Coaching women through life after USAID

Happy Monday, DMV. It’s Oct. 5.

A year and a half ago, Corinne Hart lost her job when DOGE took a sledgehammer to USAID. She had been working at the agency for about a decade, but she had a long-held dream idea, so she pivoted — to become a career coach for women.

“Some of us had a little bit of a plan B in the back of our minds. I really was interested in starting a coaching practice, but it felt out of reach to start a coaching practice and leave my federal career … Being laid off unlocked the opportunity to pursue this back-burner idea,” she said.

Before USAID was shut down, she had already taken a leadership coaching program at Georgetown University and on the side had started coaching women colleagues at USAID.

When the stop-work order was issued in January 2025, the first thing she did was launch a workshop for anyone in the DMV facing job insecurity. More than 100 people turned up, many of them USAID but also others affected by the federal workforce cuts.

“I’m an expert in gender equality. I know how to help women succeed. I never did it this way exactly, but now it’s working. I had so much fear about doing this. Am I walking away from my career, away from international development and gender equality?” she told me on a call from Ocean City, Maryland, where she moved after 20 years in D.C.

She launched Hart & Co. Coaching to help women navigate change. She’s currently launching her 15th cohort for her group coaching workshop and says she has worked with about 150 clients, mostly women.

“I haven’t felt this close to my passion and purpose in years because every day I’m talking to women, one on one, building these relationships, watching these confident women — their confidence tanked, filled with doubt, hitting this wall — helping them to move past that wall, helping to see and value themselves again.”

For the vast majority of people from the USAID world, “international development was the world they wanted to be in … people who studied these areas of expertise and felt very, very lost when the job was taken away,” she said.

“I have clients who have applied to 200 jobs,” she says, adding that they tell her, “‘I’m trying to use AI to help build my resume. I’m networking. It’s not working.’”

Last year, because so many federal workers were laid off, the job market was tough. This year, they take the rejection personally.

“Experiencing this lack of confidence, questioning your ability, wondering if there’s something wrong with you — is that why you can’t get a job or figure this out? That’s a really common theme of women who come to talk to me,” she said. “There must be something wrong with me because I’m getting all these rejections.”

(Alisa Tang)

She now also has a second wave of clients who said yes to the first job they could find but now feel underutilized, like they’ve taken a step back in their careers. They’re relieved to have a paycheck and feel guilty about being unhappy.

She asks her clients these questions:

What do I want my life to look like now that USAID is over?
How do you narrow in on your purpose and your strengths?
What is the meaningful contribution that makes you fulfilled and satisfied, so you even know where to pivot to, particularly when your industry has been disrupted?

She said there is another group of people who never had a break in their career and are now shifting their priorities.

“This is the first time they’ve been able to focus on health and wellness, pick up their kids from the school bus, take their parents to the doctor’s office. For some people, having their personal life be just as important as their professional life, recalibrating what people want in their next role — and what people really want is balance.”

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