LINDSEY A. ROGERS

I’m building a life that bets on my ability and yours to change the world for the better. We can do this. Let’s walk together. It’s much better that way.

Lindsey

Your coach

Alchemi

The philosophy

Values

What we stand for

Welcome, Worldchanger

If you’ve found your way here, you’re the kind of person who wants to change the world — to make it better because you have lived.

Not only do you see injustice, pain, destruction, but you see what is possible with healing.  You see beauty and potential where others see inevitability, status quo, or just the way things are.  You see what many other people can’t see or won’t see.  Sometimes you care so much it hurts.  Sometimes you respond by working yourself to the bone. Sometimes you freeze with indecision because you’re so afraid of doing the wrong thing, or inadvertently doing harm.

You have a big dream for yourself, for your organization, or for an organization that doesn’t exist yet — or all three.

Perhaps you feel you haven’t started changing the world yet, or perhaps you are deep in the thick of it, and the journey is teaching you so much about yourself, but you aren’t sustainable yet.  Either way, you are in the right place.

This is Alchemi

This is a business and a space on the internet created to support worldchanging people like you.

It was created and is run by me, Lindsey A Rogers. I’m a coach for mission-driven people who have a big, inspiring vision they’re struggling to bring to life.

The world changers I work with are passionate and hustling, but the intensity of their vision often leaves them paralyzed with overwhelm, burnt out from working so hard, and struggling to make their organization and life sustainable.

I help them clarify their vision, find their path forward, and take bold action so they can realize their dreams of building world-changing organizations and leading joyful, meaningful lives.

The Long Story of How I Got Here:
Passion Meets Overwhelm

For as long as I can remember, I felt driven to heal the world — to make it better.   It was more than a desire — it felt like a spiritual calling.

I was always a contradiction of a deeply spiritual, rebellious, can’t-be-contained wild child who loved animals, walking barefoot outside, holding worms in my hands, trying to climb trees, and running around in the small wooded forest area near my home.  I resisted showers and combing my hair (who has time for those things?), preferring to be outside or reading books.

So when I learned about the rainforests disappearing around the time I was seven, I founded the “Save the World” club with a friend. We went door to door selling tickets to a play we created and performed in my friend’s backyard, and with a combination of ticket sales and an accompanying bake sale, we raised $75 for a rainforest preservation fund (fundraising is particularly easy, it turns out, when your parents absorb all of the baking costs, and also buy tickets to the event).

Somewhere around the same time, my family took a trip with my older sister to visit colleges, and I saw my first homeless person. Homelessness was not something I was familiar with, growing up in a sheltered Detroit suburb, and so my family had to try and explain to me what homelessness meant.  The experience was heartbreaking — I can still remember the feeling of my forehead on the booth where we had sat to eat lunch as I sobbed, trying to process what I had just learned, that the woman I saw on a dirty blanket on the corner of a cobblestoned street didn’t have a home, and trying to understand how such a thing could be possible.

As time went on, I would learn more and more about things that didn’t feel right in the world. The legacy of racism and discrimination was not dead. That human rights were something we were still fighting for.

And in every area of my life, I was the outspoken one on any issue I cared about.  The one who cried too much, and argued too much, whether with my classmates or my catechism teacher.  Who felt everything, and wouldn’t shut up about it. I was voted “Most Likely to Join the Peace Corps” for high school senior superlatives.

Yet despite that passion, I struggled deeply what what to do with my life.  Finding my particular way to heal the world was never easy or straightforward.  There was never just one issue, never just one cause that I felt was mine, and when I tried to narrow it down, to focus, I just felt trapped.  I remember spending hours and hours on the (then new, still dial-up) internet, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, until, after months of little sleep and endless questions, on a retreat with my church youth group, at a monastery I love dearly to this day, I had a deeply spiritual experience that unveiled how I wanted my life’s work to feel.   I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the beginning of learning how to track my way towards my purpose, into the unknown, by following my connection to that feeling — whenever I could find the courage to listen. It was my first lesson in how people like me — people who feel deeply the things around them and hear a calling to do and create something that doesn’t exist yet — need to navigate the world: by learning to trust ourselves, and the connection we have to something that doesn’t exist yet.

