Welcome to Professionals with Purpose

If you are wondering how you can have a more positive impact while you run a business or earn a living, you’re in the right place. Read on for examples of people who have done this or are achieving it.

Our purpose is to prove it is possible and preferable to build a career in which you can achieve both personal success and progressive benefit to the planet.

It’s possible whether you run a business or work for one. Each week we’ll feature inspiring people from a variety of backgrounds - for-profit businesses, charities, social enterprises, government organisations, and startups.

As we continue to explore the purpose behind the people making a positive difference to society today, we speak to artist and filmmaker Dan Edelstyn. His latest project, Power Station, follows Dan and his partner Hilary, as they raise funds to install solar panels on houses in their street, including £113,000 raised by sleeping on their roof for three weeks in the winter.

In addition we share another collection of opportunities, tools, events and resources to help you in your aims to work with social impact or to find a social impact role or employer.

Howard Lake
Editor
[email protected]

Dan Edelstyn: building a power station of people for change

Where purpose began

My quest for purpose came out of a crisis of meaning experienced after making my first feature documentary, How to Re-establish a Vodka Empire. I spent five years filming the development of what I hoped was going to be a socially-responsible purpose-driven vodka brand, with the goal of stimulating trade in a village in northeastern Ukraine. The vodka, from my great-grandfather’s distillery, was imported to England, but the project didn’t work out and a lot of hard work was basically for nothing. It was a pretty horrible situation, and I was left questioning why I was making films.

After that, I found myself reading lots of books by authors such as George Orwell, Leo Tolstoy and Viktor Frankl. Frankl’s book about man’s quest for meaning was something of a lightbulb moment. It made me think that, rather than seeing filmmaking as a career where I was trying to get higher up the rankings (rather like an officer in the Army) I should instead focus on its impact, and how it can help others.

Around that time, Hilary and I heard about a group in America who were buying up and then abolishing debt. It resonated with my quest for meaning, and that was the beginning of a new method of work for me. It wasn’t around identifying a really good idea to pitch to a broadcaster to try to get money anymore. Instead, it became about identifying the best film to make to help other people understand the forces at play in the world around us.

So, the idea of Bank Job was born and, in that film, we ended up opening our own bank and then printing our own artists’ currency, selling it, and using the proceeds to then buy and blow up a million pounds’ worth of debt. We effectively became direct action filmmaker artists: we would see a problem, take action on it, and try to have an impact, with the film itself a tool to tell the story and raise awareness of the topic.

Establishing the audience

All of our film work is now impact-driven from the beginning and we start to distribute before a film is finished. This goes against the traditional model to bring the audience right into the heart of what we’re doing.

I just love the documentary genre for getting a story out there. Creating a narrative which embeds a message is a very powerful way to disseminate the facts and, when you can tell a compelling story, then things begin to change. If you involve people in the process you’re creating an architecture of possibility, which is really important because it inspires hope and encourages other people to join in with your work.

This has also helped us meet the challenge of funding our purpose-led filmmaking. We have had to learn how to build movements around our work, and importantly, how to monetise that as well. Power Station is a great example of that.

An army of supporters – Power Station

With Power Station, because it’s a live project the objectives that drive our work can change. For example, can we put solar panels on every house on the street? Can we start working to put solar panels on the civic buildings in our area? How can we do that quickly?

Who do we have to collaborate with to do that? How can we share what we’re learning about this immediately?

To bring people with us on this journey, as well as to develop a model that’s useful to others doing cause-driven work, whether it’s cultural, charitable, or otherwise., we built a membership site.

We also regularly make short clips of what we’re doing and post them across social media, which means that every day we can get 100 people or so signing up to our mailing list. And that’s really important and powerful to us because it means that we have an army of supporters.

Dealing with challenges

I don’t think anything we’ve done has ever been plain sailing but there are always conflicts in everyone’s lives and we can all run into difficulties. But that’s why having a purpose to your work is such a good thing – it reminds us why we do what we do, and is effectively like a compass, giving us a bearing as to where we should be going. We know that we’re working on a cause which is bigger than ourselves, and that’s what keeps us tuned in and pushing forwards and, ultimately, pulls us through.

