Tag Archives: careers

  • Don’t look to your social good job for fulfillment

    September 22, 2012

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    By Tiana Reid, Senior Editor of SocialBusiness.org

    Image of Tiffany Persons via Mindvalley

    Last week week iOnPoverty featured Tiffany Persons of the NGO Shine On Sierra Leone. Here’s a bit of what the email shared with its readers:

    When someone asks you why you’re interested in changing the world, is your answer something like: “Because it feels good to do good”? If so, Pathfinder Tiffany Persons, says be careful. “It’s an addiction and no one talks about this.” Her bottom line: filling an internal void with doing good is not okay – it will leave you unhappy in the end and it will negatively impact the people you seek to help. So examine your motives carefully.

    Pathfinder Wanjiru Kamau-Rutenberg said something similar when she noted: “The most useless people in the world are driven by guilt.”

    Jonathan Lewis continued on Huffington Post:

    If you think “doing good” is a recovery program for a deadend career, or a panacea for personal happiness, or a path towards building a personal brand, forget it. As Tiffany notes, “If you don’t find happiness where you are right now, you are going to be unhappy in the social sector.”

    As Levitt and Dubner summed up in SuperFreakonomics, “Most giving is… impure altruism or warm-glow altruism. You give not only because you want to help, but because it makes you look good, or feel good, or perhaps feel less bad.” The same can hold true for casual volunteerism and, all-too-often, for switching from a soulless industry to a mission-driven career.

    At first glance, perhaps, this kind of thinking could seem controversial. But I think that the social enterprise community becomes sanitized into this idea that good is good is good is good. In a lot of ways, it’s not about what you do necessarily but how you do it. Being in the social business or non-profit industry doesn’t necessarily make you a better person.

    I’ve encountered this in the flesh while I was completing my undergraduate degree in Montreal in International Development Studies. The very name of the program, i.e. the “development” part, suggests a sort of ownership about what development means and to whom. The main lens through which development is traditionally looked at is economic, even though many of my brilliant professors do make an effort to remind the students that there simply aren’t enough resources for every country to industrialize like the West has (which feeds into the “West versus the Rest” idea). The field also subscribes to a sense of nationalism that is problematic in many cases and ignores marginalized populations.

    But it was really the students, no, I can’t place blame on the students. Rather, it was (and is) the industry that really rubbed me the wrong way especially after a few years knee-deep in the program. It’s about the language, too, that “go volunteer in an Indian orphanage for four weeks and change lives” type of mentality. While I don’t find anything necessarily wrong with voluntourism, there’s a sense that it’s good no matter what. But like everything, including social good careers, it’ necessary to question the why.

    As always, this is something to think about. My posts on this blog are about being critical, living consciously and challenging the norm. And we all know that we can create micro-norms within our own fields, workplaces and minds.

  • On momtrepreneurs and “having it all”

    August 23, 2012

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    By Tiana Reid, Senior Editor of SocialBusiness.org

    “Momtrepreneur” is a term I  loathe. What does it mean exactly? Simply put and obviously enough, it’s a portmanteau that melds mom and entrepreneur. It’s a term I’ve come across through Twitter headlines but never really clicked the link because I didn’t have a personal interest to learn more—for the most part. But as I was doing research for the Social Business ebook that we’re working on, I came across a “momtrepreneur” in the flesh (well, over Skype). When I interviewed her, I asked what she thought of the term and if she thought that it applied to her. She was, after all, a mother and an entrepreneur. But even more than that, however, her social enterprise was specifically child-focused. Is “momtrepreneur” a word that is given to you, imposed on you or chosen by you? Or all of the above? Or perhaps, none of the above?

    There are social, economic and cultural implications toward what it means and allows for women who are both mothers and entrepreneurs. It’s more than simply similar to “fashionista,” but rather, it’s akin to, say, “journalista” or “editrix” because it’s career-oriented, meaning that it can diminish the professional aspect that women have been fighting for even before the women’s rights movement.

