The Catalyst: How Nomad Skills Met Humanitarian Need

Katia and I sat down for this conversation in her co-living chateau in Normandy, where many of these podcast episodes are filmed. Over our talk, she told me about accidentally pioneering remote work years before COVID made it normal, coordinating refugee relief across three countries, and why the question "what do you do?" has become impossible to answer. This is the story of someone who doesn't plan, but somehow becomes the centre of everything that matters.

Before Remote Was a Thing

Long before COVID normalised working from anywhere, Katia was already doing it. Not because she called herself a digital nomad or chased location independence. It just happened.

She'd been travelling extensively for her corporate job, spending months in different places with company apartments and drivers. When she left to start her own company with a business partner, the plan was simple: base the company in Istanbul where most clients were.

But in the beginning, whilst waiting to set up an office and navigate the administrative difficulties of starting a company in a non-European country, they worked remotely. Just three of them at first.

"The mindset behind was the company will be based in Istanbul. But we were like, yeah, until it's time to have an office and to hire more people, why don't we just do whatever and just live wherever?"

Visa restrictions meant she couldn't stay in Turkey full time anyway. So she opened a map and thought: what's close to Istanbul, has seaside, nice weather? Greece. She'd drive to Istanbul almost weekly for client meetings, then return to Greece to work.

"The plan was not to be totally location independent. Because it was not a thing at the time. It just never crossed my mind that it's possible."

She worked with a scarcity mindset: soon we'll have an office, so let's travel as much as possible whilst we still can. But slowly, that assumption started to crack.

"Why? Why do we need an office? Why can't we just do this and just live whatever and work with people that we trust?"

One team member bought a house in a village and moved there. The rest kept travelling. At some point, thinking about a traditional company in traditional ways just didn't make sense anymore.

The Chaos Behind the Professionalism

The work was high-level. Big corporate clients. International projects. The kind where perception matters.

"At the time, it was extremely not serious if you don't have an office."

So they never advertised their setup. Clients would never come to meet them anyway. They'd always go to the clients. If asked where they were based, the answer was vague: everywhere, which was true.

"They didn't need to know that we came up with their strategy whilst we were laying on the beach in Greece. What they need to know is that this is the best strategy and we are giving it to them."

But behind the polished deliverables was absolute chaos. This was pre-Zoom, pre-Slack, pre-everything. They coordinated on Facebook Messenger. No proper record of discussions. No documentation of who said what.

When I asked how they managed, Katia was honest: "It worked like magic because we knew each other and we could trust each other. But if something went wrong and you need to go back on it, that wouldn't have been possible."

The internet was unreliable. She remembers being somewhere in Lebanon with a massive file to submit on deadline day, and the electricity cut. No internet. Pure panic.

"We didn't have backup servers. We didn't have proper spacing. In that sense, looking back at it now, it was super unprofessional the way it was executed. But the clients didn't know what is behind the scenes."

That philosophy, keeping the chaos discrete, not letting clients see the pain, has stayed with her. Even now, running a co-living, the same principle applies: guests pay for the experience, not to see the work it takes to create it.

The Donation That Changed Everything

The volunteering work wasn't planned. Nothing in Katia's life seems to be planned. Things just come at her, and she responds.

It was the peak of the Syrian refugee crisis. Institutions and governments across the Balkans were unprepared. Katia decided to do something small, donate something. She can't even remember what.

"It just started with a very small, very human effort to do something. That was not at all planning to do it in a larger scale."

She went to drop off donations. The plan was simple: drop them off and leave. But someone asked if she wanted to join a coordination meeting. People thinking about how to help. She said yes.

"And then I met some people there, which to this day are some of my best friends. And then we just clicked very quickly. We started bouncing ideas. We started, okay, we can do this, we can do that."

They had very different backgrounds. They took it on as a common project. And then it escalated.

"Once you get involved, once you're like, oh, I can do something small to help, then you get involved and then you understand the scale of it. And then you are like, oh, no, this is big. Oh, I have some contacts. Maybe I can help. Maybe I can organise this."

It started small, something on the side. Then it consumed her completely.

"It totally consumed me to a point that I stopped working because I just couldn't work anymore. I couldn't focus on anything else anymore."

But when you see how much need there is, how little has been done, how many human lives are on the line, you can't stop. Every day you think: maybe I can do this little bit more. And before you know it, you're the centrepiece of a massive project that was never planned.

Coordinating Across Borders

"We were just like a group of newly made friends."

They started a Facebook group. First just for themselves, then close friends who could help. Suddenly the group had thousands of people.

Katia became a contact point for multiple organisations, coordinating logistics across Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria. All from a distance. All without any official NGO status.