One key learning I’ve had is that it’s really important to create good marketing strategies that reinforce the purpose of what you’re doing and help you to get there. Even with the very best purpose in the world, you can still have no impact if you fail to come up with a way of involving the thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of other people who can back what you’re doing.

Celebrating the wins

Rather than pride, I tend to feel a sense of the work that’s undone, like I haven’t really done enough and I think that’s the same for Hilary as well. We never really feel like we’ve achieved anything like the sum total of what we want to do yet, but I guess that’s good, because it keeps us going. In terms of achievements from a filmmaking perspective, blowing up the million pounds of debt in Bank Job was really cool - seeing an explosion happening and things flying around in the air was brilliant!

I really love movement building and having a tangible impact, and I love the fact that our work has these different little chapters in it, and each of those chapters has an impact on someone in some way.

I used to feel a bit of a sense of separation from my neighbours as well as from the problems of the world in a way. I just didn’t have time to get into them because I was so busy making sure that I had enough money to pay my rent or my mortgage.

That sense of internal pressure has been replaced now by a sense of connection, we connect to all sorts of different people in our surroundings and so, emotionally, there has been real change and the way that we work is significantly different. But maybe that is something to be proud of, although pride isn’t the dominant emotion, it’s more about a sense of feeling fulfilled.

A lucky man

I often felt that there was something intrinsically wrong with me in my early years as an artist and filmmaker because I was always hopping between things – recording a music album, and then shooting a whole load of photography, before making a film. What I was struggling with was really knowing who I was or what I actually wanted and, when I look back, maybe I was trying to find a purpose in what I was doing.

I’ve just set up this new initiative where I’m teaching others such as artists or community groups how to promote their own purpose-driven work. I’m helping with advice on how to build their following and how to effectively build their support mechanism. Basically, how to keep their aspirations alive. Too often, artists are pigeonholed as romantic dreamers, but art should sit right in the heart of our communities, it’s all about expressing our collective imaginations and knowing who we are, and what we stand for.

There’s a statistic in Frankl’s book that always stands out to me, that 85% of people, when asked, said that having a sense of purpose was the most important thing in life. In my mind, to be divorced from a sense of purpose through this idea of having to have some kind of a job that may not really align with who you are, is an awful blight on humanity. So, being able to do the kind of work that you feel called to do is incredibly important, and I’m incredibly lucky to be doing what I do.

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Resources

Looking to move into the social impact sector, to set up or grow your own purpose-driven company, or want to gain skills and knowledge in this area? Here are some events and opportunities that might help.

The Kilfinan Group

The Kilfinan Group is a group of senior business people who provide free and informal mentoring to charity chief executives.

It was founded by Nicholas Ferguson CBE, Chairman of Savills plc, in 2003. It now has nine ‘Chapters’ and around 200 members. Five Chapters are based in London, two in Scotland, one in Wales and one in Northern Ireland.

It is “deliberately informal… Once matched, mentors and mentees are free to structure their relationship to fit their needs and styles”.

Roddenberry Catalyst

The Roddenberry Catalyst Fund makes grants between $2,500–$15,000 “to anyone, anywhere in the world who has an early-stage idea or project that addresses pressing global challenges”.

Applications are currently on hold but will “reopen in summer 2023”.

Yes, it is that Roddenberry. The Foundation was “inspired by the life and legacy of Gene Roddenberry”, the screenwriter, producer and creator of Star Trek: the Original Series.

Building our Narrative Power

This course from the Public Interest Research Center will bring together 16 people who are interested in changing the narrative across social, climate and economic justice and who have faced oppression.

The year-long course is free and expenses will be covered, and there are a limited number of full and partial bursaries available.

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What we’ve been reading

• Milken-Motsepe Innovation Prize Programme - harnessing Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies for good. Offering the Green Energy Prize and the Agritech Prize.

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What readers say

"I can’t believe I’ve not come across this before now – it’s a great read."
Liz Rigby
UK Humanitarian Innovation Hub
27 June 2023