#21 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.