Episode 05. Christie Heimbach, "From Theater Kid to Storyteller"

The Power of Human Stories: From Idealism to Discernment

A Conversation with Christie Heimbach

I first met Christie Heimbach during our undergraduate years at Messiah University. We spent a semester studying and living in Philadelphia, where a small group of us became close and found excuses to make things together. There was a music video, some early student film work, and a promotional video connected to the nonprofit Christie had recently started.

We were all around 19 or 20 years old. None of us knew exactly what our careers would look like, but we had cameras, ideas, and enough confidence to keep creating.

Christie’s path since then has moved through theater, nonprofit leadership, education, graduate school, entrepreneurship, photography, marriage, loss, and family. I had followed pieces of that journey from a distance over the years, but I had never heard the whole story.

And there was a lot more underneath it than I realized.

A Theater Kid With a Lot of Interests

Christie’s creative life started early. Very early.

Her first play was at three years old, when she was cast as a singing and dancing pumpkin in a production of Cinderella. As she made very clear during our conversation, she was not a stationary pumpkin. She was the brightest pumpkin in the patch.

Her grandmother, an art teacher and adventurer, became one of the major influences in those early years. Christie grew up going to theater camps, music camps, art camps, creative writing camps, and just about anything else that gave her somewhere to direct her energy. She played instruments, competed in sports, performed in theater, danced, and joined more clubs than most people could probably name.

There was never one interest.

That multi-passionate nature has followed Christie through every stage of her life. At times, she has wondered whether it meant she lacked focus. Looking back now, the range of those experiences starts to make more sense. Theater taught her how to communicate. Sports taught her how to work with a team. Art taught her to pay attention. Her family taught her to finish what she committed to, even when she wanted to move on to something else.

Those skills would eventually find their way into almost everything she did.

Starting a Nonprofit at 19

Near the beginning of her sophomore year, Christie attended a campus presentation that exposed her to global hunger and the human cost behind resources many of us use without thinking about them. She remembers hearing that, at the time, someone in the world died from a hunger-related cause every two seconds.

That statistic stayed with her. It eventually became the name of the nonprofit she co-founded with Kelsey Hare: 2 Seconds Or Less.

The early story is almost hard to believe.

Christie and Kelsey decided they wanted to address malnutrition in Zimbabwe. They had no agricultural background, no nonprofit experience, no meaningful credentials, very little money, and no real plan once they arrived.

They packed a tent.

As Christie says in the episode, she would never let her children do this.

They traveled to Zimbabwe with the phone number of someone they had not successfully reached. Only after landing did they finally connect with that person and receive instructions to take a taxi. Within a few minutes, they had what Christie called “some semblance of a plan.”

That connection eventually led them to Patrick Makokoro, a Zimbabwean nonprofit leader already doing agricultural and nutrition work in local schools. Patrick had the experience, community relationships, and knowledge Christie and Kelsey did not have. What they could offer was energy, storytelling, fundraising, and access to resources in the United States.

A few months later, they returned to Zimbabwe to help launch their first large-scale school garden.

Back home, they told the story anywhere people would listen. They visited churches, built a social media presence, created T-shirts, applied for nonprofit status, and raised tens of thousands of dollars. Their lives quickly began revolving around the work.

Christie remembers that season as feeling like everything was on fire. The mission felt urgent. The community became family. At 19 and 20 years old, they had enough energy to wake up early, work until two in the morning, and believe this might be the most important thing they would ever do.

When the Work Becomes Your Identity

The story of 2 Seconds Or Less is meaningful, but Christie does not tell it as a simple success story.

As the organization grew, so did the questions.

Christie began learning more about bias, power, international development, and the risks of centering Western volunteers in work that should be led locally. She started recognizing how much youthful confidence and cultural naivety had shaped their earliest approach.

Those realizations created tension within the organization. During her senior year, Christie left, or was forced out of, the nonprofit she had helped create.

She was devastated.

By that point, 2 Seconds Or Less had become more than something she did. It had become the way she understood herself. Losing her place in the organization felt like losing the person she thought she was supposed to become.

That season gave her one of the clearest lessons of her life: you can do the work because of who you are, but you are not the work.

It is an easy idea to repeat and a much harder one to live.

For Christie, it became a lesson she would have to revisit through several careers, relationships, and losses.

The Classroom and the World Beyond It

After college, Christie joined Teach for America and moved to rural North Carolina to teach eleventh- and twelfth-grade English.

The experience changed her.

She taught in a community with deep poverty, limited access to resources, and a long history of inequality. Her students were carrying circumstances much larger than anything that could be addressed in a lesson plan. Some were traveling hours by bus. Some were helping care for siblings while their parents worked multiple jobs. Others were navigating profound violence and loss.

