Our connected world has made it easier than it’s ever been to see problems across the globe. Yet even when confronted with stories of injustice and suffering, most of us still choose to continue with our daily lives rather than stepping into significant action in service of others.
I have long been fascinated by how social-change leaders decide to dedicate their lives to problems much larger than themselves. What drives them—and why? What helps them find the conviction to make sacrifices that others are not willing to make?
As a social entrepreneur myself and a leadership and strategy facilitator and consultant, I’ve been fortunate to get to know many remarkable global change-makers over the past 15 years. In my home country of South Africa, I founded LINC, a forum that convened national leaders from the business, social, and public sectors to support orphaned children and to advance health care in the wake of the HIV/AIDS crisis. My work with LINC was recognized with the McNulty Prize, and in the years following, I partnered with the McNulty Foundation to tell the stories and unearth the leadership patterns of many of my fellow prize winners in a series of case studies. These social entrepreneurs, who worked across diverse geographies and sectors, had all taken that leap of faith to pioneer solutions to seemingly intractable challenges.
What moved these entrepreneurs and myself was not just one triggering moment, but a series of conversations, reflections, and experiences over a lifetime that led us to make difficult and unexpected decisions. For many of us, key historic and philosophical texts often offered that inspiration, and helped to align our actions with our values—or confront our inaction. For me, in part inspiration came from a dialogue I had with other leaders about Ursula Le Guin’s short story, “Those Who Walk Away From Omelas,” which was a core text in the curriculum of my Aspen Institute Fellowship seminar.
Omelas is a city of great charm and happiness. Citizens in Omelas live lives of “boundless and generous contentment,” and furthermore do so without submitting themselves to any great power or wealth. There are no kings, there is no stock market, there is no atomic bomb or army. Everyone is simply provided for and content.
But the city has a darkness. There is a child, only one child, who has been removed from all human company and kept in a tiny, windowless, cellar-like space. The child is filthy and malnourished, stunted and fearful. It, the pronoun Le Guin uses, is given a pitiful meal often enough to keep it alive, but receives no care: the rule is that no one is allowed even to speak a kind word to it.
Everyone in Omelas knows about the child. But they believe that if the child were saved and cared for, “in that day and hour, all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed.” These are the terms of their comfortable lives.
Most of the people of Omelas learn to live their sunlit days in full knowledge of the darkness. Only a precious few reject the cruel paradox and choose to walk into the unknown and away from Omelas.
Le Guin’s parable has always stayed with me. Every time I read about the latest climate disaster or the growing number of people experiencing homelessness or a lack of basic health care access, I am reminded that we each have our particular child in the basement. Whatever form that child takes in our lives, most of us rationalize unacceptable situations, learning to live with the knowledge of things that a good world should not allow.
The decision to commit yourself to doing something about this child—that is, to confront injustice and inequity in the world with boldness and at scale—is an intensely personal one. But as I spoke to other social entrepreneurs—fellow McNulty Prize laureates Bill Bynum, Réjane Woodroffe, Srikumar Misra, and Lana Abu-Hijleh—about their journeys, four common themes emerged.
Values and Purpose Grounded in Life Experience
We need to reflect on our life experience and how that has shaped us and use that to shape our purpose. This life experience is the seed in making the decision to do something.
When I was growing up in apartheid South Africa, my dad worked with disadvantaged learners in our local school, and children from abusive or alcoholic homes occasionally stayed with us. It always struck me how deeply empathetic my father was to the children in our care and how nonjudgmental he was of their parents. This early experience of deep empathy inspired my choice, much later, to support children orphaned or left vulnerable by the HIV/AIDS pandemic sweeping South Africa in the early 2000s.
