From a small town to Iceland to Earned Impact: Kaelene's story

I grew up in a small town (fewer than 70 kids in my graduating class) and went to college fifteen minutes from home. It was comfortable, familiar, and at some point that started to scare me. Entering my junior year of college I started to have this growing feeling that if I didn't get out now, I never would. A college advisor helped me turn that feeling into something real, pointing me toward study abroad programs. I ended up landing a four-month internship in Sydney, Australia, and it changed everything. What started as one semester abroad opened up a new chapter of traveling and living overseas, eventually bringing me to Iceland, where I stayed for nearly ten years.

While in Iceland, I joined the country's largest private university and found work that felt deeply personal. I marketed programs to international students coming to Iceland and helped Icelandic students find study abroad opportunities of their own. I got to be the same kind of person my college advisor had been for me, just at a larger scale.

Living and working in Scandinavia also reshaped how I think about business. There was no obsession with scaling for scaling's sake, what I saw instead was a deep commitment to partnership, to investing in relationships, and to believing that doing right by people is the growth strategy. When I came back to the U.S., I knew corporate America wasn't for me. I'd seen a better way to work, one built on trust, shared goals, and genuinely caring whether what you're marketing matters.

That's what led me to Earned Impact. We work with mission-driven organizations because I've lived the proof that one well-told story, one program marketed to the right person at the right time, can genuinely change a life. It changed mine.