Bounce

For my new gig - which technically doesn't start until April 1 but somehow I'm already doing work for them - I go from the very highest level of Making the World A Better Place (my current job) to the nitty-gritty of Helping Poor People in my community with a specific need. I seem to bounce back and forth between these two levels, professionally.

When you spend time helping specific people with a specific burning need - like housing, or health care, or access to money - it's very concrete and thus satisfying. But after a while, it wears me down - I think, damn, this problem is never going to go away. And I get a little bit pissed, and wonder how I might help actually tackle the problem at its root, at the system level.

So then I go to work in what's called "capacity-building" in the biz - strengthening the charitable sector generally, so it can do its job better and make its collective voice heard - or on the philanthropic side of the fence, where they give the money away. And that's satisfying for a while, until I start to feel detached from the actual people (or animals, or trees) in need of help. I think about how this money going to strengthen the long-term health of nonprofits could actually be feeding children, and maybe that would be better, no?

And so I bounce. It's probably right for me, for my temperment. For a few weeks here, I will overlap, mid-bounce - working in service to the wealthiest and the poorest of people, simultaneously. People with millions of dollars to give away to a good cause, and people without two dimes to rub together.

As a colleague of mine says - you may want to change the world, but at the end of the day it's a privilege just to be able to do good, interesting work for relatively clean money.