Making Good bills itself as a how-to manual for making the lemons in our society into lemonade. Its winning tagline says it all. “Finding Meaning, Money, and Community in a Changing World.” What else is there?
Written by Billy Parish and Dev Aujla, both young social entrepreneurs with impressive credentials grounded in the environmental activism world, the book seeks answers to the question: What do you do when you want to do well and you want to do good? In a time when traditional corridors of power and money are no longer standing?
The book begins on the premise that most systems in this world are in a flux. That is, broken. But good news! This also means that they will be in need of a rebuild and rebuilders: “rebuilt in a way that actually makes sense for people, for profit, and for the world.”
The same Internet that is wreaking havoc in stalwarts (newspapers comes to mind) is also the same Internet that allowed for Aujla to share his e-book on Facebook and for Parish to get in touch with Aujla through Gmail. They are the first true digital native generation. There is a sense of urgency in their writing voice and this brings relevance and freshness to the text.
The idea for the book began when Aujla was having dinner with a friend (at Terroni on Queen Street no less). The conversation flowed into familiar territories: How will I get paid to do what I love?
To answer the question, Aujla set out to write an e-book. With help from the Walter Duncan Foundation, the e-book took off. A mutual friend connected Aujla to Billy Parish, a fellow activist and entrepreneur. They were contemporaries, but had never had a chance to meet. In the first meeting, Aujla and Parish learned that they had harboured strikingly similar ideas for a book and decided to collaborate.
Aujla and Parish interviewed over 150 people in their 20s and 30s to “find out how they were faring as they set out to get paid to do good.” The resulting document has been lauded as the What Color Is Your Parachute? for the Facebook generation. At heart, the book is a step-by-step guide to creating your own job when there aren’t any that suit your moral and financial needs.
What gives the authors their legitimacy? Likely the street creds amassed over years of organizing, campaigning, and frankly, hustling. Years of doing good and making money.
Billy Parish is a household name. If your house is a vegan co-opt populated by your campaign-organizing friends, that is. He is the closest thing to a rock star that the youth climate change movement has. Parish is, as Aujla describes him, a “mythical figure in the youth-organizing world in Canada.” He now runs Solar Mosaic, a “solar energy marketplace” he founded after managing that spiraling mass of email threads and annual conferences that is the Energy Action Coalition, the largest climate change-focused youth advocacy organization in the world.
Aujla himself is an equal match. In college, he founded DreamNow, a charitable organization that helps youth-run social change projects come to fruition. His latest project is Continuum, a social enterprise that offer follow ups for conferences.
Not far into the book, Aujla mentions a Rolling Stone article that features Parish as the Yale dropout climate hero. Aujla writes about clipping the article and sending it to his parents who surely wanted a more conventional career path for their son.
In college, I, too, was deeply passionate about achieving social change through activism (I have since traded in activism for journalism). Because my declared major was environmental studies, my co-curricular activities largely consisted of climate change campaigns. I, too, had sent my parents a copy of the Rolling Stone article to seek out validation. It too, had made me feel like I was on the right path.
What the book suggests is nothing revelatory. Employing the principles of business to seek out social change – otherwise known by its increasingly popular term social entrepreneurship – has been around as long as businesses sought out profit and society demanded progress.
But what makes Making Good unique is that personal narratives that lends humanity to the otherwise prescriptive structure of the book. It is not some ivory tower academic or Fortune 500 CEO dolling out advice to the masses. Instead, the book reads like a pep talk from the best friend you never had.
While doing researching for this article, I noticed that other reviews highlighted the authors’ love affair with the media. Vanity Fair, Salon, and Rolling Stone have all declared them to be “voices of their generation.” No one person — however lionized — can be the voice of an increasingly atomized generation. But were it possible, Parish and Aujla are certainly strong candidates.
This is why Making Good may be the perfect graduation present for a generation looking for meaning in age of austerity.
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May Jeong is Toronto Standard’s business editor. Follow her on Twitter @mayjeong.
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