How Can I Use My Skill Set and Values to Pivot in My Career?
What helped Rita Pin Ahrens go from civil rights and advocacy work to owning a successful DC area toy store?
The following is part of an ongoing series in which I interview entrepreneurs I admire to find out how they have tapped into their courage, strength, and resilience to follow their own path.
When I heard that Rita Pin Ahrens used to be the Executive Director of OCA - Asian Pacific American Advocates but now owns and runs Child’s Play Toys and Books, I was more than curious and thrilled when she agreed to talk with me. Rita explained that she has pivoted multiple times in her career, navigating each challenge while staying true to herself and her values.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Rita: It dates back to when I had just graduated high school. I was in a summer pre-college program. I thought I was going to become a stem researcher. We toured Genentech at the time, and they were working on the human growth hormone, and I remember how excited I was. I loved the program. We walked through, and I looked around, and I noticed all the scientists looked very tired. They looked like they were bored, and I remember thinking to myself, “I don't want to look like that. I don't want that to be me.”
I thought very deeply about the sort of work I wanted to do and how I could support myself. At the end of the day, you still want to be happy, right?
So, I switched to psychology because you're still able to do research, and I found psychology fascinating. There were lots of things still to be discovered at the time. The Internet had just emerged and become more available to consumers. I was really fascinated with the study of online behavior, and nobody was really studying that at the time.
It was easy for me to kind of sidestep into it. I went to work for a tech company. This was a dream job. It was all very, very exciting.
We were studying online behavior anonymously, and then at one point the CEO said, “We can make a lot more money if we figure out who these people are because we already know what they're doing online. Then we can market to them.”
It was 2000 or 2001, before everyone started doing that. I had joined the company and did that line of work only because I thought it would always be anonymous. Following people across the Internet and then finding out who they are and where they live was too Big Brother for me.
I thought, “Do I want to be known for having participated in this? Do I want to be complicit in what is happening and the direction that this company is going?” I thought about it, and I said no. It crossed a moral line for me.
I called up my supervisor and said,” I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to resign.”
I resigned without a job. I figured if I pursued another job at another tech company, I might have this dilemma again because there were no rules and regulations. There were no laws against what they were doing.
I thought, what can I do? My skills must be transferable. I know a lot of tech things that other people don't.
I decided to go into teaching because at the time there was a shortage of math teachers and a shortage of teachers who knew technology. I was able to get into a program that would give me my master's but also allow me to teach at the same time.
At my first school, I taught sixth and seventh grade math, and I did one class of creative writing. I also taught afterschool tech classes, and not just to honor students but to your average C and B students as well. I loved it. It was very progressive back then.
Then, at the second school I was at, they gave me this giant binder, and they said, “This is day one, and here's the lesson you'll teach day two. This is the lesson for day three… and then you'll test at the end of the week.” It was very regimented.
I had my master’s in education. I had a degree in psychology from Yale, and I understood child development and behavior and motivation. Yet I could not customize my lesson plans, and I could not teach the way that I had been taught in my master’s, the way that I believed students should be taught. I had to teach exactly by the book.
Dani: Was this a public school system?
Rita: Yes, it was a New Haven public school. I was teaching at Sheridan at the time, which was a NASA Explorer School, a science and technology magnet. I was placed in the best school for my background with other former Yale students who were also teaching. I remember thinking, this is incredibly wrong. It was very frustrating.
They told us that this is the consequence of No Child Left Behind. If you don't teach this way, and the district comes in and sees that you're not on Lesson XYZ on day 34, you're going to be punished for it.
Dani: How long did you teach there?
Rita: I finished out the year. Then my husband and I moved to DC for him to pursue grad school. I knew I might have the same issue at some other school, and I thought, I'm here in DC where all the laws are made. Why don't I actually try to help fix the law from the perspective of a teacher?
I ended up at a teacher nonprofit, and I worked in education policy trying to fix various laws. I actually did work on the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind. Later, I was present when President Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act into law. That was very vindicating for me.
