STEFANIE AMBROSIO: Good evening and welcome to the Carnegie Council for
Ethics in International Affairs. My name is Stefanie Ambrosio, Program Assistant
for the Carnegie New Leaders.
Unfortunately, the Director of the Program, Devin
Stewart, will not be joining us tonight, for he is teaching a class at NYU.
In his place, we are honored to have Ms. Christine Bader, Advisor to Professor
John
Ruggie, the UN Special Representative of the Secretary General on Business
and Human Rights.
It is also with great pleasure that we have Ms. Alissa Wilson here to speak
on "The Practical Idealism Project: Stories from the Field."
I thank you all for attending this Carnegie New Leaders event.
With that, let's all please welcome Ms. Bader and Ms. Wilson.
CHRISTINE BADER: Thank you, everybody, so much for coming here tonight.
I've really been looking forward to this for a while.
I'm going to introduce Alissa and just give a brief introduction, then she's
going to talk about her project, and then we're going to have a nice, relaxed,
interactive conversation.
You've got Alissa's bio in front of you. She's a Policy Associate covering peace
and security issues for the American
Friends Service Committee. She has been very busy lately, because her portfolio
includes Iran. The AFSC has been carrying out service and development, social
justice, and peace programs throughout the world since 1917. Prior to this,
Alissa was a researcher in ethics and human development at Tufts, where she
also got her Masters in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School. She has
lots of impressive bits and pieces on her c.v., which, again, you have in front
of you.
Most importantly in my view, she holds a B.A. in Political Science from Amherst
College—hooray! We have a mutual Amherst friend, who is responsible for
the two of us meeting last year, and I was so excited to hear about what she
was doing. I asked that friend yesterday if she had any tidbits to share about
Alissa to provide a little-bit-more-nuanced-than-the-usual bio. She just shared
that she was so proud that Alissa was nominated by her fellow Fletcherites to
deliver the Class Day speech at graduation. She said that only did she speak
well, but she sang beautifully, and that her presence is always extremely calming.
Alissa's calming presence most certainly served her well for the project that
she is here to talk about tonight, and that's the Practical Idealism Project,
which saw Alissa conducting about 40 interviews with people who have done all
sorts of practical idealist jobs all over the world, which is what she is here
to tell us about tonight.
The project was officially born in November 2005. Again, Alissa will tell us
all about these fascinating conversations with people meant to guide those of
us who want to work in social change but lack examples or resources to help
figure out how to do so in a way that's effective and responsible.
If you haven't yet seen the book, here it is. It's
available on Amazon.com. If you go to practicalidealists.org,
you can also get a few of the full interview transcripts that didn't make it
into the book.
With that, Alissa, take it away.
Discussion
ALISSA WILSON: Thank you.
I'm glad that you're all here. Thanks for coming.
Because I think of the Carnegie Council as this fabulous place, I was a little
bit more intimidated to talk to you than I was to the 400-plus people who I
spoke to on Class Day. I was like, "Oh no. They all know so much already.
What can I share?" So I wanted this to just be like a conversation.
It took us a minute to get here because of lots of world changes. So there are
lots of stories that I will probably forget. I brought my trusty copy to remind
myself.
The Practical Idealism Project was basically born out of discussions that John
Hammock and I had in a class at Fletcher. It was a class on Globalization,
Development, and Humanitarianism, about ethics and personal transformation.
John is a fabulous human being, full stop. He was a Professor at the Fletcher
School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He got his Ph.D. from Tufts
and then went to work doing microfinance at ACCION
in Latin America. He quit that job. He was the executive director of ACCION.
This will come back later on. He quit the job when he felt like they were taking
too much U.S. government money. In the 1980s in Latin America the United States
was doing some things that were not promoting the end goal of ACCION. It worked
out for him, because he ended up being the executive director of Oxfam America,
growing it from a church basement to the major player that we know today.
He quit that job—he likes to quit things. He grows things and then he quits
them—to start the Famine Center at Tufts [now known as the Feinstein
International Center]. They created the Sphere
Standards, which is the minimum set of assistance requirements that you
can expect if you are a refugee being helped by the international community.
He had this class on ethics and personal transformation that everybody wanted
to get into. So he made all these requirements. Basically, it was people who
had done a lot of thinking about development and conflict resolution and humanitarianism,
and we were writing these 20-page papers with these great theses and researching
in the library all the time.
But this class was about what you actually thought, what you actually think
about your work, not just the methodology of doing your work and how to make
your work more effective. The class encompassed all of those questions.
During one of the classes, he expressed an interest in getting other people
to look at social change and how you can create an environment where more people
will do this kind of work and stick with it, because he had been getting a lot
of students at Fletcher who were like "I want to come, I want to change
the world, I want to be like you," and then they would leave Fletcher and
they were like "And I am $60,000 worth in debt, I basically have bought
a new home yet I have no place to live, and what am I going to do about this?"
So two of us came to his office to talk about how we could get more people interested.
I had come from, a couple of years earlier, a fellowship at the Center on Philanthropy
at Indiana University, looking at voluntary action for the public good and what
does that mean—What does it mean to be "the public?" Voluntary
action, does that mean it's unpaid? What are the implications here? So we got
into this great conversation.
I'm going to fast-forward a little bit to the next year, when I was looking
for a job and had just done this great dance workshop and was like "Now
I need to get serious." We ended up having a talk about how we can maybe
re-engage in some of those discussions.
He said, "You know, I think I can get some funding to go and talk to interesting
people about what they're doing."
You know, how often does somebody say, "Hey, do you want to travel the
country and talk to interesting people?" I was like, "Yes, you can
sign me up."
And so we spent about two years identifying folks and talking to them, getting
their lessons learned, in terms of how to be effective in their own positions,
and then in terms of how to encourage other people to make this leap.
Our title is a little sensational, "Changing the World and Getting Paid,"
because we wanted to make the point that it was okay, you could change the world
and still have a good salary.
So our criteria were pretty broad. We wanted people who were within ten years
of graduating from their last degree, whether that was a Ph.D., a B.A., an M.B.A.,
because we wanted people who remembered what it was like to try to form a career.
When I was at this Center on Philanthropy fellowship, we talked to all these
great people—we talked to Jonathan Fanton at MacArthur [former president
of John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation]—people who others work
their whole careers and never get to have access to them.
They had great ideas. But when it came to what the practical steps are, they
had come from eras maybe where if you were smart and you could talk a good game
you were in. The way things seem to be going now is there's this massive professionalization
of all of these spheres. Like when the person who started my fellowship at the
Center on Philanthropy started his job as the Exxon Education Foundation Director,
there was no such thing as a Philanthropy Masters. You have a good idea, you
fund it, it's done.
And we were trying also to get a little bit of geographic diversity. So we hit
the big ones—New York, D.C., Boston—but I also went to Detroit and
Greensboro, North Carolina, just to try to get a sense of what people were doing
in places where there was a lot of support for them.
In The Triangle—Raleigh-Durham, Chapel Hill—in North Carolina, that
is the most progressive community you ever want to visit. Everyone has support.
Yeah, I was surprised too.
But when you go out to Greensboro, it is a totally different issue. And so
when you're trying to do bridging the digital divide in Greensboro, North Carolina,
with urban kids—you don't think of anyone in Greensboro as urban if you're
from New York, which I am—that's my normative bias—it's a different
way of thinking, it's a different way of approaching people, and it's a different
way of explaining what you're trying to do.
It might not be about a rights-based approach, which would fly a lot better
in Boston. It's about "this is our work force and how do we make it stronger?"
So I took planes, trains, automobiles, buses. Being a New Yorker, I only learned
how to drive a couple years out of college. I had unlearned it while I was in
Nigeria during grad school, so I had to get that skill back.
I was trying to talk to people when we were in the other room [before this meeting
started] about who they were and what they were doing so I could figure out
what stories I wanted to tell. I don't feel like I talked to enough of you,
because now there are a lot more of you here.
So I figure I will start off and then maybe I'll just do it at random, whoever
looks good on this list.
One person I wanted to talk about was Josh
Dorfman. He is in your city. He is in Williamsburg. He was hands-down my
favorite—let me not say that.
He was one of the most fun interviews, because he started the interview off
by beatboxing, and no one else had attempted to give me a musical interlude.
I met him down in this loft-like space in Williamsburg at Vivavi,
which is an environmentally responsible design firm.
