It seems a strange quirk of fate when things that almost didn’t happen go on to determine the course of our lives.

Ella Goldkorn might agree. She left the University of Cambridge with a degree in classics and no idea what she wanted to do. She started in advertising and soon realised that it wasn’t for her. “I knew I wanted a change,” she says.

Goldkorn began applying for anything and everything. Her only steer was an inkling that she’d like to work for a charity. In the last year of university she had worked with a child with an autistic spectrum disorder and loved it. “I was thinking of accommodating a cause that I was passionate about [in my job].”

The day after the deadline, she saw an internship scheme at the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). She sent off an application form anyway and was accepted for a six-month internship in external affairs. “It happened so fast it is a bit of a blur,” she says. Halfway through, she realised that the work was exactly what she wanted to be doing.

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“Everything suddenly made sense. Before I could get a job I needed to learn a skill set,” she says. In the mornings she answered media calls and in the afternoons was given training in gift aid, direct mail, marketing and dealing with donors. “It felt like learning from the great masters,” she says.

The most exciting work, she says, was the UNHCR Nine Million campaign, which aims to provide education and sport to nine million children by 2010. Goldkorn helped to relaunch the campaign, dealing with the corporate social responsibility (CSR) departments of Nike and Microsoft. Her experience with an autistic child translated well to fundraising, she says. “You have to fill in so many different gaps with a child who doesn’t really communicate. Fundraising is all about communication.” And for UNHCR communication is a challenge. There is a perception that the agency doesn’t need donor support, Goldkorn says. “People hear UN and think ‘money’. But UNHCR is 98 per cent funded by voluntary donations.”

Towards the end of her internship she heard of a new charity that was looking for a director. The RISE Foundation would be the charitable partner of a production company that had made a film about orphans in South Africa and wanted to make more, using the profits to pay the children’s school fees. Something struck a chord, she says. There were similarities with Nine Million – albeit on a much smaller scale. She accepted the unpaid position (“it was a bit of a struggle”) and three months later, was able to start claiming a salary.

Eventually, Goldkorn says, she would like to work for the CSR department of a big company, “using their money to do good. Fundraising is hard. I’d like to bypass that process, be handed the money and go straight to using it.”

www.wearetogether.org

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