New Reason to Work (eBook)

2

The Evolution of
Impact Work

Meeting Kim and Farah

We, Ilaina and Roshan, were in a good mood at the end of the event. At Amani Institute, we frequently host evening events to raise awareness about impact-first careers, and how the range of options for such careers are ever-expanding. This particular event had been excellent, complete with a highly engaged audience participating with gusto and asking great questions. We stayed behind after the event finished, taking final questions one-on-one. When the last person was done, we zipped up our bags and headed to the door, still feeling energized by how the evening had gone. We noticed two of the attendees talking animatedly outside. They turned toward us as we exited the building.

“Thanks for a great event,” the woman said. She was tall with long, straight brown hair, and Arab or possibly Latin American features. She extended her hand with a warm smile. “I’m Farah, and I really enjoyed the conversations. As you can see, we’re still going, even out here,” she said, nodding at her companion.

“Hey, that was great,” he chimed in, seemingly bursting with energy. He was shorter than her, with curly blond hair and a clipped Anglo-Saxon accent. “We’re still debating some of the things you both said.”

We immediately warmed to them—not just because of their positive energy toward us, but because, like us, they seemed to belong to that group of people who identify as citizens of the world instead of a single nationality, people who instinctively see the world as one interconnected whole, filled with human beings sharing similar dreams and fears.

The young man added, “We were just about to grab a bite to eat. Would you like to join us? I’m Kim, by the way.”

We looked at each other. Our plan for the evening was also to go eat dinner, so why not join them? We walked over to a nearby cafe and dropped into an easy conversation.

“I came to your event because I am thinking of quitting my job,” Farah said. “I’ve been working in both small and large companies as a designer for about ten years. I love the actual design work, but I’m tired of doing it to sell products that I no longer believe in or for organizations that see their employees as just cogs in a wheel. The final straw was when one of my female teammates was offered a directorship role but at a 20 percent lower salary than her male co-director. This triggered a lot of questions about what fairness and justice at work mean to me, the deeper aims behind my work, and the role of women in the workplace. I want to continue being a designer, but I want to use my skills for things that matter.”

After thanking Farah for sharing her story and lauding her bravery to be willing to reconsider her career choices, we turned to Kim.

“I’ve just graduated from university, and I’ve been trying to figure out the range of job options available. I studied economics and drove my professors crazy with questions that challenged the dominant economic model, so much that I would earn eye-rolls from my own classmates,” Kim said, then paused with a wry grin before adding, “although sometimes also to some applause. While researching alternative economic models, I became interested in climate change. I see a fundamental disconnect between capitalism and the planet’s ability to cope. We need more people working on better ways to organize economic output. In the event, you mentioned that the number of impact-first jobs has been increasing throughout history and will eventually become the norm. But you didn’t explain how that happened and what jobs exactly are out there for people like me. I’d like to learn more about that.”

“Sure! Let me first say that we highly value the people who dare to challenge the status quo. It will not always be an easy path, but it can be very rewarding,” Ilaina said. She picked up a napkin and began to draw on it. “What we meant is that the impact-first sector grew from being a small sector with a handful of job opportunities to becoming a vast array of organizations and jobs across the whole economy. We rarely talk about just the social sector anymore. You also find impact-first jobs in both the public and private sectors because, thanks to a few major turning points in the evolution of the social impact sector, new ways of looking at work and organizing our economy are emerging.”

The waitress came up with our drinks and took our dinner orders and menus. Kim took a big gulp of his drink and then, leaning forward with hands crossed and elbows on the table, said, “Tell me more about those turning points and the creation of impact-first jobs. What was the original social sector you mentioned? Why and how is it expanding and changing? I’m still in student mode,” he said with a laugh. “Tell me the history!”

The Landscape of Impact Work in Eight Turning Points

Roshan laughed too. “Maybe we’ll get into professor mode then!” he said. “I can try and summarize the history as we see it, focusing on more recent and global trends. But I will certainly leave out important historical events and of course can’t cover what the social sector is like in any single country, so forgive me in advance for that. But this will serve as a working knowledge of the field of social impact. Does that work for you?”

Kim and Farah nodded.

“All right,” said Roshan, mentally organizing his thoughts. “Let’s walk through the evolution of the modern, global, social sector, framed around key turning points.”

“And while Roshan explains the turning points, I will point out what new jobs each turning point brought,” Ilaina added.

Roshan began, “The first turning point was probably in the 1890s, with the rise of philanthropy. When American industrialist Andrew Carnegie famously pronounced that, ‘The man who dies rich, dies disgraced,’ he kicked off the modern philanthropy movement that soon included people like John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and others. None of these wealthy businessmen were saints, to put it mildly, and they may well have had ulterior motives for their actions. That said, by giving away large chunks of their fortunes, they implicitly acknowledged that neither government nor business could solve for everything humans need, and another group of institutions was needed to help society address shared problems. This was a new notion at the time. And the money they put behind it led to the first spurt of new organizations specifically set up to address social issues.

“The second turning point was the rise of international nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs. There have always been volunteers and do-gooders looking out for the less privileged. And the first NGOs came into being well before the rise of philanthropy. But it was not until the first half of the twentieth century that they really came into prominence, thanks to the havoc wreaked by the two world wars. Perhaps no organization symbolizes the NGO more than the International Committee for the Red Cross. Although it was founded in the 1860s, it jumped into the limelight during World War I. Its famous “doctrine of neutrality”—treating all victims of war equally, regardless of which side they represented—became the centerpiece of humanitarian action and is still seen as dogma by many organizations even today. It has also won three Nobel Peace Prizes—not bad for a single organization!

“And yet, it is by no means the only one! Here are the names and founding dates of some of the world’s largest NGOs today: Save the Children (1919), International Rescue Committee (1933), Oxfam (1942), CARE (1945), World Vision (1950), World Wildlife Fund (1961), and Amnesty International (1961).

“These organizations are important because they are still the biggest ones in the impact-first sector. They have been around for several decades and work in hundreds of countries. They have probably outlasted 99 percent of private companies that were founded after them, so let nobody tell you that only businesses can scale! More importantly, they have collectively saved and improved hundreds of millions of lives.”

Then Ilaina jumped in. “These first two turning points launched the first set of traditional impact-first jobs. They are still the nucleus of impact-first work, because you are almost guaranteed to have impact through them—the definition of impact being where the majority of your time is spent trying to improve the human and/or planetary condition. This is where the industry of impact-first careers got started. Today, there are jobs in foundations or philanthropies and in a variety of NGOs: humanitarian NGOs, human rights NGOs, development NGOs, and local NGOs or community-based organizations. Let’s take them one by one.”

“Yes please, because they look all the same to me!” Farah said.

Nodding in understanding, Ilaina continued, “Foundations and philanthropies use private capital and/or crowdsourced donations to provide funding to social impact organizations working directly with needy populations, usually in the form of grants (donations that do not have to be repaid). They can be either purely charitable or very strategic in their giving. A large amount of philanthropic funding is also religiously motivated—some goes toward social impact, some of it doesn’t. Examples of large and well-known foundations around the world include: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, and Stichting DOEN.

“Now let’s move on to the...