The First Guest: Gratitude for Chris Bessenecker and the People Who Actually Do the Work

There's a world of difference between wanting to do good in the world and actually doing it.

Most of us fall somewhere in the gap. We care about the big problems—poverty, climate change, displacement, disease - but our caring mostly lives in the abstract. We donate when we can, share the occasional petition, and generally hope that someone, somewhere, is handling it.

Then there are people like Chris Bessenecker, who at 22 years old joined the Peace Corps and found himself in a small mountain village in Honduras called Belén Gualcho, nestled between El Salvador and Guatemala, trying to convince skeptical families to dig three-meter pits in rocky soil for latrines they weren't sure they wanted in the first place.

I've had the privilege of calling Chris a friend for nearly a decade now. We first met when I was at Classy and he was leading innovation efforts at (then) Project Concern International. I became close with several members of their team. They attended our Classy Awards and Collaborative in Boston, and I frequently joined their informal company happy hours here in San Diego. At Chris's invitation, I also got to serve on a working group that helped select innovation projects for PCI to pursue: improved llama enclosures for rural farmers in South America, clean cookstove programs, small-scale windmill projects. It was the kind of work that reminded me why I got into this sector in the first place.

When I launched Cause & Purpose, Chris was the first person I asked to be a guest. He said yes without hesitation.

That's Chris - He shows up.

***

We recorded the episode in his backyard on a clear San Diego afternoon - perfect weather, a couple of Pacificos, just two friends talking about the work we'd dedicated our careers to. There are some amazing tools now that allow remote podcast recording, but there really is no substitute for getting together in-person. It’s more fun, more natural, and the results tend to be better. If you listen carefully to the episode, you can hear the birds, maybe some traffic in the distance, the occasional dog barking, which I think adds a touch of authenticity to the recording. We could have found a studio. But there was something right about recording it this way - especially for the first episode - informal, human, the way real conversations about meaningful work should happen.

The episode covers a lot of ground: human-centered design, building innovation programs within large organizations, how the development sector has evolved, but the stories I like best are the ones from his Peace Corps years, working hands-on, in the jungle, and hanging with the locals.

One story that didn’t make the final cut of the episode, but which we released as bonus content on YouTube - Chris arrived in Honduras the same day as a terrorist bombing. Apparently it was chaos. Instead of being sent to the project site, he and his cohort were instead directed to the coast to wait things out on the beach until it was safe to proceed. When he finally called his mom to check in, he told her he'd "made his bed." This seems like a totally mundane thing for someone that age to make an international phone call about was intentionally tongue-in-cheek. The joke, was that he'd literally built the bed — scavenged wood and materials, constructed from scratch. Not just made the sheets look nice.

That's the kind of person Chris is. He makes his bed in every sense.

***

My other favorite story involves a local man named Fernando.

Chris had committed to communities in the hills above Belén Gualcho that he would bring cement and corrugated roofing for latrine construction. The Ministry of Health had promised the materials. The villagers, skeptical but willing to trust this young American, dug their three-meter pits in rocky soil and hauled sand up from the river—backbreaking work for families already struggling to get by.

Weeks passed. The materials never came. The rainy season started. The pits began filling in.

One day Chris showed up to a community meeting, and Fernando - usually quiet, subdued - came in late. He was drunk. He was crying. And he was furious.

"I trusted you," Fernando told him. "You said you were going to do this. I reluctantly trusted you, and you failed."

Chris took his words seriously. Fernando was right. He had committed to something he couldn't deliver. And these families - already failed by countless systems, countless broken promises from affluent nations and institutions - had been failed again.

Instead of becoming frustrated, demoralized, or abdicating responsibility, which at 22, he could certainly be forgiven for doing, Chris showed real backbone and character. Instead of accepting defeat, he started asking questions - why hadn't the materials arrived? It turned out they were sitting in a warehouse 20 miles away. The Ministry had all the cement and roofing the project required - they just didn't have money for fuel to transport it.

So Chris reached into his own pocket and paid for the fuel himself out of his Peace Corps stipend. For the price of a tank of gas in the 1980s, he solved a problem that had stalled critical development work and eroded trust in an entire community.

"I could have done that three weeks ago," Chris told me in the interview. "But I didn't. It was a great revelation. It was one of those lessons in life that you learn how important your word is - particularly if you want people to trust you, and particularly people who live on the edge."

That commitment to integrity - to actually doing the work, to getting your hands dirty, to keeping your word -is one of the things I've always admired most about Chris. Many people say they want to make a difference. Chris joined the Peace Corps, moved to Honduras, and spent years building latrines and water systems in mountain villages. He studied why children were afraid to use latrines (it turns out a child's body doesn't fit standard seat designs), and worked with a local carpenter to prototype solutions. He wasn't theorizing about human-centered design from a university lab. He was practicing it in Belén Gualcho, with his own money, because it mattered.

That same spirit carried through his career. Chris built the innovation program at PCI, creating systems that encouraged ideas from anywhere in the organization, establishing criteria for what counted as genuine innovation versus incremental improvement, training staff across countries on design thinking principles. When PCI merged with Global Communities, that work continued.

***

Though the Chris Bessenecker episode was the first one I recorded, it actually wasn't the first one released. That was the same year George Floyd was killed, and I had the opportunity to interview Jessica Murrey - herself a person of color who had spent her career in conflict resolution - about that moment and what it meant. That conversation needed to go first.

But I'm glad Chris was my first recording. There was nervousness, sure - launching a podcast is a leap into the unknown - but mostly there was the comfort of sitting with a friend who understood the work, who had stories worth telling, and who was generous enough to share them. I knew he’d have a lot of good stories to tell and we’d be able to keep things pretty informal.

If you listen to the episode, you'll hear Chris talk about breakthrough innovations, the challenge of building sustainability into development programs, and why so many well-intentioned projects fail because they're designed in labs by people who've never been to the field. You'll hear about a $50 cookstove that sat unused because nobody thought to add a handle, and a massive water filtration system that gathered dust next to three five-gallon buckets with stone filters that actually worked.

But more than the content, you'll hear someone who has dedicated his life to the hard, unglamorous, essential work of making things better for people who have been failed by systems over and over again.

That's the person I'm grateful to call a friend.

***

You can listen to the full episode with Chris Bessenecker here.

Chris is currently with Global Communities, continuing the innovation and human-centered design work he's championed throughout his career.