We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jennifer Jukanovich a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Jennifer, appreciate you joining us today. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?

I recently launched my new company, Ambactus Global Solutions, which brings together the last three decades of my domestic and international nonprofit leadership and board experience. Ambactus harnesses the power of connection to solve complex problems in governance, education, and international development through trust-based solutions. The name is derived from the Celtic word, ambactus, which means a servant or messenger of a lord – in other words, of a higher purpose. And when you break it down even more it means to draw out and drive forth. My career has never had a straight trajectory, but I have sought to “draw out” purpose and drive forth “goodness,” wherever I have been situated, whether that has been in serving the President of the United States on religious issues, at-risk youth in the urban core of Seattle, Rwandan women who sought the dignity of work, or college students through my role as vice president for student life. I’m a connector of people, who loves to use hospitality to build bridges and open doors for people. So when I resigned from my college role to pursue my doctorate in global leadership and education, I found myself being asked by friends and former colleagues to solve problems for their organizations and thought, what if I could harness the power of all these networks I’ve formed over the years to address really deep issues facing our culture and communities in this current moment? What if I could empower organizations to improve how they govern themselves so that the lives of those they serve are improved? What if I could serve their higher purpose to draw out and draw forth even more goodness in this world? I decided to bring it all together under Ambactus Global Solutions. It’s brand new, so I feel like I’m just getting started.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

To understand how I got to where I am today, I guess it would be good to go back a bit. After college, my plan was to become a middle school teacher. But I had also been involved with student government and declared a political studies major. The week of graduation, as I was writing my baccalaureate speech, a professor/mentor of mine from a semester I spent in Washington, D.C., called me and said, “Jennifer, would you be interested in a role where you get to help organize religious leader gatherings for the President of the United States, but don’t mind making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.” It was the strangest job offer I ever received, but I suddenly found myself interviewing Ambassador Phil Lader and his wife, Linda LeSourd Lader. Phil was serving as President Clinton’s Deputy Chief of Staff at the time and quickly soared to becoming a member of his cabinet as the U.S. Small Business Administrator, and then Ambassador to the Court of St. James in England. Linda served as an unofficial religious liaison to President Clinton, helping him to address complex problems facing the nation by bringing together religious leaders. She and Phil also founded the Renaissance Weekends, which continue to this day and bring together the most diverse array of world leaders for personal and national renewal. They needed someone who could serve as a personal assistant to their family, organize children’s programs for the five Renaissance Weekend events, and assist Linda with her work for the White House. It was the most incredible season and really changed my life in many ways.


When I left the Laders and married my husband, who was serving in the United States Army, as a West Point graduate, I felt a real burden for the tensions I was seeing at a national level and wondered what my generation, in particular my generation of the Christian faith, could do together to build unity and engender cultural renewal. While my husband started two graduate programs, and I started seminary classes and worked full-time at the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, we started The Vine, a gathering of young adults that convened for eight years.

Upon my husband’s graduation from graduate school, we moved to his home state of Washington and lived and volunteered in a very multiethnic and socio-economically diverse neighborhood of Seattle. I soon found myself being very challenged in my understanding of what hospitality is, what racism and prejudice are, my own privileges, and many other important life lessons. We started opening our home to neighborhood youth every Thursday night from June through November and those times together were deeply formative. I was also doing some event planning for a wide variety of organizations and even had the chance to facilitate an event in Amman, Jordan. In this season, we also became parents through adoption and the plight of the orphan, whether in our neighborhood in Seattle or in an orphanage in China, soon became very personal. It’s a much longer story, but after eight years, we found ourselves, and our now two small daughters adopted from China, on an orphan-care trip to Uganda. Some friends working in Rwanda asked us to visit while we were there because they thought my husband’s business experience could really be put to good use in Rwanda. We spent 18 hours in the country and when we got back on the plane I told my husband that we were supposed to move there. I wasn’t sure in what capacity, but I just knew we were. Some other close friends were going through a career transition and asked if they could dream with us. We interviewed Rwandan business leaders to find out what was needed, another couple then asked to join us, and before we knew it we had sold our house and moved to Rwanda within a year of that first visit, and launched Karisimbi Business Partners, a management capacity consulting and private equity firm.


While my husband and the other two partners started Karisimbi, I was at home with two small children and we adopted our son from Rwanda in that first year. As I was very present in my neighborhood, I began to build trust with many of the moms who lived in a very poor section of the neighborhood. I was facilitating an adoption for the founder of Noonday Collection, which is now one of the fastest growing fair-trade companies in the United States I asked her if I could help the women in my neighborhood who were without work and struggling to pay school fees, to get trained in sewing and produce a product for her new company. The Umucyo Sewing Cooperative was founded through that relationship and continues to this day. We started a preschool for their children that was sadly forced to close because of external circumstances, but it was a very entrepreneurial season in my life. It was precisely because of all that I learned from these Rwandan friends, who are seen to be at the bottom of society and yet have learned to lead and love one another in the most challenging circumstances, that I focused my dissertation on them.