On the other side of the world in North Carolina, Bill Bynum grew up in a world riddled with mistrust between white and Black, rich and poor, and between millions of families like the Bynums and their local banks. Banks, simply put, didn’t want to lend to Black people. Instead, families like Bill’s relied on a credit union that his vice principal ran out of his garage. It was savings from that credit union that paid for the suit that Bill took to college. Even at a young age, Bill heard the message clearly: by pooling their resources to support each other, Black, rural, low-income people can overcome discrimination, bigotry, and mistrust.
Knowing how hard the path was going to be for him, Bill could have decided to keep his head down and focus on surviving in a society that obviously was not built for him. Instead, he channeled that experience into a life dedicated to solving the problems his community faced. Bill developed a passion for economic justice and planned to pursue a career as a civil rights attorney. But over time, he came to believe that economic empowerment was how he would work to achieve social justice. Without access to banking services, Bill has said, “you don’t have a way out and up the economic ladder.” That belief led directly to his creation of Hope Credit Union, which has now generated over $3.6 billion in financing for underserved families across Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee.
The Catalyzing Event—or Events
Once grounded in a personal life experience, leaders still tend to need a catalyst of some sort to commit fully. In some cases, it is less of a flash point and more of a slow burn, but everyone I talked to brought an intense observation to some sort of triggering event. They described it as a moment in which the possibilities of avoidance dissolve and the dawning of clarity and the moral imperative to act becomes impossible to ignore.
For me, the event that made it impossible for me to look away was, again, through reading. I was a new mother, working in education after leaving my investment banking and management consulting career behind. I was sitting in my office and reading the personal stories of HIV/AIDS-positive mothers from South Africa, many of whom had mistrusted and rejected antiretroviral therapies and subsequently died. I remember trying to imagine the level of fear, hopelessness, and trauma that would lead a mother to choose to leave her children behind rather than take antiretrovirals and live. Even though I had never worked in the HIV/AIDS or children’s sectors before, I was moved, in that moment, to do something about this ongoing tragedy on a systemic level. This ultimately drove me to form LINC, the Leadership and Innovation Network for Collaboration, which brought together leaders and organizations to improve the quantity and quality of care for millions of South African children whose families had battled HIV/AIDS.
Elsewhere in South Africa, Réjane Woodroffe was juggling a career at a global wealth management firm while also working at a grassroots level with one of the poorest communities in South Africa. Her moments came in rapid succession, over a series of months, as a third of the babies in the rural community where she was working part-time died of easily preventable conditions. “It was a crisis point that couldn’t wait any more,” Woodroffe said. Within months, she set up an organization, the Bulungula Incubator, which worked with the community to establish access to safe potable water and emergency health response norms that would better protect vulnerable babies. The organization further supported them in securing for the community all the facilities to which they were constitutionally entitled—schooling, emergency services, health services, and so on. Réjane left behind her finance job in Cape Town and committed to the rural community full time. Bulungula has since become a model for communities to build renewable power systems that will power refrigerators to keep medicines cool, crucial for fighting HIV/AIDS in rural communities.
A Community of Support to Bolster Courage
With their values and purpose grounded in their personal experience and a catalyzing event providing an impetus to act, potential leaders have one final hurdle to clear before diving into the work: the enormous financial, familial, and personal risk that comes with making a dramatic life change. Few leaders that I engaged with were able to make this shift without a supportive family or community.
For me, it was not a huge financial, familial or personal risk to shift from working in education to supporting orphaned and vulnerable children. The risk in my case was more around the challenge it presented to my identity and self-confidence. Who am I to do something like this? What if I fail completely? At this critical time, I was grateful to be a fellow of the Aspen Global Leadership Network, where I had been nominated to participate in a two-year fellowship alongside South African leaders committed to building a just and good society. My peers provided crucial encouragement. We had all been through rigorous seminars together questioning and clarifying our own values and how or whether they showed up in our actions. They helped me shift the question to, “Who am I to not do it?” and to identify an area where my skill set in facilitating multi-stakeholder partnerships could add particular value to the challenge.
