Scaling Deep with Nadia Kist

Nadia Kist runs Blood:Water from Nairobi, partnering withcommunity-based organizations across Africa to end health disparities tied to HIV/AIDS and the water crisis. She's also Egyptian-American, a classically trained singer of German and Latin arias, and a photographer. So she pays close attention.We get into the part of the funder-doer conversation thatnobody quite says out loud: that the architecture of international development funding was never really built for community autonomy, and that our obsession with scale, replicability, and ROI is the language of mass production. "Why are we trying to do that with people?" she asks. We also talk about scaling deep instead of scaling wide, andwhy her longest-tenured supporters supported the shift toward locally-led work almost immediately.And then there's the rest of our conversation: Nadia received a cancer diagnosis in 2023, and she calls that season one of thegreatest gifts she's been given. Not because the experience was good, but because limitation became a kind of freedom: a daily liturgy of "I bring what I can, and I trust I'll be met with the rest." Her Fight Club support group still holds her to it.This is a conversation about what gets clarified when youstop trying to carry it all — as a person, as a leader, and as a sector.