Penelope Silva knew it was time for a change when she left her Manhattan office at 3 a.m. after a stressful day, got into a cab and burst into tears.
After two years of working in investor relations for an alternative asset manager, she found herself overwhelmed by the pressures of a job she began to see as just “making more money for rich people.”
“I remember thinking, ‘I can’t live like this,’” she says. “‘It’s not healthy, I’m not happy. I need to figure out something else to do.’”
Today Silva lives in a sprawling three-bedroom in Lima, Peru, and has a job she loves as a communications manager at Entrepreneurial Finance Lab, a global enterprise that helps improve access to capital for entrepreneurs in the developing world. She doesn’t miss her cramped apartment in Murray Hill — or her former big-figure salary.
“When you’re so miserable, you look for outs, glittery things to make your life a little better,” she says. “Now I’m actually happy. I don’t need money to get me as far as it used to.”
Her springboard to a new life was Escape the City, a job service that launched in London in 2010, and set up shop in New York City a few months ago. It’s a second-chance job board for people who are burned out on corporate gigs and pining for a career adventure.
The service has spawned a wave of born-again passion chasers, who’ve gone from working in finance to pursuits like sweeping mines in Cambodia, skateboarding across Australia or importing boutique Argentinean wines. Among them is a former hedge funder who’s running a travel lodge in Mozambique and a financial analyst who now captains a fishing boat in Alaska.
The currency of the site is jobs with companies that have “some sort of social impact in their mission, are based in an exotic location or have some startup excitement,” said Mike Howe, a 27-year-old Williamsburg resident who’s heading up the US launch.
The site has more than 57,000 registered users, including 10,000 in the United States. For some, it’s like a rip cord they can pull when they hit a dead end in the corporate world. For others, it’s an opportunity to pursue something more meaningful than financial success and corporate promotions.
“They’ve ticked all the boxes in life: great school, a great degree, landed what was supposed to be their dream jobs,” Howe said. “And suddenly they feel let down. They’re working long hours, without much autonomy or free time.”
Howe is an escape case himself: After college, the British native spent four years working for Merrill Lynch, and found himself stifled and restless.
That’s when he joined his friends Dom Jackman and Rob Symington, who’d successfully launched Escape the City in London, and were looking to branch out to New York. (A bit of the name is lost in the translation: In London “the City” is a colloquialism for the financial center, like we’d say Wall Street.)
Symington and Jackman, both 28, had in turn drawn on their own corporate ennui as inspiration for the site. Symington was working 70 hours a week as a management consultant, and asking himself, “Is this what we worked so hard at our education for?” He and Jackman were seeking something entrepreneurial, when it hit them.
“We realized the problem we were having was the idea itself,” says Symington. “It’s very hard to find exciting alternatives. You can go on job boards, but it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
At Escape the City, the job offerings are curated for their targeted audience. Employers who’ve hired through the site include not only far-flung startups and nonprofits, but also larger firms such as Groupon, Google, Virgin and the Clinton Foundation. Employers pay to list open positions, while job seekers use the site for free.
The site doubles as a support group and resource center for aspiring entrepreneurs. It has spread through word of mouth, using zero marketing dollars.
“The hook is that we have a real kind of offline community to offer people this escape,” said Filippo Bozotti, a partner of Tribewanted, a nonprofit community-building effort in Sierra Leone, which is partnering with the site. “People are longing for something else.”
What Meghan Lazier was longing for when she quit a “typical corporate job” in the legal industry in Chicago was “work that was interesting and meaningful,” she says.
“I didn’t want to do the traditional job search where you put your resume on one of these big sites and get contacted for all these jobs that don’t resonate with you.”
When she discovered Escape the City, she said goodbye to the corporate rat race and hello to . . . Afghanistan. She moved to Kabul this month to work as a media project manager for a grant project funded by the US embassy.
“I wasn’t planning on moving to a war zone,” she said. But “when I got the email and eventually did the interview, I thought, ‘Wow this is meaningful work. I have to do this.’”
Soon she’ll conduct training for Afghan journalists. And she says the drudgery of her last job feels far away in more ways than one.
“To me, everything is exciting because it’s new,” she says.
Some jobs currently listed on Escape the City:
* Second mate on the crew of the First TransAtlantic Swim, London.
* Web designer for “Madagascar-based social enterprise working in the clean water sector.”
* Teacher for underprivileged children, Kiwai, Pakistan.
* Doctor at Lifeline Clinic, Namibia.
* Communication staff, Outward Bound School, San Pedro, Costa Rica
* Math teacher, The Island School, Rock Sound, Bahamas