Josh is this guy who lives really hard. You know, there are some people you
meet and they're just like "I had this thought and I am going to go for
it." There might be some of you—is there anyone in this room who feels
like that about themselves? Well, I'll give you his example and then we'll go
to someone else who's a little more calm.
He graduated from college, had studied abroad, and was really interested in
what was happening with China, and felt that because of geopolitical developments
this was the next big thing. It was in 1993.
So he went to China and taught English. And then he had like a little side part-time
job at the Kryptonite bike lock factory in Nanjing, where he said they basically
just wanted him to show up every once in a while, let people know that the central
office does care about them.
After a while, he had this thought. He said, "Why don't you try not
making bike locks to export to America? There are people in China who ride bikes.
Maybe we should sell bike locks here." He told this to Kryptonite.
They said, "You know, that's a really good idea.Why don't you open up an
office and you can do this?"
So here he is. He's like two or three years out of college, doing Kryptonite
bike lock sales in Nanjing.
After a while, he decided, "This has been a really great experience. I've
got a lot of business information. I know how to do some things"—because
sometimes the best knowledge comes from just going and jumping in—"but
I'm going to go back to the United States and I'm going to go to business school
to round out what I know, and maybe it would be a good idea for me to come back
to China and work with other American companies who need to understand what
it means to bridge cultures."
So he went to business school. He fell in love with this woman. She was from
Germany. So he was like, "How do I get closer to Europe?" while he's
still in business school. He went to Thunderbird. He then decided that he would
do an internship in Geneva. So he's there.
So, okay, first he's got this China business experience, and then he's in Geneva
learning about supply chains. His friends were like "this is very unsexy."
But he was like "No, this is really important, you need to have a very
rounded sense of business."
Then he ended up coming back. It was the dot-com era, before the bubble burst.
He did some dot-com work.
But then he did a kind of a reevaluation moment. "This is not who I want
to be. I don't want to be a dot-com person."
He had gotten a really sweet opportunity. He was flying to London, all these
places. I think that sometimes—you know, in the interviews and just talking
to my own friends—it's easy to be like "This is a fabulous life style.
But, hold on. It's not exactly the end goal that I had mind."
So he says he fabricated an early life crisis and went to Montana. In Montana
he was like "I'm going to figure it all out." And then it was snowing,
and he was like "No, not anymore."
So a hiccup. He decided to do screenwriting in L.A. because he loved books.
But the screenwriting part comes in that he learned how to craft a story. So
in each of these experiences he's taking something from it. He learned how to
craft a story. He learned how to engage people.
But then he was like "This really isn't for me. I went to Thunderbird.
I'm interested in international affairs. L.A. screenwriting, while it sounds
really sexy, is probably not my lifelong goal."
So he comes up with this idea that is going to bring in the business stuff that
he's interested in and the China stuff that he's interested in, which is to
do something that's a socially responsible business. Because one of the things
that he has thought about along the way is that "If China keeps on its
development path, there will be so many people driving cars that the environment
is going to be adversely affected, and I don't want to be part of that,"
because he felt like that's what he was doing; he was part of that cycle.
But he knew that what he wanted to do to work against that cycle was not
work for a nonprofit because the first thing he said to me was "I don't
wear Birkenstocks, I don't wear burlap. That's not my community. My community
is the entrepreneurs and the business folks."
So he built this from the ground up and put part of his life on hold. And now
he has got this vibrant company. He also has a radio show, a serious radio show,
and I think he is in conversations about a television show called "The
Lazy Environmentalist" with Sundance—part of that thing about
how do we craft a message to bring people in so that they can see his vision
and engage in it as well, because it's great to have a vision, but not if you
can't get people onboard with you!
And then there are people—let's see who's a little bit calmer.
You know, for some reason we had a lot of people who were ready to strike out
on their own and people who didn't know each other.
I was talking to somebody earlier about how part of our process was asking people
who we knew, "Hey, who would you recommend that we talk to?" or looking
to see who had been profiled in something on Net
Impact.
But there were people who didn't know each other, who were just like "I
am going to strike out and make this happen."
So, for a second, someone like Noah
Merrill, who started off in a lot more kind of traditional, nonprofit setting,
where he worked for the American Friends Service Committee before I even got
there, and was doing kind of more traditional organizing work about the Iraq
war and trying to inform his community and see what people could do to work
against it. But then at a certain point he was in Jordan and saw what was happening
with Iraqi refugees, and decided that it was time to help Americans know what
they could do about this issue, and now he runs Direct
Aid Iraq.
