Net Impact CEO Liz Maw On The State Of Sustainability & Social Enterprise

Are more jobs opening up in social enterprise right now?

There are certainly a lot more opportunities than there were five years ago. The clean energy sector has exploded, and the whole impact investing field is really growing—there are a bunch of niche fields that were tiny and are now expanding. There are also people starting social enterprises, and those people are hiring people.

That’s not to say it’s easy to find those jobs. You have to be a self-starter, and you have to be ready to network and put yourself out there. You have to be confident and sort of wait past the on-campus recruiting cycle in the fall of your second year and then do an independent job search, because most people don’t hire seven months before they need someone. That’s a challenge a lot of students have: “I’ve got loans. Can I really just not find a job that’s guaranteed?” But there are many examples of students holding out and finding jobs that they just adore.

What sorts of things do Net Impact club presidents and vice presidents go on to do?

I met with a former vice president, Heather Dietz, two days ago. She now works for Interface’s innovation department, and she’s involved in an awesome project to get fishing nets out of the ocean. She’s helping lead a really cool multi-organizational partnership between her company, NGOs, and others to recycle those nets into carpet. That’s one example.

Another kind of poster child for us is Seth Goldman. He founded Honest Tea—with his business school professor–in fact, as a recent Yale School of Management alum, and now it’s a huge success story. It’s a wonderful example of a triple bottom line company: Honest Tea makes a great, healthy product using fair trade and sustainable sourcing practices.

A snapshot of the Net Impact membership: About a third of our members go into traditional for-profit business, and within that group, half the members take on positions related to corporate social responsibility. A fourth of our members go into nonprofits. 16% go to self-defined mission-driven businesses, so companies like Patagonia or Stonyfield. 11% are self-employed, 8% are in government, and 8% are unemployed.

How does student debt impact the amount of people going into social enterprise?

First, I wouldn’t give up just because you have debt. You don’t have to take a humongous pay cut to make an impact. You can find a well-paying job that makes a positive difference if you’re willing to put the time in. You’re probably not going to earn crazy, crazy money, but you can certainly earn enough to be comfortable and pay off your debt.

Second, there’s opportunity to take any job and try to bring your values to it. It’s not always easy to do, but focusing on doing great at your core job and then doing sustainability projects on the side is certainly a route to sustainability leadership. A lot of people I know started in mainstream, corporate jobs, and then did side projects related to sustainability or corporate social responsibility (CSR). That allowed them to move into CSR-type roles.

On our website, we actually have a resource called the corporate interview toolkit, and it’s designed to help people research and ask the right questions when they’re interviewing with mainstream corporations. The goal is to identify which companies really allow you to bring your values to work. There are also a lot of rankings out there—like the Dow Jones Sustainability Index—which you could use to see how companies measure up to one another. If you work for a Unilever or 3M versus, say, a Facebook or Apple, you’ll be much more likely to be able to be a part of a values-driven culture where the opportunities are more widespread.

What three things do you want to accomplish for Net Impact in the next three years?

I think Net Impact’s in a really exciting point in our history. We’re ready as an organization to reinvent ourselves for the future. I’m hoping we do that by growing significantly and attracting more members—not just MBAs, but also undergrads and other kinds of graduate students. Diverse growth is a big goal for us: We’re especially interested in increasing our racial diversity, and perhaps in working with students from community colleges to increase our socioeconomic diversity.

In addition to growth, we’re looking at the quality of our programs. We believe there’s more we can do to support young people who want to change the world. We have been piloting and scaling some really great programs over the past few years, and I’m hoping we can figure out how to scale those more, so instead of having a couple hundred students participating every year, we can have thousands of students.

Another goal is blowing our amazing Net Impact Conference (which will be held Nov. 6-8 in Minneapolis this year) out of the water. About 2,500 people participate, and we’ve been thinking about how we can have 10,000 people participate in a few years.

What’s the biggest challenge facing Net Impact right now?

The field looks pretty different than it looked 10 or 20 years ago, so it’s not enough just to have been around for a while. No one can rest on their laurels in this day and age. I’m very interested in figuring out what we can do to shake things up and catalyze more and more people than ever before. Is that through better use of technology? Is that through partnerships? Is that through offering more value to our students? Choosing which path to follow will be the biggest opportunity and challenge.

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