After four years working in youth ministry, Katie Nienow moved to the Congo to work in microfinance. Her boss was not happy. "You're leaving the one thing God has best designed you to do," he told the Richmond, Virginia, native.
But it seems he was wrong. Nienow remembers sitting in her first economics class at the University of Virginia: "I remember suddenly feeling like I had found the subject my brain was made to learn and to know." In the Congo, Nienow worked for HOPE International, offering financial services to people who are often excluded from the formal banking sector.
Nienow is now doing something similar in Mountain View, California, in Silicon Valley. At Juntos Finanzas, a tech startup that she cofounded, Nienow says, "I'm able to engage in the restorative work that God cares about . . . building business as it ought to be, as a channel for the common good."
