Murmuration: What were you doing before working at Murmuration?

Jamie Hwang: My path here was winding. Growing up, I spent summers in Korea. It was where half of my family was, and it was where I came to understand myself in a different way than I did in the States. Those years gave me an early, visceral sense of the dynamics between North and South Korea, not as a geopolitical abstraction, but as something felt, something present in the everyday conversations with the people around me. That curiosity eventually pulled me toward studying the Korean Peninsula more seriously, and from there to working directly with North Korean refugees who had escaped and resettled in South Korea. Sitting with people who had risked everything - hearing what pushed them to leave, and then learning about the challenges they faced trying to rebuild a life in a place that wasn't quite home either–that experience shaped how I think about systems, resilience, and what people actually need to survive and belong.

From there, the work took me across sub-Saharan Africa. A research fellowship in Ethiopia introduced me to a nonprofit doing innovative orphan care. Rather than relying on institutional models, they rebuilt the family unit itself, employing and training women to become mothers and anchoring children back in their local communities. In Ghana, I spent a year working in education and local community organizing, living alongside the students, parents, and teachers I worked with. In Tanzania, I taught at a local primary school and worked at a pediatric hospital with young people living with HIV, helping them develop confidence, voice, and leadership skills. The through-line everywhere was the same: when you get close enough to people's actual lives, you stop thinking in programs and start thinking in systems. And education kept surfacing as the lever that, when moved, shifted everything else.

From early on, I knew I wanted work that meant something, work that put people at the center rather than at the margins.

Murmuration: Was there a formative experience that brought you to this work?

JH: There wasn't a single lightning bolt moment. It was more like a thread I kept finding in my hands, no matter which direction I turned. From early on, I knew I wanted work that meant something, work that put people at the center rather than at the margins. That pull didn't announce itself all at once–it accumulated. And eventually it led me to people and talent work, where I have felt the pieces lock into place. I get to combine purpose with practical problem-solving every single day, and that–even now–never gets old.

Murmuration: What drew you to working at Murmuration?

JH: Initially, the fit felt almost obvious. Murmuration's early focus on community organizing mapped cleanly onto everything I'd been doing. But what made me want to stay, to grow, to invest myself here over the long term was watching the organization become something bigger than its starting point. We didn't stay small. We looked at the landscape of what's broken across the country and asked: where can we actually move the needle? That expansion of mission required us to be ambitious about how change works and how the challenges facing our democracy are deeply and stubbornly interconnected.

I also can’t understate our people and culture. This is a place where people genuinely care about fixing democracy and making our world a better place. And we work hard to do it. That combination of genuine ambition and genuine care is rarer than it should be. When you find it, you hold on.

Murmuration: Walk me through a day in the life of your role at Murmuration.

JH: As Senior Director of People and Talent, I oversee the People Team, which spans talent acquisition, performance management, benefits, and everything in between. In this role, I’m constantly balancing both the forest and the trees, simultaneously. Some days that means sitting with leadership to think through org design and long-range people strategy; others it means getting into the weeds of a job description, a benefits renewal, or a policy that isn't working the way it should.

On any given day, I might move from a hiring priorities conversation to reviewing a recruitment pipeline to coaching a manager through something hard - and then back to the structural stuff that makes all of it possible: compensation cycles, people operations, and the infrastructure that quietly supports our organization. I work across the full arc of the employee experience, from the moment someone first encounters Murmuration as a hiring candidate to the way they grow and develop once they're here.
My role sits at the intersection of strategy and service. I enjoy holding both at once—the long view and the person right in front of you.

Murmuration: You’ve had a long tenure at Murmuration and have helped shape how we support our people. What changes or growth have you been most proud to witness over the years?

JH: What I'm most proud of is our willingness to evolve, and to do it in real time, in response to the world evolving around us. The organizations that get people operations right aren't the ones with the perfect playbook from day one. They're the ones that stay honest about what's working, what isn't, and what their people actually need right now.

When the pandemic hit, and we went remote, it wasn't just a logistical shift. It was a signal that the relationship between work and life was changing in ways we couldn't ignore. We responded by expanding mental health support, adding tools like BetterHelp and Calm, and moving to unlimited PTO. Not as perks, but as a genuine acknowledgment that people were carrying more than usual and needed real support to sustain themselves.

None of it was perfect, and none of it is finished. But I think our greatest strength as an organization is that we treat people operations as a living thing—something that has to grow and adapt alongside society, alongside our mission, alongside the humans who show up here every day. That ongoing commitment to improvement is what I'm most proud of.

Caring for staff is not a nice-to-have. It's strategic, it's ethical, and it's the foundation on which everything else is built.

Murmuration: Murmuration places a strong emphasis on benefits and employee support. How would you describe the organization’s philosophy when it comes to caring for staff?

JH: We start from the premise that sounds simple but is actually countercultural in some workplaces: caring for staff is not a nice-to-have. It's strategic, it's ethical, and it's the foundation on which everything else is built. When people feel genuinely supported–financially, emotionally, operationally–they can bring their authentic selves to the work. So our philosophy is what I think of as deliberate care: build policies that protect dignity and flexibility, fund them without apology, and normalize using them without guilt.

The goal, at its core, is to remove the false choice between doing important work and living a full, sustainable life. That trade-off is sometimes presented as inevitable in so many organizations, especially mission-driven ones, where the work is hard and important. We reject it. You shouldn't have to burn yourself down to build something worth having.

Murmuration: What makes Murmuration a place where people can thrive personally and professionally over the long term?

JH: I'll be honest - we're not perfect. No place is. But what I can say is that this is a place where people truly care about each other. The care isn’t performative; it’s in the way that someone shows up when their colleague is having a hard week, or when a teammate goes out of their way to make sure you feel seen. That's not something you can manufacture, and it's not something you take for granted once you've found it.

Beyond that, the work itself matters. People here are united by a real commitment to protecting democracy and creating more good in the world. And there's something powerful about being surrounded by colleagues who share that sense of purpose. It makes the hard days worth it.

We try to support that with real investment in people's growth, fair compensation, and policies that respect that everyone has a life outside of work. We don't always get it right. But the intention is genuine, and I think people feel that. At the end of the day, it's the combination–meaningful work, people you respect, and an organization that's trying–that makes this somewhere worth staying and believing in.

Murmuration: What is your advice to others who want to work in a similar field or industry?

JH: Get comfortable with multiplicity. Wearing many hats, holding many kinds of knowledge at once. Time spent in recruiting, operations, and direct people management will teach you both the architecture of systems and the lived experience inside them, and you genuinely need both to do this work well. Be data-informed, but don’t let metrics stand in for judgment. Numbers can tell you what happened, but they rarely tell you why, and they almost never tell you what to do next. The stories behind the data are where the real insight lives.
Invest seriously in your coaching and listening skills. Influence in this field isn't positional. It's relational, built slowly through trust and consistency. Seek out roles where you get to design systems rather than just maintain them, because that's where you can actually scale your impact beyond what you can personally touch. And stay curious. Genuinely, restlessly curious. About equity and organizational dynamics. Lean into the uncomfortable conversations rather than around them. That's how better culture gets built. It's slow work, but it's some of the most important work there is.