Workers seek jobs with impact
September 9, 2009

By Emily Glazer, MarketWatch

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Now that the financial system has been rocked to its core, "social capital" is getting a lot of buzz. But what is it? It boils down to putting your efforts into jobs with a socially positive impact, connecting money with meaning and investing with those principles in mind.

People of all ages are pursuing those mantras -- from twentysomethings seeking socially responsible jobs straight out of college to Gen X-ers in their 30s and 40s leaving highly paid posts in major corporations to launch socially aware start-ups to baby boomers investing or advising companies on how to be more socially aware.

"A lot of organizations are forming social enterprises in a way that they didn't used to to highlight their social mission," said Amy Benziger, co-producer of SoCap09, a San Francisco-based conference on social capital. "It might be perceived as potentially sacrificing profit, but now it's looked as a positive thing."

Kate Tierney was on top in the traditional corporate world. As senior vice president of organic food distributor United Natural Foods Inc. /quotes/comstock/15*!unfi/quotes/nls/unfi (UNFI 24.30, -1.88, -7.18%) , she had been in a position to move to president. But Tierney sought more impact, not power.

"I recognized [my job] wasn't filling my mission part of my soul, and I knew I needed to go and find something that could fill some part of me," she said. "I had made the big bucks."

Tierney, 42, now works as the national director of sales at Alter Eco, a fair-trade start-up.

Interest in social-capital career moves such as Tierney's is likely to swell, said Beth Lester, vice president of marketing at Washington-based consulting firm Penn, Schoen & Berland, especially among those age 18 to 24, who are more likely than older people to take a pay cut to work for a socially responsible company.

"Most people are interested in working for and buying from companies that they judge are a good company," she said. "Particularly for young people that means having an ethical, socially responsible and sustainable company."

In a June 2009 "Corporate Citizenship Study" conducted by Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates in conjunction with Landor and Burson-Marsteller 40% of about 1,000 participants said they were willing to take a pay cut to work for a socially responsible company.

And of those workers ages 44 to 70 not already in second careers focusing on a social impact, almost 50% are interested in one, according to a 3,500-person survey by Civic Ventures and the Metlife Foundation.
Millennials: seeking social impact first

After working on Barack Obama's presidential campaign in Las Vegas shortly after graduating from Stanford University in 2008, Kanyi Maqubela's life changed.

"I realized that ... any sort of work I did from then forth had to have a social aspect, not to necessarily be altruistic, but whatever my impact was had to be a social impact first and anything else second."

But socially responsible jobs are not easy to find because it is an emerging interest and covers a range of industries. Companies do not have formal recruiting programs geared to socially responsible jobs, said Rich Wang, University of California, Berkeley's Career Services account manager.

Recent graduates who get jobs with a social mission often need to bank on their personal connections, often alumni-related. Maqubela's job with Virgance, a for-profit company acquiring companies that combine activism and capitalism, came through a Stanford alum.

William Walter, a 2007 graduate of Williams College, got his job at EarthWater Global, which locates, develops and manages large-scale, sustainable groundwater resources internationally, through a fellow Phillips Academy Andover alumnus. Walter added that the company's interns also come through personal connections.... (read on by clicking title below)

Emily Glazer is a reporter in MarketWatch's San Francisco bureau.

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