In terms of his own reevaluation, continuous reevaluation, it was where did
he want to be working: Did he want to make a change with U.S. communities so
that they understood more about the impact of the war, or did he want to make
a change that more directly impacted a community abroad, where he was still
informing people in the United States but it was really a direct result that
he could see?
I think sometimes that's one of the questions that people are grappling with.
It's like I do policy work, and I spent some sleepless nights about the F-22
last week and writing action alerts. Is that what I want to do? Or would I rather
be in Burundi doing something with elections and peace-building, because if
the elections go badly conflict might break out again?
So those reevaluation points—sometimes you actually do something with them,
like Noah did in his own life and like Josh did like a thousand times. But sometimes
you need to kind of sit where you are and try to figure out what the lessons
learned are for that policy work so that if you go and work in Burundi, if the
peace agreement holds and there are more development promises made, you understand
what it means to make sure the United States upholds their funding commitments
and things like that.
CHRISTINE BADER: So while you're on that topic of the questions that
you found that people ask themselves, one of the things that I really enjoyed
about the book is that there are these incredibly disparate stories. I mean
we don't know a lot of Josh Dorfmans, right?
ALISSA WILSON: Yeah, it's true.
CHRISTINE BADER: They're really disparate stories. Some of them you can
sort of see yourself more in than others. But then you managed to present these
very kinds of deep questions in a really straightforward way.
If you look at the table of contents, it's like skills, work and jobs, personal
finance, and it walks through some questions that are really quite fundamental
and deep, but they are presented in a way that's totally accessible: What are
your values? What do you believe in? How much money is enough for you to live
on? I mean it's presented in a way that "Okay, I can walk myself through
these and it will make me think."
So one of the questions that I had for you is: in the process of doing all of
these crazy disparate interviews and then distilling it down, did these themes
emerge over the course of that process as the things that you found in common—like
everybody kind of thought about money a little bit, everybody thought about
the skills that he had? Or was that your framework going into the interviews,
of "Okay, this is what I'm gathering, that people who are seeking guidance
want to know?" Can you just maybe talk a little bit about the process of
going from the interviews to how you structured it?
ALISSA WILSON: Some of it was in the questions.
I should have said the other criterion for being interviewed was that you paid
your own bills, because there are a lot of people whose parents can fund their
lives and you can have these fabulous jobs, and you're like "Yeah, and
I live in a loft in SoHo and I never have to pay a bill ever. It's great."
One of the questions that we had for the interviews was "How much is enough?"
because it's a different answer for so many people, but it's something that
I think anyone who wants to have a practical idealist career has thought about.
So we were talking about student loans, rent, if you live in someplace like
New York City. We really wanted people to get at that. So sometimes our questions
are a little bit disingenuous, because we're like "We know what the answers
are. We want you to think about them."
And in terms of values and passions—in our writing team John is sometimes
like "We are going to take over the world." We had a question about
whether we wanted the book to say "It is your responsibility to go out
and do something socially responsible because the world is in a bad place, and
if you exist you can do something to help it"; or if you wanted to say:
"Think about your values. Do you live in the world that you want to live
in? What do your values tell you about the world that you want to live in? What
are your passions? How do you make sure that your values are met with a career
that also has you engaging your passions?"
So at the end of the day someone could say, "You know, this does not lead
me to social change work," if they're not feeling really grounded in their
values or if their values don't say X or Y. But of course, the people we talked
to, their values were grounded in that.
We really wanted people to read some of the stories and then think about their
own process was. But going from these 40 massive interview transcripts, because
I'm long-winded and I like to hear people talk about themselves because people
are so interesting—it was a lot of data mining to get through.
And then, some of the folks who were more traditional, like Laura Hogshead,
in terms of "I went to grad school, and then I did the presidential management
fellowship at HUD, and then I got an offer to go and be associate director for
the Edwards' Poverty Alleviation Center at Chapel Hill, and now I'm back at
the House Appropriations Office." They were not like "And then I was
in China, and then I was screenwriting."
But they still had that same process of "What are my values? What are my
passions?" As Laura said, "At the end of the day, I think that people
should be housed and that housing is a human right. Right now I'm passionate
about government service because I think that everyone should have access through
that vehicle. But now I have this great opportunity to go work with Edwards,"
who for her was like an amazing figure.
