Non-Profit Organizations With Impact Nonprofits with Impact getty I learned a lot about the Job Sphere during my time in the not-for-profit sector (though I didn’t call it that at the time). Let’s start with what we were doing. By the IRS’s definition, as employees of 501c3 organizations, what we were doing was “good” for the people we served, as described in our mission statement. In reality, I saw a lot of useless efforts: some of what we did didn’t meet those people’s needs and, worse, some caused harm due to how we did it. I was hired to do a needs assessment of local youth centers in Palestine that a major global funder was considering as grant recipients. The funding came with a requirement to meet a 50/50 gender mix for participants in the centers’ programs within one year. There were a few brave families in this conservative community who started sending their daughters to one of the centers after having gotten over concerns of physical safety, philosophical differences, and conflicts with the students’ school obligations. Still, there were usually conditions for joining, such as having to be in a girls-only program with a female facilitator or staying in the same classroom or activity as their brother. Building trust with families was a long, slow path. Clearly, the center wouldn’t get to that 50/50 mix within a year unless they reduced the size of the programs to the handful of girls whose families permitted them to come with a matching number of boys. But this approach would underutilize both the centers’ capacity to serve youth and the funding provided. I relayed all this to the funder. Hoping to leverage my privilege as a White American with deep commitment to equity, I explained the center leader’s commitment to equity and the need to pursue it in a more realistic time frame and format that would work in his community. A few days later, the global funder made the grant to this center and four others—which included a requirement of equal participation by gender within 12 months at risk of rescinding funding in the second year. By demanding equal gender participation to serve their own vision rather than honoring the cultural context, this major international funder caused great harm to staff of these youth centers as well as hundreds of youths and their families, to say nothing of reinforcing the image of international development as paternalistic and inept at solving real problems. So even in the not-for-profit sector, where the IRS is in charge of mandating that organizations do work that’s intended to be good for the world, the specific choices people make about what to do and how to do it can cause harm. Indeed, I was the example of a bad leader in some situations! I remember with great discomfort several phone calls, workshops, and staff meetings in which I barked at a youth leader, community member, or colleague. Whether they were late with a deliverable, misunderstanding my point, or refusing to try my brilliant idea, I applied some combination of withholding approval, shame, and unconstructive criticism. Over time, I was able to recognize these errors within a matter of days or hours and apologize. Sometimes I was able to repair the relationship during that conversation and revisit the issue at hand to reach a solution that worked for everyone involved—most importantly, the people we were trying to serve. But in other cases, my errors led to a trust deficit for days or weeks that (rightly) took me days or weeks to repair. And in that time, none of us was able to do the work we were there to do as effectively as we could have. This might’ve been different had I been making the Self Sphere investments necessary to stay empathetic, non-judgmental, and present in listening to the challenge presented. I certainly don’t intend to suggest that the not-for-profit sector does no good in the world; on the contrary. But I want these examples to illuminate the fact that having impact in the Job Sphere is more complex than having a job that saves lives or shapes young minds. There are plenty of ways to have great outcomes and align with your purpose in every single job on the planet. If you value these insights, stories, and tools about activating purpose to avoid burning out, stagnating, and missing the opportunities that matter to you, follow me on Forbes. (It’s free! Just click the blue button to the right of my name!) Follow me on LinkedIn. Check out my website or some of my other work here.