Melissa Everett's Making a Living while Making a Difference is as if Paul Hawkins met Majora Carter and Joanna Macy in Career 202 and a hands-getting-dirty, how-to book came out of their conversation. In a book market shouting increasing warnings of the twin crises of environmental catastrophies and increasing human and economic struggle, this remarkable book gently yet firmly acknowledges the challenges, molds them together, grounds them in spirituality and then sets forth on a 10-step journey of discerning what is, finding, creating, and sustaining Right Livelihood.
This book remarkably re-constructs the way we understand our work in the world; from what it is - to how we find it - to what we do once we are doing it. The array of options and questions that any job-seeker who wants to make a difference face are enormous, and there are any number of constructive or debilitating processes for forging a path for oneself.
Too frequently, career-guides are not very good at balancing the enormity of the work to be done and an indivdiual's great passions with the realities of job-hunting, filling out applications, and receiving rejections from seemingly 'perfect' positions. Everett pratically includes exercises worksheets to help one successfully navigate changing and unpredictable currents.
She not only describes the twisting pathways that form most people's lives and livelihoods but she demonstrates through continual examples the interconnectedness and interdependence of our world today - and what it means to make a living in that world.
It is here, perhaps, that her contribution to the current discourse is the greatest - for she shows how the ideas, philosophies, beliefs and values motivating people around the world are combining and criss-cutting one another in exciting, innovative ways that are building the bridge into a sustainable, live-able world for all. Given the precariousness inherent in our current situation, this is not only positive, it is necessary for our survival.
I strongly recommend this book not only to other job-seekers like myself, but to all of those who are researching, engaged with and curious about the 'green shoots' that are arising to re-construct a world entering what she aptly describes as 'an Era of Interdependence.'