Although Zigbi dreamed of returning to Bruyema to work with clan members, she also believed she could contribute more by gaining work experience in her hometown, New York City. In 1985 Zigbi returned to New York to work as a childcare worker in a residential drug treatment program. She was promoted to group therapist and later Director of Admissions, but the longer she stayed with the program, the more critical she became of its underlying ideology. She disagreed with the exclusive focus on individual responsibility as the sole mechanism for change. She thought there should also be a focus on collective action to influence change at the community level.

As her disenchantment grew, she explored the idea of a career change. She decided to study regional planning to enhance her understanding of how resources and policies dictated opportunities available to individuals and communities. She completed a master’s in city and Regional Planning at Cornell University in 1990. While she pursued graduate studies, villages in Bruyema were burned by political dissidents, and the country disintegrated into chaos and horror. Zigbi decided to continue working in New York City in ways that allowed her to express the values she had developed in Bruyema.

In the early 1990’s she accepted her first official environmental position as an affordable housing advocate and organizer in New York City. She coordinated a peer-training network for tenant and community organizers, co-founded a Harlem-based tenants’ organization, and advocated for affordable housing and the better enforcement of the city’s housing code.

While working as an organizer, Zigbi was invited to serve on the Community Funding Board of the North Star Fund. Through this position, she gained insight into the practice of grant-making and other social justice issues and groups in New York City.

She used the skills gained from this experience to revamp a small grants program for a citywide, non-profit training and technical assistance organization that helped neighborhood-based volunteer groups – many of which addressed local environmental issues.

Zigbi received a Revson Fellowship in 1999, allowing her to take additional environmental courses at Columbia University. After this, Zigbi was hired as Program Officer at the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation. She was responsible for the foundation’s New York City funding and sustainable agriculture and food systems grants. Zigbi was later promoted to Program Director, where she developed a grant strategy with support from the board of directors and managed a national and place-based portfolio of grants in sustainable agriculture and food systems, New York City Environment, and social justice movement building. In this role, Zigbi also assisted grassroots organizations with organizational development and fundraising; organized and influenced fellow grantmakers.

She was also an active member of the Sustainable Agriculture and Food System Funders group, Environmental Grantmakers Association, and Philanthropy New York. Zigbi was involved in dialogues and meetings meant to deepen grantmakers’ issue understanding, sharpen strategies, and facilitate synergies. In 2010, Zigbi played a catalytic role in creating a new New York City-based affinity group called Community Food Funders, for which she currently serves on the steering committee. She hopes that through her involvement, the group will focus more on the strategic importance of issues facing people of color.

In 2017, she designed and directed a collaborative process involving five California-based funders in selecting grantees for a one-time, one-million-dollar initiative: Californian Consumers Advancing Organics and Agroecology (CACAO).

Since 2016, she has been working as a consultant for her company, WKZ Consulting, and provides the following services: program design and development for place-based participatory granting strategies, RFP and award process; qualitative multi-stakeholder interviews and focus groups; integrating racial equity - assessment, planning and implementation; structural racism workshop facilitation for government and philanthropy; inventory and landscape mapping for ecosystems and infrastructure; and public speaking.

When asked about the highlight of her career, Zigbi says, “My idea of a successful life is having many moments of satisfaction rather than one or two major ‘highlights.’” Zigbi continues to work for environmental justice and includes what she calls “food justice” under that rubric. She feels that the concept of food justice extends the idea of environmentally sustainable production to encompass economic justice issues for workers in the food system and access to food and nutritional health. She says, “People living in… communities [of color] bear toxic burdens in their bodies and need and deserve to eat pesticide- and hormone-free foods rich in nutrients. Instead, people of color communities are inundated with junk foods and fast foods. Rather than the foods we eat helping us survive, they are contributing to chronic illness” (2005).