Making Good: Finding Meaning, Money, and Community in a Changing World - Softcover

Parish, Billy; Aujla, Dev

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1605290785 ISBN 13: 9781605290782

Verlag: Rodale Press, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

As we emerge from the recession, a generation is searching for practical answers about how to succeed and make positive change in the world. With real-life success stories and practical advice and
exercises, Making Good outlines how to find opportunities to effect change and make money. These
opportunities are not just for entrepreneurs and Fortune 500 companies: Making Good shows step-by-step how any person can achieve financial autonomy, capitalize on global changes to infrastructure, and learn from everyday success stories—providing the skills and insights this generation needs to succeed and build careers and lives of consequence.

Charismatic, young, and passionate, Billy Parish and Dev Aujla have been recognized in media outlets
like Vanity Fair, Salon, and Rolling Stone as the voices of their generation. They are at the vanguard of figuring out how the next generation will rethink, reimagine, and rebuild the world around us. Making Good culls the knowledge that has allowed Billy and Dev to build thriving, meaningful careers into a book that will be What Color Is Your Parachute? for the Facebook generation.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

DEV AUJLA is the Founder of DreamNow, a charitable organization that works with young people to develop, fund and implement their social change projects. Dev works as a Director of Partnerships for Change.org and has worked for other leading companies that do good and pay well like GOOD Corps. His work and writing have been featured in numerous media outlets including the Globe and Mail, CBC Newsworld and the Huffington Post. Aujla divides his time between Toronto and New York.

BILLY PARISH is widely known as an innovative youth organizer, social entrepreneur, and champion of the emerging green economy. He co-founded the Energy Action Coalition, the largest youth advocacy organization in the world working on climate change issues, is co-founder and President of Solar Mosaic, a solar energy marketplace and serves on numerous non-profit and clean-tech boards. Parish lives in Oakland, California with his wife and daughters.

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CHAPTER 1

THIS MOMENT

Dev

A couple of years ago, I was at a newsstand in the airport waiting for my flight home to Toronto, chewing gum and flipping through a Rolling Stone. In the middle of the magazine, I came across an article about climate heroes, which featured a guy I was friends with online but--typical Facebook--had never actually met. In the picture accompanying the article, Billy Parish was standing in a cornfield in front of a school bus, which he had driven around the country on vegetable oil to raise awareness about clean energy. The words The Dropout were emblazoned proudly above him. This guy, I thought, he's sort of like me.

To see Billy get recognition for nontraditional work somehow made me feel like I was on the right path, made me certain the work I was doing was valid too. I had started an organization in Canada called DreamNow, which supports young people to get personally involved in fixing problems in their communities. Our tag line is "producing ideas that do good," and we have worked with people on a whole range of projects, from body image workshops to an energy-conservation campaign to turn off lights in hundreds of high school classrooms. The details of what Billy and I were doing were pretty different, but I sensed that we shared an investment in getting people personally involved in change.

I phoned my parents and told them to find the Rolling Stone article online. I'd been having this feeling that they were hoping my quest to do something meaningful would dead-end at law school. I wanted to show them someone like me was doing the kind of trailblazing work concerned less with convention than with results and that, at the very least, the editors at Rolling Stone thought it was heroic. My parents were into it, even though the thrill I felt didn't exactly transmit to them.

Two years later, I heard from Billy out of the blue. I was sitting at my desk at DreamNow, having transformed my scrappy little project into a social enterprise that had reached over 50,000 people and had raised over a million dollars for projects, as well as providing me with a good salary and the freedom to travel. When I got Billy's e-mail, I phoned back right away. We talked for about 30 minutes about the project that I had just finished through DreamNow that involved interviewing hundreds of young people and adults to figure out how to make money and change the world. I had turned up a foundation to support my research and developed the results into an e-book called Occupation: Change the World. Billy had read it and loved it.