CHRISTINE BADER: That's really interesting, because that conveniently
gets me to another question that I had, which was: Upon first read, it did read
to me like it was more targeted towards people who were coming out of school,
because it's sort of about asking these really big-picture questions and then
choosing a path. I guess what I was a little bit hungry for, and thinking about
the crowd that was likely to be here tonight and thinking about my own peers,
I was hungering for a little bit, a slightly different decision-making process
for a slightly older crowd. As you say, there are a lot of people in the book
who really went for it in a big way, and either took a really big risk or made
a 180-degree change. And maybe that's because it sounds as if you were asking
people to recommend people, they would recommend people who they had heard of,
who took a bolder step.
I guess I was thinking about the kind of our peers who—I mean some people
have been laid off and they are forced to go through a more dramatic evaluation.
But I was actually looking for stories of people who wanted to make more incremental
changes and wanted to think about what their values were, and try to still work
with—they might not be ready to leave their industry or their company,
or even their job. But then how can you make sort of incremental change, just
try to make sure, do a check on yourself, and see if you're really living who
you want to be.
ALISSA WILSON: Having the dream—not the dream, but that's my way
of—
CHRISTINE BADER: But the dream is not so far from where you are today.
ALISSA WILSON: Right. You're like on the path—
CHRISTINE BADER: But it's incremental choices and changes. Were there
people that you found who did a kind of reevaluation but it didn't result in
a huge leap, they just—
ALISSA WILSON: Like a shift.
CHRISTINE BADER: Yes.
ALISSA WILSON: I think that Laura Hogshead, who I just mentioned, made
smaller shifts. She did change jobs, but that was more in terms of the opportunities
that were open to her.
One of the things I was trying to write about on my way down here was how do
you internalize this when it's a smaller shift or you're in a job market that's
like you are never going to leave your job, it's very secure, because in a way
the book is geared towards people who have just left an educational something,
whether it was undergrad or you're at Fletcher.
But the reevaluation is sort of the same. I mean sometimes you do still need
to check in with your values and understand are they shifting, are they changing,
and is my work still going towards that goal?
So there's the macro level of "Okay, I'm still working in conflict resolution
or poverty alleviation," but then there's the micro, everyday level of
"Are my programs and my projects using the methodologies that I want them
to? Are they reflecting the larger ethical framework that I'm trying to work
with?" So you do the effectiveness evaluations, in terms of "Is it
working, does it have the outcome that I want," but then the evaluations
that say "Are the ethical underpinnings there, and not just outcomes that
look a certain way?"
But as I'm talking I'm like "Who has done smaller changes?" You know
what? It's funny. The people that we interviewed, only one person was like someone
I saw. Everybody else—and it's weird. So it means that hidden in your life
somewhere is probably someone who is making these really drastic changes that
either they're billing as changes that are not that drastic, which, as someone
who has made drastic changes in my life, you're like "No, it flows very
easily like this," so it looks very coordinated. I look at my bio sometimes,
and I'm like "Yes, that's fabulous!" But, you know, while I was doing
it I was like "Okay, now I'm unemployed for three months and what am I
doing now? I'm on my mother's sofa."
I think Pete
Girard is someone. He works for Timberland doing environmental impacts in
their factories and their business. He started out on the path of trying to
explore socially responsible business and did the more traditional "How
do I get a better job, a better job, a better job?" I don't think there
was ever a step where he was like "I need to totally change what I'm doing."
But when you're looking for those better job opportunities or when you're looking
to implement a new program or project, you know that's a moment where you can
do an evaluation that you can implement in that new endeavor.
We were kind of wondering: Who is going to get stuff out of this? They said,
"People who are making big changes." But are the things that you need
to think about when you're making those big changes also things that you need
to think about just like every six months?
QUESTION: I just have a very simple question. Can you tell us more about
Josh Dorfman's business, what exactly he's doing?
ALISSA WILSON: He sells high-end furniture, like a $3,000 bed or chairs.
