Making A Living While Making A Difference [Paperback]

Melissa Everett (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 30, 1999

While we are enjoying the lowest unemployment rate in decades, our need to mesh career with purpose is at an all-time high. And, as business and society continue to place greater emphasis on social and environmental responsibility, opportunities for career-seekers with a conscience have never been better.

This completely revised second edition of Making a Living While Making a Difference updates the rapidly expanding career opportunities in socially responsible and green business, industry, commerce, and non-profits. Professional career counselor Melissa Everett guides the reader through a 10-step program for career development that stresses personal fulfillment, integrity, and contribution. Unlike traditional career guides that focus on defining skill areas, Making a Living While Making a Difference focuses on personal, social, and environmental values as the driving force for career decisions. Expanded and updated self-assessments, exercises, and visualizations point the reader toward defining their personal area of commitment.

Compelling stories such as the origins of the Endangered Species Chocolate Company or the success of Stonyfield Farm, the feisty little yogurt company, illustrate how ordinary people are doing good and doing well. Everett provides a compassionate self-help framework for dealing with the unique challenges of establishing and maintaining a value-driven life/work career path. Whether a new job-seeker, job-changer, or someone who would like to make a difference right where they are, Making a Living While Making a Difference is the definitive "how-to-make-it-happen" guide for anyone who wants to customize their work lives to reflect their values more fully.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

PART ONE: THE WORK TO BE DONE

Self Employment
The Work to be Done
Headlines We'd Like to See, I: Environmental Protection and Renewal
Headlines We'd Like to See, II: Social Healing
Catalysts for a Positive Future: Occupations that Make a Difference

PART TWO: A TEN STEP PROGRAM FOR PRINCIPLED CAREER DEVELOPMENT

Step 1: Wake Up
Step 2: Stabilize Your Life
Step 3: Create a Vibrant Support System
Step 4: Turn On the Light of Connection W

Editorial Reviews

Review

This ten-step program for identifying personal goals and matching them with job strengths and employment avenues provides an excellent workbook for identifying personal values and matching them with job opportunities. Let go of work assumptions with the aid of this fine guide. -- Midwest Book Review --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Publisher

In a nonjudgmental, supportive style, Everett leads the reader through self-tests and checklists that help examine personal inclinations and goals for a career with a conscience, assess its feasibility, and distinguish realistic-idealistic goals from impractical-idealistic goals. Everett outlines a program for career development in eleven easy-to-follow steps that stress practicality, innovation, and vision. She gives tips for job-seekers, for job-changers, and even for those who want to revitalize their working lives while working with a conscience right where they are. With this guide, readers will become survivors in a challenging business climate as they face their dilemmas about doing good while doing well, develop multiple employment options, and vigorously cultivate their entrepreneurial skills and spirit. The book also predicts emerging, secure career fields around the world that will be environmentally sustainable, meet long-term basic needs, and reflect social values. Using trend analysis, detailed case studies, extensive resource lists, and numerous exercises, readers will learn how to discover and create myriad opportunities to make their job make a difference. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 250 pages
• Publisher: New Society Publishers; Rev Upd edition (September 30, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0865714002
• ISBN-13: 978-0865714007
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,832,635 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Melissa Everett is an author, career counselor, educator, and nonprofit organization executive director working at the intersection of green jobs, sustainable economic development, and climate action. She has advised the Department of Labor, state agencies, inter-municipal alliances, county legislatures, and community colleges on the nature of green job opportunities and priorities for expanding them.

Everett is author of Making a Living While Making a Difference: Conscious Careers for an Era of Interdependence. It has sold more than 20,000 copies in three editions. Described as one of "twenty books that can change the world" by Common Ground magazine, Making a Living While Making a Difference won a Bronze award for career books in ForeWord magazine's Best Books of 2008. Designed as both a structured workbook and a rich collection of stories, the book was described by fellow counselor Ande Diaz as "possibly the most visionary and integrated body of work in career literature today... an enormous contribution to the field."

She maintains a career counseling practice focusing on public interest paths in business, nonprofits and government. From a base of experience working with M.B.A. candidates, environmental professionals, civil servants, nonprofit professionals, entrepreneurs, and many others at all stages of life, Everett also trains and supports career counselors through their professional societies and in special programs. She has worked with the community college systems of five counties to promote their clean energy training programs.

As Executive Director of Sustainable Hudson Valley, Everett designed and orchestrated the Ten Percent Challenge campaign, calling on communities to cut their carbon footprint 10 percent and get 10 percent of their citizens involved. She has convened seven regional climate action conferences and symposia.

Everett's experience also includes a stint as Executive Director for Hudsonia (an environmental research and education center), serving on the board of the New York Solar Energy Industries Association, co-founding the US Green Building Council's Hudson Valley Branch, and directing the fundraising and grant administration for Global Action Plan.

With a Ph.D. in Sustainable Development from Erasmus University in the Netherlands, Everett has given hundreds of presentations and workshops for campus, business and professional audiences internationally. She has keynoted national conferences and spoken to such distinguished academic audiences as Harvard Divinity School, MIT, Yale, Dartmouth, Vassar, and Radcliffe, as well as to cutting edge MBA programs including Penn State and Green Mountain College.

Her writings and presentations highlight success stories of people who have created careers that contribute to social and environmental renewal in dozens of occupations and industries. In a dangerous world and an imperiled environment, how shall we make livings and lives that genuinely matter, that actually make a difference? She offers a detailed framework for understanding the promise and current reality of green jobs, and job-creation and survival strategies that work in a tough economy.

Her professional blog features up-to-date information and postings - http://melissaeverett.wordpress.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is one of the best career guides ever written., November 10, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Making A Living While Making A Difference (Paperback)

Melissa Everett has done all of us a great service by writing this book. Her ten-step process alone is worth the price of admission. As a career advisor with The Environmental Careers Organization, I tell anyone interested in a socially-responsible career - get this book!

52 of 63 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Biased towards environmental careers and not much else, September 8, 2002

By 

I. Das "Das" (Hartford, CT USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Making A Living While Making A Difference (Paperback)

I'm going to offer a point of view different from the rest. I think this book focusses almost exclusively on environmental issues, and practically equates "making a difference" to "saving the environment". Well, yes, there are remarks about "improving society", but no clear path to doing any of those things. (...) The book does not contain any lead into careers that address world poverty or undernourished children or any of the other burning issues that affect the world everyday, unlike a dwindling dolphin population. Not that I don't think that a dwindling dolphin population is an important issue, but it is less important than starving children groping through some rubble heap in search of food. In fact, unless that part of the "starving population" is reeled out of poverty, they will continue to have dire impact on the environment faster than any socially-responsible fund manager can write out "green" dividend checks. This book provides "first-world denizens" the distorted view that fixing environmental issues is all there is to it (and calls itself "The Expanded Guide"). This is most likely related to the author's own background and focus on environmental issues. But it doesn't measure up for me.

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent!, October 18, 2000

By 

Ron Mader "Planeta.com Founder" (Mexico) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Making A Living While Making A Difference (Paperback)

(From Planeta Journal) - This is a guide to "creating careers with a conscience." Can we ask for anything less? Authored by Melissa Everett, this second edition is an excellent resource guide for anyone interested in making the world a better place. The book provides a 10-step program for career development and offers advice to career counselors. It is an imaginative and valuable tool for anyone thinking about their career. Highly recommended.