I gradually expanded my portfolio. I worked on everything, from teacher policy to trying to improve graduation rates to antidiscrimination. I worked on stem bills for colleges, tech access, immigration. I worked in the civil rights sector.
In 2019, I became the executive director of OCA - Asian Pacific American Advocates. It's a national civil rights organization, the second oldest Asian American civil rights organization in the country. We had 50 chapters across the country, and also worked with Guam and other territories.
It was a very fulfilling, rewarding job. I worked on the Future Act, which President Trump signed.
It was a bill that provided $255 million dollars a year, permanently, for minority-serving institutions to create programs for students to pursue stem careers, and I was one of the six primary advocates that worked on it.
When the pandemic hit, of course, we had to pivot. We worked on anti-Asian hate—we tracked data on things that were happening to Asian Americans as a result of what President Trump was saying and people's fears about Covid.
I went from a 40-hour week to 50 to 60 and sometimes 70 hours a week. I didn't mind the hours. My work affected so many families across the country. It was important work. I made a lot of sacrifices for that job, and my family was completely on board with it.
I had a 7-year-old son and a teenage daughter at the time. I was doing all this work for other families, and yet my own family was in a way getting neglected, and I was sacrificing time with them. I wanted to be able to support my son through virtual schooling. I wanted to be able to supervise him. I needed to cut back on my hours in order to do that, to get it back to 40 as opposed to 60 and 70 hours a week.
My immediate supervisor was the CEO. I had been warned before I joined the organization that he was a very difficult person to work with. He was very traditional and old fashioned.
I experienced it first-hand. There was some misogyny.
The chairwoman of the Board of Directors for the organization met with me, and she said he feels challenged sometimes. She said, “You're challenging his authority.”
And I said, “I don't understand.”
She said, “It's your tone of voice. You have an authoritative tone of voice. I need you to consider moderating your voice. Try lifting it at the end of a sentence.”
Dani: —Gasp—
Rita: Yeah, exactly. I can see your expression, and the same thing was going through my head.
I put the call on speaker phone so my husband could hear because he was in the same room with me. This is the pandemic. We were there together. He could not believe what he was hearing.
In that moment I looked at him, and I thought to myself, my God. I am leading a civil rights organization. I'm a female executive director. We have workshops that teach women how to empower themselves, how to talk like professionals. We lead business seminars. And the chairwoman who leads the board of directors, and who works in HR for the federal government, was telling me to act like a female who doesn't know what she's talking about so that I would not intimidate my male colleague.
Dani: She was literally asking you to do what teenage middle school girls do where they ask a question at the end of every sentence. The thing that we're constantly trying to get girls not to do!
Rita: Correct, absolutely a hundred percent correct.
And you hear the way that I speak. I speak very directly. I don't question what I say.
In high school, I did debate, mock trial, and I was on the speech team, and I was very good at those things. I have done a lot of public speaking. Throughout my career, I have addressed members of Congress. I've worked on regulations committees. I've been in the room with people who have more advanced degrees than I have, more expertise than I have, and have been older and have been male, and so I know that I have to act authoritatively. I have to speak in a certain way if I want them to have a positive opinion of what I'm saying.
I'm not a naive, inexperienced woman. I understand what I'm facing and the challenges that women are facing, but to have a female boss tell me this so that I could make my male colleague feel better…I'm sorry, no.
Dani: And once that happened, you couldn’t unsee it. You couldn’t unhear it.
Rita: Correct.
It was a pretty easy decision for me to make.
I've always thought about community first, about the needs of others. I believe in public service, and making sure that you leave the world in a better place. And I didn't think if I brought up and aired these issues that it would actually help the organization or help the community. At the time, the pandemic was raging. I had worked on a lot of grants and a lot of things. I had helped bring in a lot of money to the organization, and I didn't want to endanger any of that.
