“You finish and you graduate and you have a degree and now what can you do with it? I wanted to make a difference,” says Agner, who served in the Peace Corps in Kygryzstan in central Asia. “Part of my family is Filipino. So coming from a developing country, they understand how important it is to have some help. I just feel like the only difference between myself and people in other countries is opportunit[y]. I really wanted [to do] this.”
Agner served as an education volunteer from 2004–06. Her role evolved into teaching gender development and working with the women’s crisis center to teach critical thinking skills in the non-democratic nation.
Agner’s proudest moment was the institution of police sensitivity training. “It took two years to [enact] a police sensitivity seminar, where they taught police officers to handle domestic violence situations. The cultural belief is that it’s a family issue. Even though they have the laws in place … as far as following through with the laws, it wasn’t there,” she says.
Today, Agner’s love of serving humanity enticed her away from traditional corporate America where she serves as an account representative for Better World Books. “I think it was just a great transition from working with Peace Corps to working with Better World Books,” she says of the bookstore that was recently featured on CNN after winning Business Week’s social entrepreneur award. “We call ourselves a bookstore with a soul. Doing something good and being able to still be profitable, but definitely [being able] to do good with the money that you make.”
Because of her experience, Agner envisions she will be working in a service capacity for the rest of her life.
–terry shropshire
