to be or do things a certain way,” she said, adding that the world would miss out if one of her sons missed an opportunity just because he didn’t make eye contact or couldn’t sit through a meeting.

“It's really helped me think about diversity in the workplace, and being really open-minded to getting the best out of people no matter how they show up,” she said.

Her husband, a chiropractor, quit his job after their second son was diagnosed to take the role of full-time parent.

“I really owe what I'm able to do to him,” she said, calling him a “natural nurturer.”

McKenna is also the primary caretaker of her elderly mother, who lives in assisted living near their home.

Apart from her immediate family, she has a close-knit group of women friends whom she talks with daily. The five of them pledged with the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority when she was 18 and have been a unit ever since.

“I've grown up with them. It is a very deep, tightly knit bond that's really become invaluable,” she said.

McKenna said she was raised with a firm sense of obligation to others.

“I think that comes from being an African American. My parents are products of segregated schools. I was always raised to believe that it was my job to … provide opportunities for other people,” she said.

Her grandmother had a master’s degree in math, but for her generation, largely the only jobs available to Black people with those qualifications was to teach.

“I also was very conscious of … the ways my ancestors may have been able to self-actualize that were denied to them,” she said. “No matter where people live, we need to provide people with opportunities to self-actualize.”

In a previous role, she was told by a subordinate that she would never rise to the level of CEO within that organization because donors wanted a “blue-blooded” person.

“Basically, they needed someone that looked like them to be in charge,” she said, adding that board members also said racist things in front of her.

“They're just a lot of biases against Black leadership,” she said. “Especially as a woman.”

She’s currently the only African American woman leading a major American humanitarian organization.  

When she visited the organization’s country office in Iraq in March, a Kenyan staffer approached her and said she joined Mercy Corps because it was led by a Black woman.

“I always think about what it would have meant to me to see more people like me in leadership roles or [the situations] where I was the only one in the room and didn't feel empowered to call out something that was inappropriate,” she said.

She said she loves her job; it gives her purpose. But also walking away from an opportunity to lead was “never an option.”

“There is this pressure to prove that people that look like me can be in these positions and do well,” she said. “I've never existed as an individual. I am a Black woman. … I would have felt that I was [leaving] the community behind.”

And in that vein, she hopes to lay the groundwork to open opportunities for others at Mercy Corps.

“Hopefully, the next CEO will be from a region that we're serving,” she said to staffers in Mogadishu. “I want Mercy Corps to be a place where you can grow.”