5 Questions with Chime’s VP of Community, Sara El-Amine
At ChimeⓇ, community isn't just a buzzword—it's central to who we are and how we operate. Few people exemplify this core value better than Sara El-Amine, Chime’s Vice President of Community.
From her early days organizing grassroots campaigns for then-Senator Barack Obama to her historic role as the youngest and only woman to lead the nonprofit Organizing for Action, Sara has consistently prioritized innovation, connection, and meaningful community impact.
Read on to learn from Sara’s journey, insights, and deep commitment to creating genuine community impact at Chime and beyond.
Q: What role does innovation play in your work, and how do you stay ahead of the curve?
A: "I treat most of life like a game wherein I see how efficiently or creatively I can complete a task with a team (think: planning Chime’s product member impact analysis all the way down to optimizing my garage).
As a result of this, I’m constantly experimenting with ways to do things bigger, smaller, faster, or better—and I have a ton of fun with it. The 1% shifts (and sometimes the 30% shifts!) compound and I often end up delighted by a whole weird new system that we have innovated to make things that much more impactful, durable, or awesome."
Q: What was one pivotal moment in your career that helped you get to where you are now?
A: "In 2014, when I was 29, President Obama asked me to lead OFA, his advocacy arm that leveraged everyday Americans to advance the President’s major policy reforms—ranging from minimum wage and gay marriage to immigration and gun violence prevention at both federal and state levels. Having spent my entire twenties working for Obama—first helping secure his historic 2008 election, then playing progressively larger roles through healthcare reform and his 2012 re-election—I became the youngest and only woman selected for this pivotal role. I was somewhat terrified, but I knew in my heart that I had the experience, context, relationships, and credibility to do the job right for our crucial last two years in office. The position was grueling, stressful, and exhausting—markedly the hardest job I've ever had.
Despite the immense pressure and demands (the phrase "rapid response" still triggers me!), it gave me a clearer sense of what I can do vs. what I enjoy doing. Knowing I can handle such responsibility has empowered me to confidently take big jumps in the right direction and, sometimes, forgo those big jumps in favor of smaller pivots or progress in other facets of my life."
Q: What does community mean to you?
A: "Community is a social contract that a group of people create together, abide by, and iterate against over time and across space. It's the most predictive component of longevity and happiness—in many ways more so than health or wealth. It's the glue that turns even the most mundane things from rote into magic.
I’m so honored to be our VP of community, driving smarter, community-aligned impact at scale for ALL our communities and the segments within them. I feel lucky every single day to get to create that magic and meaning at scale here at Chime, alongside so many talented, earnest, people-centered, metrics-driven fellow changemakers."
Q: How do you stay connected to Chime’s members and communities?
A: "I’m obsessed with our NPS report, member testimonials, User Research sessions, and other primary source data that provides trend lines at scale, or anecdotal qualitative evidence of trends. I love the saying “soon is not a time, some is not a number” and I really adhere to it in my efforts to understand problems and opportunities. Data is only as useful as the quality of it, and data is an invaluable tool.
Finally, data gathering isn't limited to spreadsheet poring. Member obsession means spending time with actual members, doing the things that they do day-to-day, using the app the way that they use it, and channeling that lived experience in decision-making. My favorite thing about Chime is our collective member obsession. It's what differentiates us and has allowed us to build ACTUALLY useful products for everyday Americans, again and again and again."
Q: What advice would you give younger professionals who want to make a big impact in their careers?
A: "I loved Malcolm Gladwell’s books “Tipping Point” and “The Outliers” and found them to be really descriptive of some of the things I sort of accidentally did right in my career. In Outliers, Gladwell follows exceptional standouts who did things better or differently than the rest, and found that on average, 10,000 hours of practice leads to expertise (he famously uses the Beatles playing nightly for many years before they were famous as the example of how 10k hours of jamming together led to their eminence, among other things).
When I was 23, I borrowed my best friend’s car to drive to an old ice skating rink that was the headquarters for a little-known Senator’s presidential race. The Senator’s name was Barack Obama. I went on to help build new systems for electoral organizing, stayed with the Senator-President for eight years working under 20+ bosses and learning at least 20 different ways to do the same things.
My advice is:
- Work your way up. Run the exhausting micro-approvals process forty-five times and let it show you what big swing innovation could look like. The only way to do the glamorous, innovative stuff is to master the un-glamorous.
- Work for as many talented people as you can get your hands on, not just in your twenties or thirties but over your whole career. It's like free school!! (That you get paid for, actually!). Only take feedback from people whose lives you would want to step into.
- Always manage your manager, and be the one pushing them, not the opposite (I call this “huskying” in coaching my teams, because I had a husky that walked us, growing up, not the opposite :).
- Treat everyone with respect and integrity. Be reliable and trustworthy above all else. Deliver on what you say you will, when you say you will, over and over and over again. Careers are long, and reputations are built centimeter by centimeter. The way we do anything is the way we do everything."
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