In the half hour we talked, it was clear that we had remarkably similar ideas for what we wanted to focus on in the next few years. My research had shown me the importance of helping people find a way to get jobs that made an impact, and he had come to a similar place through his work on the climate change and Green Jobs movement. We both agreed that there was a huge need for someone to provide direction, to demystify the process, and to share the stories that we were both hearing every day. The people we each talked to and spent time with wanted to make a difference, but they didn't know how to get paid, how to build careers, how to raise families, and how to build lives without sacrificing all that they wanted. We had heard stories of Nobel Prize winners and of wildly successful outliers, but what about the rest of us?

I remember feeling hesitant the moment I realized the similarities between what Billy and I each wanted to do. I have always thought that there are two types of people--those who obsessively protect their ideas and those who share them, collaborate with others, and hustle so that no one can catch up. I'd always considered myself as a member of the latter group, but still, there was this lingering selfish question in my mind--after putting so much work into my e-book research, shouldn't I just do this myself? I knew we would be stronger together, but I didn't know how collaboration on a book would work or what it would look like, and I still felt like I was figuring it all out myself.

Billy

I left Yale during the fall semester of my junior year fully intending to come back. Seven years later, even though I was technically still "on leave," I arrived at my 5-year college reunion as a party crasher. But I didn't feel sheepish coming back. I was just excited to have a good time with some old friends. I was pained to discover just how miserable many of them were. Many of my classmates had defaulted to law school, some were living at home. A few people had cleared the high bar to get low-level jobs in the Obama administration, and they were deeply frustrated at how powerless they felt in such powerful positions.

I'd heard of the "quarterlife crisis," but what was going on with these people seemed like a more permanent problem. My friends had had all this crazy ambition and talent in college, this freewheeling ability to invent and imagine. But it seemed like they hadn't found anywhere to use it, and so for most of them, it was as if they had spent their life building and learning to fly a plane and, now that they were in the air, they didn't quite know where to land.

Over dinner in the big Commons cafeteria, I talked about this observation to my friend Laura, who had taken a job at a major New York publishing house. She pointed out that my story had been an exception to that rule: I'd found work that was challenging and meaningful and fun, and somehow I was also making a really good living doing it. She thought maybe I was in a position to help others, to speak to our generation, and she thought a book on the subject could connect with people.

Talking to Laura jarred something loose, and I started thinking about how I'd gotten started on my path, how the early choices I'd made ended up working out for the best. I had done a bunch of globalization and environmental activism in my first and second years of college and went into my junior year as one of four co-chairs of the Yale Student Environmental Coalition. My three other co-chairs were focused on campus sustainability initiatives, but I wanted to organize an environmental conference for college kids across the entire Northeast. We ended up having a whole weekend of workshops, large group discussions, and late-night strategy sessions. Seventy students showed up from 30 campuses. People were excited about connecting beyond their campuses, and a core group of leaders emerged. On the final day, I pushed to create a new student network to keep us connected and allow us to run campaigns together. We formed ECO- Northeast. The conference ended with much whooping, hugging, and excited departures.

Then it all started to crumble. We found it hard to recruit new leaders who hadn't bonded at the initial conference. Other existing student networks popped up, some angrily wanting to know how the student groups we worked with at a particular campus were planning on coordinating with the student campaigns they were already supporting there. One of the networks worked with a few of the students to try to stage a coup. I felt besieged, totally unsure how I fit into this new world of student movement-building.

I actually took my first semester off to try to sort out the mess I had created. I had long conversations with all the networks that worked in the region and realized that what we needed was not another splinter in an already splintered movement. We needed a coalition to bring them all together--to allow them to develop joint campaigns, to share what they learned, to build something stronger, and to do things bigger than any of them could pull off alone. While we forged closer ties in the Northeast, the idea was spreading with new clean energy alliances forming in the Southeast, the Midwest, the West Coast, and Canada.

We started hosting conference calls with...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Rodale Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1605290785
• ISBN 13: 9781605290782
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 292
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar