Hello lovey humans,

When Nino Maisuradze was nine years old, she watched as her parents lost everything overnight. The Soviet Union collapsed, civil war erupted in Georgia and with that jobs, savings, electricity, and the heat disappeared.

What didn’t go out was the warm of friends and families. In the cold, conversations got longer. And a little girl learned something that would take her thirty years to fully understand: that the things which look like losses are sometimes the conditions for the deepest kind of connection.

This is Nino’s story.

The Girl Who Wasn’t Supposed to Think for Herself

Nino was born in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, during the Soviet era. Autocratic regimes and independent thinking are like oil and water. But her parents stubbornly refused to let their children be shaped by the system. They pulled Nino and her sister out of public school and enrolled them in an alternative school, which at that time was virtually unheard of. Starting at age six, Nino was taught to question what she was told and trust her own judgment.

Then the world she knew fell apart. The Soviet Union broke up. Civil war broke out. She watched every adult around her lose their jobs, their savings, their sense of safety, all in a matter of days. But the part that surprised her when she reflected on it later: “Honestly, it was probably pretty damn perfect from a parenting perspective.” No electricity meant no distractions. No jobs meant the adults were always home. Families spent more time together than they ever had. Connection wasn’t a luxury. It was the only thing left.

Success Without a Plan

Nino doesn’t remember being ambitious. Not in the strategic, ladder-climbing kind of way. She didn’t plan to move to Germany, where she’d live for ten years. She didn’t plan to come to the US. Things just moved, and she moved with them.

As a woman from a small post-Soviet country navigating corporate boardrooms in Germany and then America she got her fair share of racist and sexist comments along the way. But she was also lucky enough to work with people who appreciated what she brought. She rose to CFO. Then COO. Two C-level jobs before she turned 40. Named one of the Top 25 Financial Technology COOs in the country.

The Puzzle That Didn’t Feel the Way She Thought It Would

And then, as she got comfortable at the top, Nino stopped seeing the point. That slow realization that the problems she was solving weren’t actually solving anything. She describes it with an image we think anyone in our community will recognize: “It’s kinda like finishing a big, difficult puzzle and realizing you have to take it apart and put it back in the box. And you’re like — hm, this is not what I thought finishing this puzzle would feel like.”

She started remembering who she was before the career took over. As a teenager in Tbilisi, she used to visit orphanages and spend time with the kids there, without even knowing the word “volunteering.” Her best friend and she used to hug trees and feel genuinely happy. That kid who connected with the world without needing a reason had been missing for a long time.

So she walked away from a well-paid, much-respected executive role. For someone who grew up in a war, where stability was the most valuable thing in the world, this was completely unthinkable. And that’s how she knew it was real growth.

Nine Months Underwater

Nino didn’t go looking for the next thing. She went looking for no-thing. Days after leaving her job, she flew to Austria. She describes it the way you’d describe walking into the ocean on a hot day: “Like putting your head underwater and loving how it feels not to hear the outside world.”

For nine months, she paused. And in that pause, something extraordinary happened. Emotions she hadn’t felt in years started surfacing. She didn’t push them away. She embraced them. She connected with strangers for no reason other than shared humanity. Her brain got quiet and her energy settled. “I felt like the child me,” she says. “And I started connecting with people on a much deeper level than I had in years. Because I was able to. Because my brain was free and my energy was calm.”

Her biggest takeaway from those nine months? The beauty and the power of a pause.

Somebody Pinch Me

Nino had been saying for years that museums and botanical gardens were her happy places. So when an opportunity appeared at the Atlanta Beltline — one of the largest urban redevelopment projects in the United States, home to the world’s longest linear arboretum, an organization dedicated to building trails, parks, affordable housing, and elevating communities out of poverty — it felt like the universe had designed the job specifically for her.

Now her job revolved around nature, community, art, and connection. It was everything she’d cared about outside of work her whole life. “Somebody pinch me,” she says.

As a Second Harvester, Nino also understands that everything is temporary. She knows that one day she might feel done with this role too. That the puzzle might feel complete again. And that’s totally okay. The nine months of nothing taught her there are plenty of things that interest her, and she’s not scared of getting bored anymore.

Why Nino’s Story Matters

There’s a version of this story that’s about resilience — the immigrant kid who made it big, beat the odds, climbed the ladder. That’s all true. But the real story is about what happened after the climbing stopped. It’s about a woman who got addicted to solving problems that didn’t actually solve anything, recognized it, and had the courage to step away. Not because she failed. Because she remembered who she was before the scoreboard started keeping track.

The girl who hugged trees in Tbilisi never went anywhere. She just needed the noise to stop so she could hear herself again. That’s what Second Harvest is about. Not reinventing yourself. Remembering.

With love and a deep breath,

— Richard & Devon