The Idealist.org Podcasts

Lara Galinsky, Senior Vice President of Echoing Green is launching an inspiring career guide for social-impact work called Work on Purpose.

Each chapter of Work on Purpose asks key questions for career seekers; illustrates the impact of these questions in the lives of Echoing Green community members; and offers a place for notes at the end for you to jot reflections from your own life.

In this episode of the Idealist Careers Podcast, Idealist's Amy Potthast chats with Lara Galinsky about the central message of Work on Purpose: finding work that uses your "Heart + Head = Hustle."

Lara shares the stories of the five people who illustrate this message:

• Cheryl Dorsey, President of Echoing Green, who graduated from medical school and Kennedy School of Government, and chose social-justice over medicine.
• Mark Hannis, founder of the Genocide Intervention Network and the child of Holocaust survivors, who discovered as a college student that genocide still occurs, and that he could mobilize action to end it.
• Mardie Oakes, founder of Hallmark Community Solutions, combined her background in architecture, community housing, and finance to develop housing for people with special needs.
• Socheata Poeuv, creator of the film project Khmer Legacies, which documents interviews between Khmer Rouge survivors and their adult children.
• Andrew Youn, Founder of the One Acre Fund, who started out in a corporate consulting job but later used his business skills to develop a market system for farmers in a region of Kenya to prevent annual famines.

Learn more about Work on Purpose.

Learn more about Work on Purpose.

This podcast features a conversation with Shirley Sagawa author of The American Way to Change: How National Service and Volunteers and Transforming America and the “founding mother of the modern service movement.” During the first Clinton administration, Sagawa drafted the legislation that created AmeriCorps and the Corporation for National Service.

Today, Shirley is a fellow at the Center for American Progress, and co-founder of the sagawa/jospin consulting firm which brings new resources and strategic thinking to solve problems affecting children, families, neighborhoods, and our nation.

In his 1995 book, How a Bill Becomes a Law, Steve Waldman compared national service —  full-time stipended volunteering like AmeriCorps and VISTA — to a Swiss Army Knife, “performing numerous useful functions in one affordable package,” including addressing social needs, bridging diversity, and building participants’ self-confidence.

In today’s show, Shirley revisits the Swiss Army Knife analogy with some timely new insights that she also shares in her new book The American Way to Change.

To find more good things to do, including 12,000+ volunteer opporunties, go to Idealist.org.

This show was hosted and produced by Idealist's Amy Potthast with assistance from Tim Johnson, podcast intern.