Michelle Obama named it the “palpable sense of dread about the future” we’ve all felt in recent years. Luckily, she didn’t leave us to stew in that bleak portrait. Instead, she invoked the wisdom of Presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s mother: “Don’t sit around and complain about things. Do something.”
Like a friend who can comfort you and check you at the same time, Obama seemed to put it on the table at the Democratic National Convention by suggesting that we’re all ready for a new chapter. But what work are you personally willing to put in to get there?
After years of chaotic, violent, or lackluster discourse from our leaders, even this straight talk felt like a balm. It also felt like a challenge.
As someone who, while a far cry from a public servant like Obama or Vice President Harris, nonetheless made my own, small commitment to a career of service in social impact, this resonated.
Eight years ago, I left my then-dream career in the music industry to join the managers, marketers, strategists, activists, creatives, campaigners, organizers, philanthropists, and other changemakers who collectively make up the social impact sector. It was 2016, and this was my version of committing to take action every day to support our social rights and needs.
Years into seeing the faces of Black people killed by police and school children slain by shooters orbiting us constantly on air and online, I, too, had to check myself when it came to where I was investing my time and talents. I wanted to do more, and to be more directly contributing to outcomes meant to improve people’s lives and realize society’s potential.
Shifting my career to social impact, where I could still help produce content and communications in keeping with my background, but focus squarely on doing so in the context of positive change, seemed like a steady way I could contribute.
As unsexy as it will sound to some, that steadiness was a match for me. I care a lot about equity, justice, freedom, and peace. I always have. I also believe you can leave almost anything better than you found it. At every scale, progress is always worth pursuing.
But, as a realist, I am not clamoring to burn everything down to live and work off the grid (though the fantasy can be deeply tempting). I understand and reluctantly accept that feelings aside, my work, my paycheck, and I are, unwittingly, part of “the system” that binds us all.
Likewise, I am not a fixture on the frontlines of grassroots social disruption, mask over my face and megaphone in hand. And that had to be okay, both for me and for the scores of other people whose advocacy doesn’t look like the clashes you’ll see splashed in photos across the news, but whose commitment to the cause is no less real.
In the end, when pivoting my professional pathway, this much was clear: I knew what my values were, I knew where my skills could make a difference, and I knew how important it would be to use those skills to create platforms for the people and issues that are on the frontlines. Even more crucially, I knew that I had the motivation to work on these efforts, with professional diligence and care, every single day. I knew I would show up.
And if we’ve learned something over recent years, it’s that we can’t take progress for granted through time and political tenures. We have to defend and cultivate the reality we want through effort and commitment, every day.
Which isn’t without its challenges.
It is either the best or the worst time to be committed to a career in social impact. On one hand, opportunities to build careers based on values-led work—from the desks of B Corporations to major brands with social programs, to organizations sprouted from social media-powered movements—exist in ways and numbers they haven’t in generations past. In that way, the landscape is a playground.
On the other hand, with all of the polarization and media melée of the current era, professions like mine have been vilified by some. For example, the “war on woke” is distracting, divisive, or malicious. (It feels important to note that I do not know a single person in this work who still says “woke.”) Across my network, there’s nothing but flux as resource commitments and cultural appetites shift.
If you remain committed to the job, you may find that in its most intense moments, social change work can be mentally and emotionally exhausting. You are, after all, working on some of the most entrenched, ubiquitous systemic issues and political turning points we face while carrying the needs, pressures, pains, and dreams of your funders, clients, and served communities on your shoulders.
You do this all while dealing with the regular obstacles and politics of any profession and attempting to appear knowledgeable, hirable, and fundable. Real, emergency-level burnout is not a hypothetical risk in this work, but a present and persistent one. I’ve experienced this myself and seen it take out other talented colleagues—a worrisome fact not just for the individual, but for the progress that relies on consistency.