One story from this section of the conversation has stayed with me.

Christie took one of her students, a 17-year-old high school senior, to a mall around 30 or 40 minutes from where she lived. When they reached the escalator, the student froze. She had never seen one before.

It was a small moment that revealed how narrow someone’s physical world could become when transportation, money, opportunity, and geography all worked against them.

Christie later used that story in a classroom fundraising campaign. The campaign was seen by the owner of the Los Angeles Rams, who donated enough money for Christie to take several students overseas. They traveled to England, Ireland, and Wales, giving the students a chance to see a world far beyond their hometown.

The work was deeply meaningful. It was also exhausting.

Christie became closely attached to her students and carried their stories home with her. She began recognizing a pattern in herself: she would enter a cause or relationship with tremendous empathy, pour herself into it, and eventually reach a point where there was almost nothing left.

She could care deeply. She was still learning how to care sustainably.

Grief, Rebuilding, and Returning

Christie’s twenties held a lot of change.

She returned to 2 Seconds Or Less. She entered graduate school. She worked in education and project management. She built her photography business. Her first marriage ended, bringing another kind of grief into a life already full of complicated endings.

One of the things I appreciated about our conversation was Christie’s refusal to force every painful experience into a clean lesson. Sometimes, she said, difficult things simply happen. They hurt because the people, relationships, and work mattered.

Still, each loss changed the way she approached the next season.

When Christie returned to the nonprofit, she brought a more developed understanding of local leadership and sustainability. The organization trained student leaders, expanded its work, and eventually supported 10 large-scale gardens feeding thousands of students.

But the organization also faced growing financial and ideological pressures. COVID disrupted access to Zimbabwe. Longtime funding relationships changed. Christie found herself wrestling with how closely the organization had become tied to her own identity and public voice.

Eventually, the board hired a new executive director who appeared highly qualified. According to Christie, that person stole $40,000 from the organization. By that point, the nonprofit did not have the money or stamina to recover.

2 Seconds Or Less closed.

Christie had now experienced the loss of the organization twice, first through her separation from it and later through its final ending.

The experience could have made her suspicious of everyone. She is still learning how to protect herself without becoming hardened.

That tension led us into a conversation about skepticism, discernment, and the people we allow into our lives. In your thirties, time begins to feel more sacred. The people you hire, work beside, trust, and build with affect more than one project. Those decisions reach into your marriage, family, health, and ability to keep creating.

Christie still wants to see the best in people. She is learning to do that with greater care.

Photography as a Refuge

Through all of this, Christie was building a photography business.

Photography gave her a creative outlet, an entrepreneurial challenge, and a way to continue doing what she had always done: helping people feel seen.

She admitted that part of her still wrestles with whether photography is “important enough.” After years spent working in global development and underserved classrooms, photographing weddings can feel less urgent.

Her husband regularly pushes back on that idea.

A photographer can help someone feel beautiful and comfortable during one of the most emotionally charged days of their life. She can notice the person standing at the edge of the room. She can recognize the complicated family history underneath a joyful celebration. She can capture the hug between a grandparent and grandchild that no one else saw.

Sometimes those photographs become the last images a family has of someone they love.

Christie has heard from clients who used one of her photographs in an obituary or who were grateful she captured the last time an entire family was together. Those experiences have changed the way she understands the value of her work.

Wedding days may look joyful from the outside, but they hold years of family history, grief, tension, belonging, and love. Christie’s ability to notice those layers may be one of the clearest ways all her previous lives show up in her work today.

The theater kid knows how to read a room.

The teacher knows how to make people comfortable.

The nonprofit leader knows how to listen across differences.

The photographer knows when to press the shutter.

Still Becoming

Near the end of our conversation, I asked Christie what all these previous versions of herself might be preparing her for.

She does not know yet.

She is still building her photography business. She is writing a musical because it brings her joy. She has new entrepreneurial ideas quietly forming in the background. She hopes to create something that is both financially successful and capable of supporting other young people with ambitious ideas.

She wants to become the person she needed when she was 19.

I think that is part of what made this conversation stay with me. Christie’s story does not resolve into one perfect career or calling. She is still multi-passionate. She is still learning where to put her energy. She is still trying to balance ambition, service, creativity, marriage, friendship, and family without allowing any one of them to consume everything else.

There is no clean formula for that.

There is only the work of paying attention, gaining discernment, staying open, and becoming a little wiser about what deserves your life.

You can listen to my full conversation with Christie Heimbach in this episode of The Power of Human Stories.

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