He brings together businesses that are making these products, and he puts them
onto the market. So in terms of his marketing and his vision, he markets to
people who work for places where they make a lot of money. It's billed in terms
of "It's good, it's designed well, and you're still doing something; you're
being this lazy environmentalist." So a lot of the people who he went to
school with, who are in traditional business capacities, are the people that
he's selling to. He doesn't design them, but he finds other companies to bring
things together with.
CHRISTINE BADER: I'll also just point out the fact that in the appendix
of the book there are short biographies of all of the interviewees and then
there are a few of the full interviews. And there are a few of them on the website,
right?
ALISSA WILSON: Yes. And Josh's interview actually is in here.
QUESTION: Could you give us a visual picture of how you actually set
these interviews up? Did you call them? Was there a pre-interview? Did you go
to their place of employment? Did you go to their home? Did you go to their
studio? And the questions that you came up with, did you ask some of those pre-questions
on the phone or were they actually directed during the time when you were conducting
the interviews?
ALISSA WILSON: Most people I had their names. I emailed them. Because
we were going through a university setting, our funding was from a university,
or a university conduit, we had to do an internal review board process. So our
questions were already set and we had to get them to give a certain type of
permission to have their stories made public. So that was sent to them ahead
of time.
Also, because I thought, "You know, if you're really thinking about these
issues, I'd love to hear that answer," and people can do it definitely
off-the-cuff, but if there is some prior thought behind it—There were a
couple of people who said, "You know, I looked at those questions and I
thought I hadn't really thought about these things for a while, and it made
me kind of wonder about some of the choices that I'm making."
But most of the time people hadn't actually looked at the stuff before I got
there, because you bring your hard copy and they're like "Oh, yeah, yeah,
right, it says 2 o'clock."
I usually would go to their workplace. My shtick was "I will meet you wherever
you have time to do this because in a sense you are really doing us a service."
It was just us and a recorder that's probably about that size, and we would
just talk. "Tell me about why you're doing this and tell me about what
you like about your job and tell me about what really frustrates you about your
job, how you started out, tips that you would have for other people trying to
start in this profession."
QUESTION: How did you use the information that you got from the interviews
in the process of writing to inform your own decision-making? With this flood
of information, how did you then select what you wanted to use?
ALISSA WILSON: One thing I forgot to say was in the beginning our vision
was that this was going to be a book of interviews. We were going to just put
it together and people could read through them. They would be funny and they
would be poignant. And then we were like "That's ridiculous!" So we
have a number of interviews in here, but we were like "We need narrative,
we need themes."
I've never written a dissertation, so unscientific method, right? I basically
sat down and read all of the interviews and thought to myself, "What am
I hearing from them?"
I had a yellow pad—this might not be the question that you're actually
asking—and every time somebody talked about something I made a note of
it. Then I tallied up what everyone seemed to hit on and what were some of the
kind of outliers that seemed really kind of interesting but a little bit crazy.
And then we also had ideas of what we wanted people to be thinking about. Like
we wanted people to be thinking about skills and what it meant to have the skills
to make something happen. Because I know in my own life, the new skill set that
I picked up was lobbying. I'm a born-again lobbyist I say, because it wasn't
something that was in my background, yet to do policy work you need to be lobbying.
And so just to be able to tell people, "Hey, if you're interested in this
kind of thing, these are some of the skills that you need to have and to be
identifying about yourself."
So the book has got these themes, and it's narrative and it's skills, but it's
also kind of a little bit of a workbook with all these questions so that people
can really be interfacing with these ideas.
CHRISTINE BADER: What I was hoping to ask was then how did you use that
information that you gathered for your own personal career development?
ALISSA WILSON: Oh me, Alissa?
CHRISTINE BADER: Yes.
ALISSA WILSON: Oh. Well, to be completely honest, I think one of the
largest impacts that the book had was that when we were finished with a lot
of the writing and I sat down with John at our favorite diner, for grilled cheese
and sweet potato fries, and he said, "Well, what do you want to do now?
Do you want to try to open up a center?" He's got a really great fund-raising
track record. I said, "No. I want to go and come back to this conflict
resolution work, this security work."
So for me—and I think part of the advantage of having bold stories, when
most of us live our lives in a much calmer way, is that you can see that somebody
ran twice as hard as you did towards the edge of a cliff and they actually were
okay. I'm not running that hard toward the cliff. I still have my Amherst and
Fletcher degrees and my experience in Nigeria. But it really was like, upon
further reflection, I wanted to do something that left a good impact for the
people that I admire, which is people who are trying to do this kind of work,
but that really in my heart I wanted to come back to the conflict resolution
work. It would have been very comfortable to just live in Cambridge and open
up a practical idealist institute and do workshops, but that wasn't where I
was.
