Orchid Project CEO & Founder Julia Lalla-Maharajh: Leaving the Corporate World to Found A Charity

“I realised I had to change something quite seismically in life
because what I was doing had no real congruence or value anymore
for me... I quit that job and went into a phase of not having a job
or business card or identity. It was really tough. I consider that
year utterly formative in my life… I started to tune into what
motivated me and what I wanted to do. I realised I wanted to see
more of the world… I was starting to follow my instincts.” My guest
this episode is CEO and Founder of Orchid Project, Julia
Lalla-Maharajh.  After spending 18 years in the corporate
sector, Julia decided to leave her job in search of something else.
She first volunteered in Ethiopia where she came to understand the
devastating scale and impact of female genital cutting. In 2010,
she won a YouTube competition to take an urgent human rights cause
to Davos and lead a panel discussing how to end FGC. After which,
she spent time in Senegal and The Gambia, visiting communities and
seeing the incredible change at the grassroots level. In 2011,
Julia founded Orchid Project, a UK-based NGO that is catalysing the
global movement to end female genital cutting.  Julia has been
recognised for her commitment to ending FGC in being named
‘Influencer of the Year’ by the Directory for Social Change in
2010, being honoured by the Queen as a ‘Woman Agent of Change’ on
Commonwealth Day in 2011.  In 2017 Julia was awarded an OBE.
Julia’s story is exactly the kind I set out to tell on this
podcast. Hearing how Julia made the brave leap from a successful
career in the corporate sector to founding a charity for a cause
she truly believes in was, well, nothing short of inspirational. We
talked all about: Realising that a corporate career was incongruent
to her core self and value-systems  Making the leap into the
unknown and what it felt like What FGC is and how Orchid Project,
the charity she founded, is helping put an end to the
practice  And how the inner-journey is just as important as
the outer journey  It affects over 200 million women and girls
around the world. It is a global issue. It’s estimated that around
68 million girls could be cut over the next decade. This is such an
important issue. To find out more, you can visit orchidproject.org.
And of course, listen to our conversation.