I couldn’t look away from what was wrong with the world, but besides just seeing what was painful and unjust, I saw potential everywhere.  I am a joyful person who loves people, who loves the Earth.  In each of these areas I could see what was possible — I could see the beauty of a healed world. This combination was incredibly overwhelming.  But I’m not someone who gives up when it really matters.

An Education Begins

While I didn’t find a clear career path on the internet, I had the feeling of what I wanted my life to mean. So like everything else, I dove into college head first, ready to change the world. I was an activist and core organizer in a human rights and environmental justice corporate accountability campaign. I stood on campus handing out flyers and talking to whoever would listen, pulled all nighters to write pamphlets and op-eds, to prepare arguments for administrative bodies we were pressuring to take action.  One day after tabling for many long hours on very little sleep, I collapsed with the first known case of flu that year on campus. I was burning out.

Ultimately our campaign achieved what could be defined as success for a time — the university suspended its contract with a major multinational corporation, and our work made international news.  And yet I was haunted for years about whether or not it made any difference at all to the people who really mattered. I knew that what I was fighting for was important, but the way I was fighting for it wasn’t sustainable.  And I wasn’t the only one burning out.  When the university reinstated the purchasing contract they had suspended, the campaign mostly fizzled out.

After burning out, I focused harder on my studies and the consulting work I did in my major, Organizational Studies.  I was studying organizational development and organizational change in the context of social impact, and doing consulting work for local nonprofits. I studied how people and organizations could affect change, how organizations changed people, and how social movements formed and changed.

Over time, I came to realize that it wasn’t some kind of flakiness that had me failing to commit to just one “issue” as people normally articulated them — rather, I had a gift to see the deep interconnections between people, places, ideas, and issues, and the ability to look at not only each individually, but the greater whole and the interactions between each of the parts. By the end of college, I knew I wanted to use what I’d learned to create my own worldchanging organization.

An Idealist Meets the “Real World”

Knowing that I wanted to create and lead my own organization, but not wanting to be the kind of leader without any real world, front lines experience, I joined City Year in Detroit, an Americorps organization working in direct service in education, and moved downtown. I got to experience the joy of seeing middle schoolers start to realize their own power and potential — their ability to make the world around them better, and despite being raised (as many suburban Detroit kids are) to avoid any place south of 8 Mile, I fell in love with Detroit.  Unfortunately, in the wake of the crippling recession as the auto industry hit rock bottom, jobs for 23 year olds looking to work in the nonprofit/social impact sector were practically nonexistent, so I headed to the city I saw leading the way in social innovation — Boston.

In Boston I was drawn to organizations that touched many issues and enabled social impact organizations to be successful, and to positions that would let me work directly with the leaders of these organizations.

I worked with both the President and the CEO at a national nonprofit recruitment firm that recruiteding and managed hiring for some of the most innovative social impact organizations in the country, and supported thought leadership projects on talent management and the impact of volunteering. 

I was the third employee at an impact investing firm creating a new way to fund social impact initiatives, working with the CEO and Managing Partner to build the operations and manage critical projects for the work of creating and building political support for a new financial tool at the edge of an unknown market.

I became part of an incredible community of young, social impact focused fellows trying to build bridges across sectors. Later in my career, I would join the Development team of an organization focused on innovative health care, and help to build their new funding model.

In any place I worked, I was always drawn to the unique challenges of charting a path where there wasn’t any before, building an organization to support the work, and challenging and inspiring purpose-driven leaders. The organizations I worked for were in the news, starting new industries. And in every instance, I saw how much leadership matters. Values mattered.  Alignment between mission, vision, values, and leaders mattered.  And self awareness mattered.