QUESTION: I was wondering what influence failures—how they factor
in these stories, and whether people talk about when they tried to achieve something
and then they realized they didn't have the skills or they weren't going to
be able to accomplish it, and how they maybe persisted beyond that.
ALISSA WILSON: First, who were failures? We talk about quitting. We don't
talk about failures as failures that much.
So this is a story about something that could possibly not sound like a failure
but was not achieving the goals that it had set out to do in a more complete
way. Wait. Hold on. Sorry. Let me go back to the book before I tell you something
that is slightly inaccurate.
James Forman, again, he's one of these people—well, he's pretty circumspect.
He was a criminal defender. He worked for the public defender's office. He did
a lot of juvenile cases. He got really frustrated with his job, because he felt
like there are more ways than the penal system to get people back onto the right
path. There were judges who would agree to do it, but there weren't programs
that he could send these kids to. So he was like "I'm young, I am smart,
I can start a program."
And he did. It was like six kids. And so his goal was a whole lot bigger. He
was like "This is really just not meeting the need and this isn't a process
that we can upscale and it's not something that I can get other people to do.
It's just not a sustainable thing." So the year was fine, but he realized
that it was not at all meeting what the goal was.
I think, like a lot of people, he just took a step back and thought about "What
is it that we need to be doing?" He did this on a year that was a sabbatical
year from his office, so he didn't have to quit his job and be a pauper.
They had to revamp the entire program. So it was a lot of soul searching about
effectiveness, like models of effectiveness, and talking to other educators.
I think most of the people that we had in the book took—or this is what
they like to tell you, right, because you've only known me for half an hour
and you're not going to tell me about your deepest, darkest failure, although
I'd love to hear it—you know, like James, he took all that information
and tried again with a completely different model and tried something that was
a little bit more out of his comfort zone. And that worked, and he has been
really successful now.
And there were also just setbacks. Like there was a woman who—it was either
Peace Corps and then a legal job, who was doing legal defense work in the South
Pacific. She got really sick. So it was clear that she could not do that kind
of work anymore. She had to be home. She had to be under medical supervision.
So it seemed like a huge setback, because she did not want to be in Michigan;
she wanted to be traveling around the world. What she turned that into was doing
legal work with refugees in Detroit who are seeking asylum either in the United
States or in Canada.
So there were definitely setbacks that people had. And refugee work in Detroit
isn't as sexy as "We're in Sudan and we're talking to—." But,
you know, it really was able to fulfill what she wanted to do in terms of working
with international communities, but also the limitation that she had in terms
of needing to be close to medical facilities.
CHRISTINE BADER: I think that actually leads to one other question that
I had about a theme that I sort of picked up but I wasn't sure if you would
have culled it out explicitly or not, and that was of compromise. So there seemed
to be a lot of conversations of "Okay, well I really want to live there,
but I can't because family is here" or "I'd really like to do that
role, but I'm not going to make enough money, so I'm going to take a role where
I can pay my rent, but it's not quite what I want." There's a lot of compromise.
I just wanted to see if you think that that's an essential part of being a practical
idealist, or is it just a part of life, or is it actually "No, you don't
have to compromise at all, you can figure it out; it just might not look like
what you thought it was going to look like"?
ALISSA WILSON: Can it be all of those?
CHRISTINE BADER: Sure.
ALISSA: So in the book we—because we were trying to look at "How
do we explain this in a way that"—because compromise sometimes gets
a bad rap. But, you know, mediating your life's needs is something that we all
have to do. So we were like "It's a balance between flexibility and stubbornness."
But yes, compromise is very important. I think in the endgame maybe the last
thing you said, like "No, we're going to make it work, but, you know, we're"—okay,
sorry, I do work for a Quaker organization—on the journey to making it
work for quite some time, and trying to figure out what you need to pull in
to make it work, so that in the end there is a lot of compromise that has to
go on.
But compromise in the best sense of the word, in the sense that you're pulling
in parts of your life that are very realistic or practical and that respond
to your ideals in that idealistic sense, because at the end of the day it would
just be a book about idealism if there wasn't the compromise part, because with
the practical component it means that often you have to do things that you are
not very excited about.
