Margo Lababdeh Harris

I started my career with basketball sports in Third Ward in Houston, doing after-school programming directly with youth. I taught martial arts, volunteered my time, and worked with families. This happened because I was a child that benefited from investment, and I was also a teen mom, so I understand how hard it is to be in that position and to just give each child the opportunity they can do whatever they want with it. That led me to learning a lot about the programmatic side and engaging with youth that have to face a lot of obstacles just to get to the starting line. The more you work in this field, the more you commit yourself to understanding not just the muscles that drive this work, but the skeleton that supports the muscles. That led me to become an AmeriCorps VISTA, which led me into nonprofit leadership through development. I've worked heavily in education equity, in civil rights, in food access, and gender rights. No matter how big or different we are, we are all still people, and being able to build community and support one another is essential to being a human being. It takes connectors, it takes thread between points, it takes dotted lines to make that happen. Some people are the dots, and some people are the lines. Now I serve as the Senior Program Manager for the Executive Office for Rural Impact, a national intermediary working to better the opportunities for rural youth from cradle to career. I've been in advocacy for 25 years and in this position for a few years now. My typical day varies from day to day because I am a jack-of-all-trades and a master of a lot. It could be anything from building copy for a national media campaign, making sure communications are facilitated for a political meeting within the nonprofit sector, to internal strategy meetings. My work is very dynamic because I work for a dynamic CEO directly, and when you work with nonprofit leadership at a national level, you realize very quickly that it isn't enough to be good at one thing. I consider myself a generalist in the sense that I'm generally good at a lot of things, and I'm really proud of that because that's come from hard work and believing in myself.