Cassandre Arkema

I really attribute my success to the kindness of people and those small, positive interactions that keep me going. I feel like we have so many negative productions as a society, but those are societal, they're not individual. I think we need to do more of bringing communities to the center and individuals to share power, so that we can proliferate positivity instead of negativity. It's these genuine human connections that fuel my passion and remind me why this work matters.

The best career advice I ever received was to be authentic to yourself, even when it's hard. I learned this while working with team members to create a proposal to reorganize carbon tax proposals in a way that would give more to communities closer to pollution and have different rates depending on how much organizations pollute. We didn't make progress on that effort, but I learned that being authentic and learning to convey your authenticity in ways that can travel is so important. Coming to leadership with a full proposal that was very detailed and similar to other policy proposals they'd seen made them take us more seriously. It's about showing your passion through a workflow that is comprehensive.

I would say stay authentic to yourself and learn the language of your industry so that you can always stay authentic. Once you learn the language, you can leverage it in your favor and achieve your goals. It's about joining something, even if you're unfamiliar with it, understanding the lexicon and how that system is organized, and then deploying that knowledge so that you can meet your own needs and progress your own goals. Don't let unfamiliarity hold you back - instead, use it as an opportunity to learn the system from the inside so you can make it work for what you believe in.

Government oversight and funding is a huge, huge issue in my industry right now. Almost all the nonprofit founders I talk to are struggling to obtain funding or having funding on hold. It's genuinely a huge issue, and progressing around that is so difficult. But I think we have an enormous advantage through digital strategy and social media platforms. I write a lot about this in my newsletter and weekly blog, going back and forth on whether we can use digital strategy and these platforms to actually advance positivity, or if all these companies are working against that goal. I think that's a fair question. But like I talked about with small positive interactions, the more I talk to people and the more that we share these issues happening in the industry and the importance of this effort, I think people start to understand. So I would say the biggest way to confront these issues is to never shut up about them, very plainly. Continue to convey the issues, continue to meet people where they are and where their understanding is, and try to bridge conversation about these topics.

I recall the words of John Rawls, that we can only measure society based off the least advantaged individual, and that's really my belief. Our society is only as effective and positive as what the least advantage person experiences, because any of us could be that person. It's just a coincidence that any of us are born into the circumstances that we are, so we could just as easily be born into the worst possible circumstances. I think it's so, so important to create a society where any of us would be comfortable living in what are considered the worst circumstances for a person. We shouldn't accept circumstances that we would deem unacceptable for ourselves. We need to have that same empathy and idea that we are, or we could be, any other human.