How volunteering my finance skills helped me give someone a second chance at life

Decades before I would serve on the Board for the Southern Center of Human Rights, my family and I lived in a rough neighborhood. My mom was a single parent who as a social worker worked around the clock – sometimes two or three jobs at a time to take care of us. But that didn’t stop her from making time to take my brother, sister and I to volunteer at the foster care center in our neighborhood each week. It wasn’t long before my mom began working at the center, putting in long hours and going above and beyond to place kids in safe homes, helping thousands of kids over the years.

Seeing my mother dedicate her life to helping others reinforced my desire to use my skills to give people a second chance. My mom helped instill in my siblings and me that despite the financial challenges we faced, we could still use our knowledge and time to help others.

What started with weekly volunteer hours at the foster care center led to me taking on a bigger role volunteering, teaching math, science and social studies to at-risk youth and tutoring finance to underprivileged highschool students across the city of Atlanta. These experiences were ways for me to leverage the finance skills I learned in my college and MBA programs to do good for people in my community. It’s what also led me to apply for a nonprofit board seat through PwC’s Skills for Society.

I was matched with two opportunities, including one with the Southern Center for Human Rights, which helps represent inmates on death row who they believe are wrongly convicted and provides acclimation resources after they’re released. I joined the Board and was able to leverage my finance skills and the professional experience I use on a daily basis serving clients. At the time, it felt like another impactful opportunity to use my professional skills, but later on it felt like fate when the Southern Center for Human Rights was able to help release an inmate who had spent 27 years in prison, with seven of them on death row, after being wrongfully convicted. It was incredibly rewarding to meet him and see him smiling with his family, knowing we helped give him a second chance at the life that had been taken from him.

Through this experience, I realized just how large of an impact donating my skills could help to make on the lives of others — especially when coupled with the support of my family, colleagues and fellow Board members. I thank PwC for connecting me to the Southern Center for Human Rights and giving our people opportunities to put their personal purpose into action. And lastly, I thank my mother who taught me that together we can all help solve society’s biggest challenges when we give our time, efforts, resources and what we know to something greater. I hope my story inspires you to pay it forward — with your skills, time, money, or whatever resources you have available to you — each day throughout the year.