On top of the personal strains, working in the sector can feel fragmented and siloed daily. For every well-connected program executive, philanthropist, or consultant, there are tiny direct service teams, small Corporate Social Responsibility units, and lone-wolf social entrepreneurs, some of whom may work without daily connection to or collaboration opportunities with the broader social change workforce. They may attempt to close the collaborative gap by seeking each other and partnering up. In other instances, groups like these may find themselves in inadvertent competition for precious resources, a demoralizing and counterproductive dynamic.
And, we might as well acknowledge, the sector can feel unwelcoming. It shape-shifts regularly, from its priorities to its language in keeping with changing causes, technologies, and market appetites. This can make it difficult to identify where you and your skill set fit, let alone mentally sketch out a career path. And that’s before counting the pressure you sometimes feel to be a perfectly evolved, never-misspoken poster child of political correctness before qualifying for a career supporting social progress.
So what might make it feel less hard to help pursue positive change? As with social change itself, there likely isn’t a singular intervention that’s going to transform the sector so that it’s instantly less draining, more connected, and more accessible.
But there are things we can build to foster connectivity among those who have gritted their teeth and chosen this path so that the widespread landscape of this important work feels like the force of committed talent.
As a person whose profession has always revolved in one way or another around culture, my mind goes first to cultural infrastructure, that connective foundation that holds people close to each other, and to their purpose, when the going gets tough. When I worked in the music industry (which, to be fair, has its hardships), I witnessed a sense of identity and affinity that felt unshakable enough to get people through the curveballs they faced in the office. For those who could hold on, just “being in the industry” and a part of things seemed to provide energy and motivation where the hope of stress-free days could not.
There is a small thing that stays with me when I recall that feeling of Tuesday mornings when new editions of Billboard magazine and its song and record charts were published. You just knew that thousands of people across the industry were seeing the same features and checking the same charts at the same time, like a work-y version of watching fireworks together on the 4th of July. It’s a decidedly minor ritual, but isn’t that what culture is: A mosaic of seemingly small norms, practices, and rituals that, taken together, make some spaces feel like home?
In the social impact sector, where there is arguably more at stake for society than entertainment, I struggle to pinpoint if we have any rituals to call our own. Outside of political mobilization and crisis response, I wonder if there are ever times we’re all watching the same spaces dedicated to our community and our work. And not for vanity’s sake, but because reconnecting to what we’re doing, alongside whom, and to what end could be the very thing that keeps our mental, emotional, and social tanks full for the next stretch of innovation and heads-down change-making.
As a strategist in social impact, the most profound moments that have held my teams together with energy, unity, and purpose seem to be the occasions we created to invest in our sense of culture and community with vulnerability and truth. Each time we held the space to talk about what was hard about our work, our work actually got easier.
Our proverbial safe spaces, created so that we could name and humanize the struggles within our work, became cherished home bases where we could dispel tension and drop the pretense, renew the connection to one another and our work, and get inspired and aligned to produce real things of value for our social missions. That dialogue was at the heart of each moment and only strengthened our efforts. Awareness and empathy, collaborative ideation, shared goal-setting and mutual respect are all facets of a thriving culture fostered through open conversation.
Those moments were in the controlled context of an organization, where it’s relatively easy to bring people together at will. Zoomed out to the sprawling social change professional landscape, we’ll have to build that togetherness from the ground up. Spaces, conversations, and content that look, feel, and sound authentically like the people in this sector—honest, imperfect, hopeful, and multifaceted—and facilitate those same supportive exchanges between them, can be a strong place to start.
There’s no denying the truth in what Michelle Obama quoted. We can’t just complain about the world, we have to act. But in a workforce of people who’ve already committed to making the pursuit of progress a daily calling, creating space to talk through what that commitment means, to see ourselves reflected in each other’s stories, to remember that we’re not running alone in the long marathon of positive change, just might be the affirming, reenergizing cultural stepping stones that give social impact professionals the confidence and resilience to show up and clock in to work another day.
And when the changemakers show up, we all win.