So, I used the excuse of the pandemic, the excuse of my 7-year-old needing supervision for virtual schooling, to resign quietly.
I wanted to be the sort of person who could always say to my children that I did the right thing.
That's why I led you through the different threads of where I've been because usually when I left a job, it was because there was a moral issue that I encountered, and I knew I didn't want to cross that line.
Dani: Compromising your own values or diminishing yourself.
Rita: Exactly.
Dani: So how do you end up at Child’s Play?
Rita: My family and I had been shopping at Child's Play ever since we moved to DC over 18 years ago.
We lived down the street so we knew the owners. We knew a lot of the staff.
They were very fascinated with my career. They liked that I had been a teacher. They watched my career progress from teacher policy to expanding my policy portfolio, and they also watched my kids grow up.
Dani: What did you think when the owner came to you and asked if you would you be interested in buying the store?
Rita: It was an immediate yes. It was one of those moments where everything seemed to align.
I had always imagined myself either working in a little cafe or owning a cafe somewhere charming where I'd be sipping coffee, and I'd be painting in the corner, but I could never figure out how you sustain yourself with that sort of dream. You have to be really filthy rich to be able to do something like that.
When Steven [the previous owner] said, “You wanna buy my stores?” I thought, that's the missing piece! That's how I have my bookstore cafe and be able to pay for it! It's got its own revenue stream!
Dani: What role do you play as the owner in the day to day?
Rita: This is my full-time job. My role is Chief Happiness Officer.
I chose that title very thoughtfully.
I'm stepping in without a lot of retail experience. I have experienced managers at every store. They are more of the experts than I would be.
I can contribute to the health of the overall company, looking at the big picture things, the branding, the reputation, the marketing, the strategy. How do we grow? How do we make sure our work environment is what we want it to be? What are the values of this particular company?
It was very important for me to have at the center of the company this thought that we are thinking about both your health and your happiness, your development. It was very easy for me to come full circle and say, let me center my values.
I want our store to be a model for other toy stores in the country. I want to show people that you can bring diversity, equity, and inclusion into a toy store. The same things that I'd been working on in the civil rights world, right? You can put that into your products and the way you work with others, the way you work with your vendors. And you can still be sustainable and profitable.
For example, we're focusing on making our store more accessible to neurodivergent kids, and that requires employees to understand some of the issues of neurodivergent kids and their families and caregivers.
I am making sure that every single one of my employees watch these customized training videos that I paid someone to develop for us, and after everybody's watched the training videos, we're doing in-person training.
I found a way to really tie my morals and my values into my work, and I've also found a way to really get my employees to buy into it. And as a result, we're all happier. We all understand what it is that we're trying to do.
It's been very fulfilling to know that I can continue doing the work that I was doing at the different civil rights organizations I've worked at, but I'm doing it in a different form. I'm doing it in a different industry.
Dani: When you look back to the story about the people you saw in the lab, and you decided then what you wanted for yourself, to earn a living and be happy, do you feel like working at Child’s Play matches your criteria?
Rita: Absolutely. I do believe that we all can find fulfilling careers, and we don't necessarily have to make sacrifices to do meaningful work that we enjoy.
Dani: You’ve let your values guide you.
Rita: Correct. I also used my boundaries and my values in negotiating for what I wanted at my jobs.
I was taught to be inquisitive, and to question and think deeply about why I believed certain things and what was important to me.
Each job I’ve had has been a learning process, a lesson. I made choices, and I thought about why I was making those choices, why I was doing what I was doing.
We are responsible for our actions, including the way we say things and how we do things. Even when we have good intentions, if we do something wrong, we have to be responsible for that. That’s our impact on the world, right?
If you have a story you’d like to share, or you know of someone you think I should talk to, write to me: dani@curiousmindopenheart.com
Work with me — Perhaps you want to pivot in your career? I can help you manage the stress of that transition so you can achieve your goals and live your values. Book a free discovery call. and let’s talk!
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