Megan King ’97
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.
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. 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.
She 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.”
Tags: English, environmental science, environmental studies
