Beyond Borders: Leadership Lessons
with Peter Schaller
The Corvus Effect / Episode 28
Released: April 21, 2025
Overview
Peter Schaller designed his own major at Virginia Commonwealth because international development didn’t have an academic program yet, and he found his way to Nicaragua almost by accident — except that the moment he landed in Managua, he had what he calls a strange sensation of coming home. He’d grown up in Connecticut feeling that family and community had somehow lost importance; what he found in rural Nicaragua was the opposite. This conversation is about Rayo Del Sol — the nonprofit he built around Mother Teresa’s deceptively simple discipline of loving the person in front of you — and about why stewardship beats scale when the mission is the actual point.
About Peter Schaller
Peter Schaller is the executive director of Rayo Del Sol, the Nicaragua-based community development organization he’s built across five program areas: spiritual growth, educational quality, community health, youth in action, and community development. His impact-per-dollar runs significantly better than most organizations because he refuses to let fundraising and reporting move ahead of the people Rayo Del Sol actually serves.
Listen to the Full Episode
Key Takeaways
1. Love the person in front of you
Mother Teresa’s answer to how she could possibly serve so many people was the simplest thing she said: ‘I just love the person in front of me.’ Peter holds onto that line because international development is full of structural problems no individual can fix. The work is to focus on the one you can reach, not the million you can’t — and to let the change in that one person become the answer to whether the work was worth doing.
2. The starfish parable
A boy throws stranded starfish back into the ocean while a stranger tells him he can’t possibly make a difference — and the boy keeps throwing them and says ‘it made a difference to that one.’ Most leaders and most organizations get paralyzed by the scale of the problem and never do the action that’s actually available to them. The scale of what you can’t fix doesn’t make the action you can take less valuable; it just makes the action more important.
3. Stewardship beats scale
As organizations grow, the people they serve quietly slide into the back seat behind fundraising, grant writing, and reporting — that’s the failure mode Peter has seen most often. Rayo Del Sol’s impact per dollar runs significantly better than most because Peter built it from zero around stewardship of resources, mission, and the relationships with the people they serve. The growth opportunities you say no to because they would dilute focus are the ones that protect the mission from quietly disappearing.