When I asked if her remote work skills helped, she was clear: "For sure, because there was a lot of logistical coordination from distance with different organisations, with different camps and points."

And here's where the two worlds started to intersect.

"A lot of the volunteers were nomads. Even when I went to Lesbos at the time on the front lines, a lot of people were just nomads at the time travelling to Lesbos. And then the whole thing happened. And then they saw it firsthand, and they decided to stay because they're nomads and they're flexible and they don't have plans. And they just decided to stay and help."

It bridged something for Katia that had been missing.

Two Worlds, Finally Connected

Before the volunteer work, Katia had felt split in two.

"I was always feeling like I live a schizophrenic life. My corporate life with the big clients and projects and stuff like that, they wouldn't know that I'm a nomad. And the nomad people were usually people with much smaller scale, freelancers trying to make it, trying to get started. So I kind of always felt like the two worlds have nothing in common, and they're two completely separate compartments."

The volunteer work changed that.

"For the first time it kind of bridged. And for the first time also showed me how important it is to have a community and to have people that understand you and understand what you are doing. That was really nice and helpful."

For the first time, her skills, her flexibility, her unconventional life actually made perfect sense. She wasn't hiding it or compartmentalising it. It all came together.

The Stories You Don't Realise Are Wild

Years of nomadic life do something to your sense of normal. You adapt to any situation. You become so flexible and agile that challenges don't look like challenges anymore.

"Even with the challenges, your life is still better than the life of most people. But then when you look back, you're like, oh my God, I did this. What?"

When I asked for an example, Katia described sitting with other nomads, swapping stories.

"Random stories come up. Oh, yeah, and then I went alone to India and hitchhiked on the way out. And they're like, yeah, it's totally normal. But then when you say that in the context with people that don't do that, and they're like, what did you do? You went alone and hitchhiked in India?"

The reaction reminds you: oh, it's not normal. In nomad circles, everyone's done something similar. The level gets normalised. You don't realise things are uncommon until you see other people's faces.

"It teaches you actually that you can find yourself in any situation and find the way out of it. It gives you a lot of confidence. You are less scared of starting businesses, of failing, of doing things."

When you've physically been somewhere and something goes wrong, you don't have a choice. You have to get out of it. You have to find the solution. There's no way out except through.

That confidence translates everywhere. In work. In life. In knowing that whatever happens, you'll find a way.

The Question That Takes Half an Hour

There are three questions Katia dreads when meeting people outside the remote work world.

Where are you from? She left her country so long ago, putting herself in that box feels impossible.

Where do you live? She doesn't, really. Not in the traditional sense.

And the worst one: What do you do?

"It's so hard to explain. And then you almost come across as rude because it's not that I don't want to answer, it's just that it's not a one word answer. It'll take me half an hour. Are you sure you want to listen to that?"

When I asked her to try, for the nomads listening, she gave the simplest version possible: "I run a chateau co-living in France."

But even that doesn't capture it. The remote work pioneer. The humanitarian coordinator. The person who bridges worlds, connects people, makes things happen without planning to. The catalyst.

How Nomads Give Back

Near the end of our conversation, I asked how nomads can benefit the places they visit. Katia's answer was immediate and specific.

"A lot of nomads do volunteer work. Volunteer work can also be done online, by the way. And the difference between nomads and tourists is they stay in the place longer, you understand the place better."

You can support small businesses. Bring money from outside the country and spend it locally. Choose the little coffee shop instead of Starbucks.

But there's something deeper too.

"Just the fact that you can interact with locals and exchange stories and hear about your travels, kind of see that the world is bigger, it inspires them also to do things in a different way and to live their life in a different way."

In small towns where people have never met foreigners, seeing someone from the other side of the world care about their village, recycle, want to clean the marshes, it shifts something.

"If they care about my village, then I should care also a bit more about my village and also about the world. Those are little shifts, but they for sure they make a difference."

The Chateau

Today, Katia runs the chateau in Normandy where we sat for this conversation. It's famous in co-living circles. She consults people who want to start their own co-living journeys.

When I asked what she likes most about it, she didn't hesitate: "The interaction with a lot of very, very fascinating people."

As our conversation wrapped up, I realised Katia's story isn't about planning or strategy. It's about responding. Showing up to drop off donations and staying for the meeting. Saying yes when someone asks if you want to help. Starting small and letting it consume you because the need is too big to ignore.

She doesn't call herself a humanitarian or an activist. She's just someone who kept seeing ways she could help, and then helped. Someone whose nomad life accidentally prepared her to coordinate across borders, work with flexibility, and bring people together who'd never normally meet.

The catalyst doesn't plan to start reactions. They just show up, and everything changes around them.