For others, though, financial and familial risks loomed large. Srikumar Misra, born in India, was on an upward professional track in London, eight years into a corporate career as the mergers and acquisitions director of the Tetley Group. “It was a great life,” he said. But for Sri, it wasn’t enough. He felt unfulfilled. “At a deep level, I always wanted to do things to address social inequities.” Sri had the idea of launching a disruptive and transformative dairy business in his home state of Odisha. With his background, Sri saw an opportunity to create a brand and a venture that could address the consumer trust deficit with dairy food nutrition at scale and create many local, sustainable livelihoods.
At the time, Sri’s wife, Rashima, was pregnant with their first baby and was due to take maternity leave from her corporate role as well. Not the best time to trade their secure corporate life for an entrepreneurial venture in an unlikely industry. He persuaded her to join him as co-founder. “We were very concerned about what we were giving up,” Sri says. “But as we discussed at the time, if we let the baby be born in London, then we’d take some time to get things settled, and next thing you’re sort of building walls around yourself. We said: ‘Let’s get there before we start building these walls.’” By the time Sri and his wife moved, she was in her eighth month of pregnancy. Their families were deeply concerned about the decision but ultimately supportive. Without the support of his wife and their families, Sri would likely not have had the courage to take the first step.
A Way to Hang on to Hope
I am able to find hope in the smallest victories and in the simplest things. Yet it’s also easy for me to fall into despair and anger in the face of unnecessary, ongoing preventable deaths and the complex politics that value ego and power over life. I can only move forward with my work because I choose to move through that despair and return to my core belief that I can contribute something positive to the situation.
In Lana Abu-Hijleh’s community in Palestine, hope is vital to existence. “Hope is our survival theme,” she says. “We cannot afford despair. We have to remain hopeful for ourselves and for our children, for our region and the world. We have seen what unacknowledged despair in one region can do to the world. It has exploded in all our faces.”
How, I asked Lana, do you keep hope alive considering everything you’re up against?
Lana’s own mother was a victim of senseless violence, killed by Israeli forces as she sat on the porch of her home in the West Bank town of Nablus. Lana’s father, a well-known surgeon, and brother, a professor at a local university, were injured in the same incident. “I was raised to believe in justice, in dignity, in freedom,” Lana says. “But how do you deal with something as painful and traumatic as this? It was when my mother was killed that, for the first time, my hope just drained away. I felt lost. But my daughters were young. I needed to maintain my sense of humanity. They needed to be hopeful about the future. And for their sake, I needed to find reason to be hopeful again.”
For Lana, being accountable to and responsible for others brought her back from her lowest point. Without her daughters, she might have very reasonably retreated into grief and despair. But Lana has not only preserved the hope and aspiration she inherited from her parents, she found a way to pass it on to the next generation. Through her work as Palestine’s country director at the development organization Global Communities, Lana launched Shiam, a network of youth councils that has reached almost 50,000 young Palestinians, giving them hands-on experience with organizing and running in elections, and participating in democratic governance. With over 300 hours of training in project management, public speaking, negotiating and budgeting, these youth councils work with mayors, council members and other stakeholders to solve community problems. Their community projects have built new parks and community spaces, made city buildings handicap-accessible, and mediated disputes among local factions. Just as Lana’s family prepared her to preserve hope with a vision for her community’s future, Shiam and the councils are repeating that feat for tens of thousands of young leaders across Palestine.
Although each approach was distinct, every leader had developed a practice of maintaining their optimistic mindset even in the face of extreme adversity.
These four themes—having values and purpose grounded in life experience, a catalyzing event, a support system, and a way to hang on to hope—appear consistently enough to serve as a framework for potential leaders to answer the call, transform their lives, and take on the mantle of leadership in the social change sector. They go from: “How can I?” to “How can I not?” Those who aspire to meaningful leadership may find it beneficial to identify and pursue these elements within themselves, and funders seeking to expand the ranks of morally courageous leaders can foster this framework in their programs and fellowships.
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Read more stories by Ann Lamont.