The New York Times Writes About "Doing Good in a Bad Economy"

Making a difference is not an accidental career path, as implied in a front page article of yesterday’s The New York Times business section.

Written by Catherine Rampell, "In Service to the Public" profiled two individuals who graduated from college at the onset of the economic crisis. Both thought they were headed for careers in the for-profit world. Both wound up in nonprofits. Rampell surmises that these college graduates "ended up doing good because the economy did them wrong."

I’m not so sure about that.

In the article, Rampell reports that the young people joined the social sector because they could not find work at a for-profit. But after reading their stories, it seems to me that the tough job market actually gave the recent college grads the profound opportunity to explore what a career with purpose might look like for them, which didn’t necessarily mean shifting sectors.

If you were like me, you may have grown up thinking that for-profits were rich and nonprofits poor; thankfully, that’s an extremely outdated, and perhaps even dangerous, dichotomy. At Echoing Green, I continually see the division between for-profits and nonprofits melt away. In fact, many of our Echoing Green Fellows forward social innovation using a for-profit model.

Furthermore, a third of our Fellowship applicants this year were for-profits or hybrid organizations. Both for-profits and nonprofits create tremendous value and play a critical role in changing the world.

The economic crisis gave a boost to a growing phenomenon that Echoing Green had been watching and participating in for many years: no matter the sector, those in the nonprofit, for-profit and government sectors are more aggressively (at least it seems that way to us) seeking careers with meaning. For example, every position we advertise yields hundreds of applicants, and a good number of those applicants are career-switchers. Our pool of Fellow applicants grows every year—this year, even, with great force. Nonprofit jobs are on the rise, yes, but so is volunteerism, government jobs and for-profit jobs with a positive social impact. The growing interest in developing a life and a career with social impact that Rampell cites in her article is not a blip in the road. It is part of a turning tide.

And yet, our country is unprepared to help people find and create the careers with personal importance they now seek.

In a 2003 study, Paul Light, NYU Wagner's Paulette Goddard Professor of Public Service and founding principal investigator of the Organizational Performance Initiative, found that sixty-two percent of graduating college seniors are interested in careers related to public service. However, just nine percent know how to go about finding a job in the sector. This finding certainly matches my own personal experience.

When I was graduating from undergraduate school, I approached my school’s career advisors and asked them how I could transition into a career with social impact. They were not sure how to answer. My advisors suggested I contact alumni who had created careers in the nonprofit field. So I set up a series of informational interviews and learned that each of the alumni I spoke with had taken a different path to the position in which they now sat. I learned that, when it comes to creating a career with positive social impact, there is often no clear path. There is also no organized system to insert yourself into; few recruiters in the field. And, unfortunately, very little time for reflection. So, therefore, working on purpose requires a little entrepreneurialism, some bold flair.

In response to the dearth of resources for creating meaningful careers, Echoing Green’s newest book, Work on Purpose—which will be released in the coming weeks—features both the career paths of five Echoing Green Fellows and a study guide to help our readers find their own work on purpose.

Echoing Green is committed to serving the needs of a generation of young people no longer content to work to live. Realizing that they can align their hearts with their heads and create a career that forwards their personal vision for the world, they live to work. And this resonates with us, because at Echoing Green, we do the exact same thing.

Tweet