Distinguishing doing good and making change will help us focus and concentrate efforts for a better world.
So many of us want, wish, and act for a better world - for there to be less challenges for more people to live their free, full lives. The wishing and wanting is paired with frustration that positive change seems slow and often arrives late. To help reduce this frustration, one thing we can do is increase the focus of our efforts. By focus, I mean concentrating how we spend time and money to make a difference. Concentration requires getting real about doing good versus making change. They can overlap, but they are distinct. Distinguishing good and change can take the force of our collective action from a kinked hose to a power washer.
A Good Story From My Teen Years
I’d signed up at 16 to volunteer at a women’s domestic violence shelter. The “training” (sit at the program head’s desk while she rambles for about 2 hours interrupted by 3 smoke breaks) resulted in assigning me to provide childcare. I showed up the following week before Group began. A late arrival, about 2 years old, suited with a McDonalds happy meal and a snot bubble growing and shrinking with their cries was plopped on the carpet. They didn’t want a fry. Didn’t want a hug. Didn’t want a toy. Didn’t want to be on the floor. And so we just sat, little person now loosely on the lap of a distressed-but-holding-it-together teen, hoping their tears would subside. Calm came. Fries looked good again. We goofed around for an hour before they were all picked up. I remember feeling angry-good. My most tearful tot was the outward expression of deep, unfulfilled need. Women trying to shift their lives and here they’d found support – but needed so much more, and so did their kids.
Distinctly Good
Doing good is the more familiar of the two. Acts of kindness. Giving back. Doing a good deed. These are all familiar phrases. The familiarity is partly because doing good is tied to our emotional repertoire. Selecting from the long list of emotions covered in Brene Brown’s Atlas of the Heart: I think there are clear connections to many feelings - compassion, empathy, sympathy, belonging, connection, contentment, and gratitude. Not only hitting our feelings, Bea Boccalandro writes about how humans acting purposefully experience other personal benefits. American individualism is proven to also cause a lack of community spirit, but all the good we do dissipates the clouds of selfishness to open the sky of fellowship. In short, doing good is valuable in many ways.
Distinctly Change
While making a difference is a common phrase, truly making change is less familiar to the average adult. There’s individual/personal change versus bigger changes – to a neighborhood, an institution, or a belief (some of you will immediately think she’s talking about systems change! Yes!) Personally, I feel bombarded with messages of what I should change: stretches to do every morning. Meal prep methods. Meditation apps. Personal change has valleys and peaks poking into our regular rhythms on new years eve, the 1st of the month, or our birthday.
It’s even more complicated to succinctly summarize true changes in the world. Passing major legislation comes to mind as one example. We could throw back to the Civil Rights Act or observe the effects of the Inflation Reduction Act in our current daily lives. Derek Chauvin’s criminal conviction was a marker of change to reduce racism in America’s criminal justice systems. The growth of Impossible Foods signals major change in the meat industry. The sticking power of the phrase “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” born in the 1970s has undoubtedly caused changes in behavior. We celebrated the USA Olympics team being 50% women for the first time – the culmination of decades (centuries?) of women breaking norms in athletics.
These examples are real but questionable, because we can also point out how each change is tied to an unresolved societal issue. Civil rights still aren’t fully protected in practice. IRA environmental spending is allocated but not enacted. Racism in criminal justice is still a daily occurrence. It’s still cheaper to buy animal meat. The recycling industry is fraught with achieving circularity. Athletic team owners still chronically underpay women athletes. In short, making change is challenged by its duality. And, it’s thorny because the incompleteness teases and taunts even when progress is made.
Overlap
It would be fun to break bread and banter with a table full of changemakers about when good and change overlap. The conclusions would likely not be definitive, but instead a bunch of examples proving either side. Most importantly, gaining clarity on making change can contribute to concentrating efforts. Less tossed salad of good and change. Changemakers today accept good acts in the name of change because our attitudes are often “it’s better than nothing.” I don’t think that’s true anymore.
The Battle Royale
So who would win? Good or change? My foam finger says CHANGE! It’s not on the field against good, though. Change is out there battling powerful but idle, status-quo lovers. Good is out there running plays against individualism. Both are valuable and both can win – if we focus and build each team distinctly to win on the issues they’re best equipped to tackle.
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