Four years later, I was asked by my alma mater, Gordon College, to serve as Vice President for Student Life. I oversaw everything involved in the student experience outside of academics – athletics, residence life, leadership, discipline and Title IX, counseling, diversity initiatives, international students, and raised nearly $2 million toward student life activities for the college. I resigned after six years and pursued my Ph.D., becoming a co-investigator for the 2020 GLOBE (Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness) project. This is when I began serving as a nonprofit board coach for the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, actively working with a diverse range of nonprofit clients – artists doing community development for children and refugees, scientists and scholars cultivating human flourishing, educators in the US and Africa seeking new pathways of learning, and those accompanying survivors of prostitution to heal from gender-based violence.

Out of my coaching, I co-authored the book The Culturally Conscious Board: Setting the Boardroom Table for Impact with my Murdock colleague, Russell W. West, that will be published by Berrett-Koehler this September. While I have been recruited by search firms for more established institutional roles over the last four years, I have realized that those roles would not provide me with the flexibility and varied missions that I enjoy serving. At the same time, I really like having the flexibility to be present to my teenagers. As I spoke to more women in my age group, I realized there are other women leaders I would like to partner with and that my networks are varied and yet when harnessed in the right direction could offer really strategic counsel to complex issues in the areas I care about – governance, education, and international development. So here I am now, launching Ambactus Global Solutions.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

My vocational journey has been one in which I have sought to pursue purpose, not just a career. Part of my purpose I always felt was to become a mother. However, after four years of marriage my husband and I realized we were unable to have children biologically. A fourteen-year-old girl in our neighborhood, who was on crack, became pregnant and we wondered if we should adopt her daughter. That set us on a journey toward adoption, even though we realized it wasn’t safe for our family to adopt her particular child. My husband had studied Mandarin in graduate school. We lived in Beijing for a summer. Our neighbors were predominantly Chinese and so we began a journey toward adopting a daughter from China. It took 15 months from the first paperwork application to when we received her, never mind the nine months before that when we were discussing adoption. When we decided to adopt our second daughter from China we were told the process would only take six months for a referral. It ended up taking 33 months. This was one of the hardest seasons of my life, as you have to literally and figuratively give up control, not knowing the outcome. In this same season we decided to end our nonprofit, The Vine, which we had led for eight years, so there was double loss.


One of our closest friends is a physicist and he talks about resilience in metals. He says that being tough in material science means absorbing energy until the material breaks and it fractures. In contrast, resilience is the absorption of stress to the point of the material being deformed, but then releasing that energy and not breaking. Our experience in adoption has definitely brought us to what we thought was our breaking point and yet we didn’t. Our love grew stronger for each other and for our daughter. And then again when three years later we adopted our son in Rwanda. His adoption was only seven months long, but a government official wanting to demonstrate her power threatened to stop our adoption. In that case it was even harder because we had already been placed with our son and had followed all of the necessary steps. It was one of the hardest moments of our life, and another near-breaking moment, but it has only deepened our love for our children.

And it opened our eyes to the deeper injustices facing some of the most vulnerable humans on the planet. I won’t lie. The experiences threatened our hearts to become bitter against those committing the injustices and that’s where forgiveness is so important; for us our faith was the factor that prevented us from breaking. So when I face obstacles now, I have a deep sense that even though things don’t go as planned, they will work together for good in the end. It just may not look like how I imagined.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

When I started The Vine back in 1998, it was at a time when relational events were not seen as being fruitful to funders. And Ted Talks didn’t exist at the time. And in the faith-based community, there were not a lot of female founders, so I felt that I was in a constant uphill battle to bring forth this event that I believed could serve as an antidote to the wreckage of the culture wars. Yet, somehow we hosted five national gatherings and five regional gatherings that catalyzed numerous partnerships and creative ventures in those eight years. I volunteered my time during that season and after receiving our first daughter, I realized I needed help. However, I had not built the financial sustainability into the events to hire staff. I did, but it was too much of a financial hit. A board member sat me down one day and quoted a well-known verse, “Unless a a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” This was hard wisdom for me to hear, but I knew he was right. We closed down The Vine and I wondered what would be next.


One of the friendships we made in The Vine was with the CEO of Children’s HopeChest, an orphan care organization. He had invited me to serve on their board a couple years prior. After closing down The Vine, we received our second daughter the next year and then my husband and I and our two girls joined Children’s HopeChest on a trip to Uganda the following year. And it was on that trip that we visited Rwanda and our lives changed again. We often say that if we hadn’t closed down The Vine, I would not have felt the freedom to move with my entire family to Rwanda. And that move has definitely been one of the most significant moves we made in our life.

Contact Info:

Please consider pre ordering my new book here!

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jjukanovich/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jjukanovich
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-jukanovich-ph-d-143351/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/JJukanovich
• Other: I will have two more websites coming out in the next two months: www.ambactusglobal.com – this is for my new company and www.culturallyconsciousboard.com – this one will be for my book The Culturally Conscious Board: Setting the Boardroom Table for Impact that is being published on September 3, 2024