Like John Hammock is this guy who would probably wear a T-shirt and some khakis
every single day of his life, but, you know, working at Oxfam, maybe in the
office that was okay. But it's not a great high-drama example.
One that would probably would be better is having to leave your family. With
Oxfam, he brought Oxfam to Boston. It was still small enough so that he could
do that. But he knew that in his life he and his wife had made the decision
to live in Boston. They had already had a family and that was just what it had
to be. So it was like "Well, if you move it to Boston I will do it."
So one could say that he had to make some compromises because there might have
been other jobs that wouldn't have been willing to do that. But in having to
make those compromises he actually found something that was even better, maybe
a better fit for him.
QUESTION: On the practical financial side of things, did you find that
either people felt guilty about making a salary on the nonprofit side or that
there was resistance from the outside community about people making a decent
wage doing this work? It sounds like John went into business and did well in
business because that was the only way he could make a decent wage. Did you
find a change in attitude that people can make, like have a family—maybe
not have the three-car garage, but live a decent lifestyle and raise a family
and be a provider and work in the nonprofit sector without either resentment
or push-back from funders, or did they feel guilt about that that they need
to be poor in order to do this work?
ALISSA WILSON: No, actually. It's a really good question. But no. People
felt like they were making a living wage and feeling pretty good. I think often
that had to do with—I'm kind of making a stretch guess here—but their
family, like what the socioeconomic status of their family was, because if their
living wage in the nonprofit community was sort of average for what their socioeconomic
expectations were, they were just like "This is kind of where I'm supposed
to be in my life, so this is what I make."
We had probably a vast array of salaries that people were making. But we only
really had one person who had taken a vow of poverty and would have known what
it was like to live the other way. She lives in Buenos Aires and is by far the
most progressive person of the whole endeavor.
But yeah, people generally felt pretty good. The only time that the guilt and
the other sentiment came up like in a very strong way was with Jeff Deutsch,
who is a graphic designer at Oxfam. He was talking about it in terms of people
who work in business or the private sector and assume that he does not think
good things about them because they work in that way.
But yeah, the feeling bad about money—I think often people had come—like
maybe in their first job they didn't make so much money, so they were just feeling
"Yes, I am here and it is a good thing."
QUESTION: The starting points of these people, like the families that
they came from, did any of them happen to come from particularly rich or poor
families, and do you think that that starting point had anything to do with
how practical their idealism is allowed to be?
ALISSA WILSON: I think that is a fabulous question. We were trying to
figure out was it skewed because a lot of these people were friends of friends,
and so you've got a middle-class sampling. There were times when we'd ask professors,
so sometimes it was who was going to their college or university. I was really
dismayed that a lot of the people we spoke with came from backgrounds where
they really had safety nets. A lot of them were like "I would never engage
in it," but at the end of the day there might have been a safety net. I
think that definitely has an effect on the decisions that people make, because
if you know—even if you say "I will never use that safety net,"
subconsciously you know it's there.
And also you know more about what your options are. You know more about the
fact that nonprofit work doesn't mean taking a vow of poverty. Whereas if you
don't come from an experience that has so much of a view of what it means to
do social change work, or that you can do business in a socially responsible
way, you may think of nonprofit or socially responsible equating vow of poverty
and so you're not going to touch it.
I think after this project one of my major goals was to preach the gospel of
"You can make money doing this," because people need to know that
you don't have to take the unpaid internships. It may take more digging. Now
there are more college and university pools of money available. When I went
to Amherst, it was like "You want to do something fun over the summer,
like save somebody's life? You don't get a dime." Now it's "You can
apply for this fund, we'll give you $5,000." So there are a lot more ways
to do it.
But I think in terms of the people we interviewed, there definitely was a skew
towards people who had a little bit of a safety net.
CHRISTINE BADER: I want to conclude on time, even though obviously people
want to continue the discussion. Alissa is going to hang out for a couple minutes.
But you can always read the book, go to the website—
ALISSA WILSON: Or send me an email.
CHRISTINE BADER: I really want to thank Alissa. I think it's clear that Alissa
is someone who cannot only write very beautifully about practical idealists
but that she is a beautiful practical idealist.
