Every so often, you encounter an idea that doesn’t simply interest you, it’s more like it recognizes you. It gives language to something you’ve believed for years but could never quite articulate, and once you’ve seen it, you can’t stop thinking about it because, somehow, it has helped you understand yourself a little better.

That happened to me in Sydney, Australia, in 2024.

I was introduced to Sharon Aaron, the founder of Fashion Forward, a volunteer led fundraising enterprise that transforms donated designer clothing into funding for Jewish House, an organization whose mission is remarkably similar to Ve’ahavta’s. The concept itself was beautifully simple. People donate designer fashion they no longer wear. Volunteers prepare it for sale. The proceeds create opportunities for people facing poverty and homelessness to transform their lives. It was innovative, beautifully executed and, perhaps most importantly, it was working, generating hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.

But what stayed with me wasn’t the business model itself, ingenious though it was. It was the philosophy embedded within it. As Sharon described what she had built, I had the unmistakable feeling that I was looking at something I had known for a very long time without ever seeing it so clearly expressed. It gave shape to an idea that had quietly informed almost every important leadership decision I had made, first in business and later at Ve’ahavta.

The idea is surprisingly simple.

I have always believed that the strongest enterprises are intentionally designed to create value for every person connected to them, and that financial success is not something that competes with that goal but grows out of it. People are naturally drawn to places where they themselves are growing, contributing and becoming more fully who they are capable of being. When an organization creates those conditions intentionally, it doesn’t have to convince people to engage. They want to.

That belief has shaped almost every significant decision I’ve made at Ve’ahavta. It shapes how we work alongside people facing poverty, how we invest in our staff, how we engage volunteers and even how we approach fundraising because, to my mind, an enterprise only truly succeeds when everyone connected to it both contributes value and receives value in return.

Which brings me to what I jokingly call the “No. Thank you, Cari” phenomenon.

Every so often I’ll call a donor who has just made a significant gift, ready to thank them for their generosity, only to be interrupted.

“No,” they’ll say. “Thank you.”

The first few times it happened, I laughed it off as simple humility. But after hearing it again and again over the years, I found myself asking a different question.

Why were they thanking me?

Two conversations, years apart, gave me the answer.

Both donors described themselves in almost exactly the same way. They had worked hard. They had made good decisions. But they also spoke with remarkable humility about how much of their lives had been shaped by things they had never earned: the families they were born into, the opportunities they had been given, the careers that happened to flourish. They called it good luck. And with equal honesty, they recognized that many of the people Ve’ahavta serves had simply experienced the opposite.

That, I realized, was what they were thanking me for.

Not for the phone call, and not even for the opportunity to make a gift. They were thanking Ve’ahavta for creating a trusted way to put their values into action. A way to use the good fortune they had received to create opportunity for someone else.

That, I realized, was exactly what I had recognized in Fashion Forward.

Not simply a fundraising initiative, but an enterprise intentionally designed to give people authentic opportunities to live their values while, almost effortlessly, creating value for everyone else in the process.

Someone donates a dress they no longer wear. Someone else volunteers because they love fashion. Another discovers an affordable designer handbag they otherwise couldn’t afford. None of them arrives for exactly the same reason, nor do they need to. The enterprise begins by accepting people as they are and then quietly weaves those different motivations together into something larger than any one individual could have created alone.

A dress sitting unworn in the back of a closet becomes hot meals. A love of fashion becomes a force for social good. And because Fashion Forward is run entirely by volunteers, every dollar raised creates more opportunities for people facing poverty to transform their own lives.

I left Sydney convinced we needed to bring it to Toronto, and I approached Sharon about helping us do exactly that.

The strongest enterprises don’t begin by trying to change people. They begin by understanding them. They recognize that people are already searching for meaning, for purpose and for opportunities to contribute to something worthwhile. Rather than asking people to become someone different, they create places where people can become more fully themselves.

Looking back, I don’t think what captivated me in Sydney was Fashion Forward itself. It was seeing a philosophy I had carried for years expressed so beautifully through the design of an enterprise.

Perhaps that’s why some organizations capture our imagination while others never quite do. We recognize integrity when we encounter it. We recognize generosity, fairness and authenticity, even when we can’t quite explain why. Somehow we know the difference between organizations that simply talk about their values and those whose values are woven into every decision they make, every relationship they build and every experience they create.

That, more than anything else, has become the guiding philosophy of how I try to lead at Ve’ahavta. Over the years I’ve become less and less interested in convincing people to care about what we do. Instead, I try to build an organization that is worthy of the values people already carry within them. An organization where donors can turn their good fortune into opportunity for someone else. Where volunteers can transform their talents into acts of service. Where staff can bring their whole selves to work each day knowing their efforts matter. And where people facing poverty are not defined by hardship, but are given the opportunity to discover their own strengths, confidence and capacity to build a different future.

When I think about it that way, success no longer feels like something to be pursued. It feels like the natural consequence of building an organization where people are able to become more fully themselves.

Perhaps we’ve misunderstood what creates success.

What if people aren’t looking for something to believe in but rather, are looking for places where the very best of who they already are can find meaningful, genuine expression?

With gratitude,

Cari Kozierok,
CEO, Ve’ahavta