Megan King ’97 takes on climate change, one tree at a time

Megan King ’97, left, is CEO of Fairventures Worldwide, a reforestation organization. Here, she takes part in a Kalimantan, Indonesia, tree nursery inspection with Indonesia Director Fahillah Hanum and Production Manager Yunizar.

Megan King ’97 with Fairventures Worldwide Uganda Director James Thembo in Indonesia on an exchange visit focused on cocoa agroforestry.

No day is typical for Megan King ’97, but it’s not uncommon for her to move between continents—so to speak.

King is co-CEO of the reforestation organization Fairventures Worldwide, which focuses on planting trees in Indonesia and Uganda. 

“I spent my morning—my whole day—sitting here in my house, jumping back and forth on calls with foresters in Indonesia and Uganda and headquarters in Germany,” King said recently during a video call from her home outside Prague.

“We’re tree planters,” King added. “We believe there are a lot of different ways to do climate mitigation, and we think that you do it through trees. It’s not the end of the story, but it’s part of it.” 

The same climate crisis King and the Fairventures team are working to address also affects their ability to do that work. 

“These are the tropics, and the rains are like clockwork,” she said. “I’ve spent over 15 years going back and forth on the ground, when the rains were so steady. You could count on them, and you can’t anymore. So we live in this climate crisis, constantly looking at what we can change, how we can mitigate faster.” 

King began as a consultant to Fairventures after years spent doing international development work. 

King in Kalimantan, Indonesia, at a focus group with cocoa farmers.

It’s a long way from Randolph, where she majored in English and Russian. She left the country right after graduation to teach English at the University of Economics in Prague, and never looked back. 

“The accent’s American,” she jokes, “but I’ve been out of the country longer than I was in it.” 

From there, she followed opportunity wherever it led—often into entirely new fields.

She worked in the Czech Parliament before co-founding a civic education initiative that organized political town halls in pubs across the country. She held several positions with the humanitarian nonprofit People in Need, including project manager and head of mission for the Middle East during the Iraq War. 

Those experiences eventually led her into broader international development work and, eventually, into environmental and climate-focused projects.

King started at Fairventures Worldwide about eight years ago. 

“I tried to reduce my hours, and they made me the head of operations,” she joked. “Then I tried again, and they made me the director. “I fall into every single job that I’ve ever gotten, I think, because I just always say yes.”

Now, as co-CEO with Wolfgang Baum, King has helped shape Fairventures into the kind of organization they always wanted to work for.

“We both took over in a time of restructuring and wanted to create something transparent, collaborative, and mission-driven,” King explained. “A place where people are open, where information flows and people feel entrusted and empowered. That’s a very different model than what you often see in development. A lot of organizations are very hierarchical. We didn’t want that.

“We spend a lot of time on culture,” she added. “That’s what matters. You can have all the technical expertise in the world, but if you don’t have trust and clarity and communication, it won’t work.” 

King traces her values and this leadership philosophy to her time at the College.

“One of the biggest things that came out of my education was the idea that if something doesn’t exist, you can build it yourself,” she said.

“It was an incubator, a period of time to think and figure out what my values are,” she added. “And the Honor Code—that embodiment of transparency and personal responsibility—you can see that throughline directly into how we’ve built this organization. 

“I think my entire path wraps around back to the moral and ethical foundation I was given at the College.”