Becoming a Coach, Founding a Company

At the same time I was working for the established executive entrepreneurs I supported through my traditional work, I found myself taking a particular role in the groups of young changemakers I surrounded myself with.

My friends were navigating nonprofit careers, in social enterprise programs, starting their own impact-focused initiatives or businesses, and enlisting in social innovation accelerators.  In the same way I had been supporting the executives I worked with, I was able to help them see their potential, clarify their priorities, face down their self-doubts, and navigate the landscape. I didn’t know it yet, but I was coaching them, and little did I know that my patchwork education of all the different aspects of building a nonprofit organizations was giving me exactly what I needed not only to help my friends, and the executives I supported, but my future clients.

Slowly I realized that the company I wanted to found wouldn’t be based on one particular issue, but on activating and supporting people in living world changing lives and building organizations that make the world better — on living their missions, and unleashing their potential. Instead of trying to build an organization that could encompass the vast amount of connections I saw between every social issue I cared about, I would build a life and an organization with a mission to activate and support others in doing the work they feel called to do.  That this was really my calling.

It had been several years of working in Boston for organizations that other people admired and I felt I should be happy in, and feeling crazy for hearing the calling that I wanted to create an organization of my own — an organization that I could create in alignment with my purpose and my values — when I faced a moment of truth.  I had only been working for a few months for an organization with a community I loved and whose mission I supported, but who’s then-business model I did not.  In retrospect, I think accepting the role in the first place was a way I was avoiding answering the call to make the leap into entrepreneurship, but when my boss was adamant that we continue our current plan to raise funds — a plan that felt out of integrity with both what I valued and what I saw as important to the future of the organization — I quit.  Without a plan, with only a few months of living expenses saved and the knowledge that I wasn’t going to run this time, that I was going to do it — I quit.

Knowing what you are feeling called to do is only the first step — then comes the work of making it real, and learning to enjoy the journey.

That was back in 2013, and the story of how I built my organization from there is a long one.  Here are some highlights: I tried to run my first retreat within three months of existing, and no client list — I failed hard.  I signed up for a coach training program and it changed my life.  To fund the program (which cost all of my savings) I got a job at Starbucks, where I was the living embodiment of many people’s worst fears. I got other side gigs to help me make it work.  I moved in with a friend and moved across the country to save money on housing.  I started over again in a new place.  I faced (and continued to face) fear, adversity, and self doubt.  And most importantly, I learned how to cultivate joy on the journey.

Where I am today

Today my clients keep growing, learning, building, doing our work on each of our missions to make the world better.  We keep making mistakes, learnings, and doing better.  Clients who years ago I helped navigate career transitions are now founding initiatives and organizations, and I get to evolve with them — to help them do that, too.

While I’m still hustling, I have built a life that gives me more and more freedom each passing day to live in closer and closer alignment with my values: in the way I spend my time, in the way I communicate, and in the way I make and spend money.

I get to help mission driven professionals, entrepreneurs and creators, people with a calling like mine — a calling that won’t leave them alone — bring their ideas into reality.

I get to combine my practical skills in strategy, development operations, hiring, change management, and most of all coaching — to help visionary people who want to make the world better get out of their own way and find joy in the difficult, inspiring process of building incredible lives, organizations, communities, and works of art that make a difference.

I help them learn how to fundraise in a way that aligns with their personality and values.  I help them start to hire their first people.  I help them build systems that will work for them.  I help them get out of their own way, dissolve crippling mental and emotional blocks and turn them in to fuel that moves them forward. I help them enjoy the process. I help them make brave, life- and organization-changing decisions… and I get to watch as my support helps them unfold — how it unleashes their gifts on the world — and how we all get to benefit.  I get to cheer as they blow us all away. (Yes, Hamilton is the best. George Washington forever.).

It feels amazing to see people  break through barriers they didn’t know they had.  To watch the level of joy my clients feel grow as they grow their capacity to move the world around them.  To name their most audacious dreams, to face down their fears, and to celebrate their successes.

Lindsey A Rogers
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