    But others embrace the term and their dual status. They straddle both worlds: motherhood and entrepreneurship. It gives a sense of a community and a sense of belonging. There are meet-up groups and support groups and cocktail hours and business advisors and the like.

    For me, a non-mom, it can’t help but make me think of the dreaded “having it all” debate. It began with The Atlantic’s controversial cover story noxiously dubbed “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” by Anne-Marie Slaughter where “all,” I guess, refers to both a successful career and a fulfilling home life—the “women problem” that has emerged since women have been working professionally in North America.

    The piece went viral and many responded whether via Facebook and Twitter or through editorials and op-eds. One such opinion came from Veronica Percia, a 27-year-old lawyer, who was quoted in the Washington Post: “It scared me, but men should be scared, too, because work-life balance is a human problem, not just a woman problem.”  And indeed, work-life balance shouldn’t be relegated simply to one gender, even though it commonly is.

    In a way, “momtrepreneur” could be considered a form of othering. By making distinct, it threatens to diminish. It’s important, I think, that women entrepreneurs in the social enterprise and social business spaces consider their roles as it plays out within gender, business and social good. Feminism isn’t a hot topic in the social enterprise world (or a lot of worlds actually), but no one is exempt.

    And it’s an even larger question on whether “it all” exists. It is, of course, a personal question and one that at twenty-two years old, I’ve considered and, well, don’t believe in. But hey, maybe I’ll end up proving myself wrong and re-imagine what “all” means.

  • On Purpose – talent for social enterprise

    April 18, 2012

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    By Tom Rippin, CEO of On Purpose

    On Purpose believes that for social enterprise to fulfil its potential, it is critical for it to attract and work with the very best people. Many organisations are currently researching new forms of financing for social enterprises or helping social entrepreneurs start up new ventures, but too little effort is being concentrated on attracting and developing high calibre talent to help manage and grow later stage social enterprises.

    At the same time, there is huge interest out there, especially amongst professionals in their 20s and 30s who want to work in social enterprise and see it as a promising alternative both to shareholder-driven capitalism and to traditional, philanthropy-dependent charitable approaches.

    On Purpose is a leadership programme for the next generation of leaders who will use the power of business to help solve society’s biggest problems. We believe that if we find the most inspiring people, provide them with the right experience, training, support and networks, then great things will happen. On Purpose recruits professionals with at least two years of work experience into a one year, full-time programme that provides this and so kick-starts their careers in social enterprise.

    It  is a full-time, 12-month leadership programme that combines paid on-the-job experience with a world-class training and coaching support structure. The programme participants (“Associates”) are high-calibre individuals from a variety of backgrounds who show commitment to a career in social enterprise.

    During the programme the Associates:

    • Complete two 6-month work placements, that provide real-life, on-the-ground work experience in return for a modest salary from the placement host
    • Spend half a day each week on a “mini social enterprise MBA” delivered predominantly by professionals from third-party organisations
    • Receive regular 1:1 mentoring and coaching from experienced professionals to support them in delivering value to their host placements and in planning their career beyond On Purpose

    After the programme, Associates find a job in one of their two work placements or in another social enterprise or return to a more traditional corporate, public or charity organisation to which they will take a social enterprise way of thinking. In this way, On Purpose is developing a committed and influential network of alumni who are working on sustainable solutions to the world’s biggest problems across all sectors.

    Managing a social enterprise is more complex than managing a solely commercial or solely charitable organisation and yet talent processes in this space are dangerously under-developed; as a consequence many people struggle to find meaningful jobs in this space, and many social entrepreneurs lack the fellow managers and leaders who can help them scale to sustainability.

    At this critical time in the evolution of the social enterprise space, it is more critical than ever to attract the best and brightest talent to help innovate, manage and, crucially, scale the social enterprises around the world.

    On Purpose helps young professionals realise their aspirations of embarking on a career that allows them to “do well whilst doing good” and in so doing helps secure the future success of the social enterprise space.