Muthoni Maingi Lands CEO Role After Suing World's Biggest Petition Website

Kenyan award-winning Global Digital Strategist, Priscilla Muthoni Maingi, was on Wednesday, June 7 appointed to the role of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Chayn, a non-profit organization (NGO) based in London, England.

The announcement was made by Hera Hussain, Chayn's founder, who revealed in a statement that Maingi will assume the role while she is on maternity leave.

"I want to introduce everyone to Muthoni Maingi, who will be shepherding Chayn while I’m on maternity leave.

"She’s based in Nairobi, Kenya, and has an impressive career working in human rights and digital media. It’s been a pleasure working with her," she announced on Twitter.

Hera Hussain, the founder of Chayn. /POINTS OF LIGHT AWARDS

Maingi on her part, expressed her delight in assuming the new lucrative role which came after she spent time understanding the operations of Chayn.

"I am very excited to join the team at Chayn as CEO while the amazing Hera is on maternity leave. These are big shoes to fill over the coming months.

"I have spent the past few weeks in a robust onboarding process to understand how best I can support the users, communities and partners that Chayn serves and meeting a fantastic team of people who are truly motivated to do the work that it takes to create a safer, inclusive and healing world," she said in Chayn's blog post.

As a big believer in people power and community; on both a systemic and individual level, Maingi described her journey to applying for and succeeding in the interview process with Chayn which she attributed to its community.

"When I was looking for work, I sent out messages to people in my network asking them to share any roles they felt I could fit; one responded and said I needed to reframe it and share why I would be a great candidate for particular organisations and functions.

"And she was right; I needed to think more about why I wanted to work with specific organisations and why I felt I could and would add value to them, their teams, communities, stakeholders and partners. And so I reframed it, re-sent it, articulated my vision and mission to all who had time and ears for me, and one day a couple of people shared the Chayn CEO maternity cover vacancy," she added.

Chayn is a global nonprofit, run by survivors and allies from around the world, creating resources to support the healing of survivors of gender-based violence. It creates open, online resources and services for survivors of abuse that are trauma-informed, intersectional, multi-lingual and feminist.

The NGO describes itself as one that flips the design default, and put the experience of marginalised people at the heart of what it does, opening up access to its resources for all.

"We work across all forms of gender-based violence, especially domestic and sexual violence, and technology-facilitated abuse. We’ve reached 400,000 people across the globe, and reach more every day," Chayn states on its website.

Hera started Chayn in 2013, having been born in the United Kingdom (UK) but grew up in Pakistan. She helped two friends from the UK and Pakistan escape abusive marriages and experienced significant challenges in finding the basic information they needed, like their rights and how to cope with trauma.

She had the belief that if she could put critical information online in one place and in accessible language, it could change lives.

Maingi on Saturday, May 6 hit headlines owing to her lawsuit against Change.org, the world's largest online petition platform, where she worked as its country director between January 2022 and February 2023.

She sued the multinational company based in the United States (US) for unfair dismissal and is seeking up to Ksh18.7 million in damages from the company. 

According to the petition which was certified as urgent, Maingi was terminated in February 2023 on claims of her post becoming redundant, but the online firm and its agents went ahead to replace her with a man.