Impact Tuesdays
The latest from humanitarian and early impact-careers coach, Daniel Higgins
Hey Everyone!
Welcome to your weekly dose of Impact Tuesdays, your go-to roundup for students and recent grads ready to launch a career that matters.
Each edition, I’ll share 4 quick wins, fresh tools, and real-world lessons to help you move from “just thinking about it” to actually building your impact career. Expect practical tips, honest reflections, and a few shortcuts I wish I’d known when I started out.
Something new with me
Snakes in Germany!
I went on a quick break to the Saxon Switzerland National Park, located on the Germany, Czechia border (nowhere near Switzerland).
It was an awesome hiking spot that I had never heard of before. We saw a few snakes, wild boars, falcons and a lot of funky rock formations. If you’re nearby I 100% recommend going down!
Nothing to do with career development, but some nice hikes at the very least.
Accelerators, free workshops and other fun projects are active. Feel free to email or book a consultation if you want to hear more.
Something cool for you
Sick of designing your CV, or hitting another pay-wall just when you click download on a CV design platform.
NO MORE!
I use https://flowcv.com/ as my go to CV platform.
It has just the right amount of customizability, while still having a clean design.
The sh*t thing is that you can only have one CV at a time on the free version.
The cool thing is that you can just “Hide” the sections you are not using on that CV and keep them on the platform for next time.
So go try it out if you need a designer feel with a student price tag (FREE).
Something useful you might not know
Market Systems Thinking.
If it were not for innovation and capacity building taking my heart, I probably would pursue work in MSA.
MSA, market systems approach, is a perspective you can take to design a programme (interventional programme from NGO).
The concept is to learn more, A LOT MORE, about the economic and social systems and the legal, economics and social rules from the communities that you are working with. Then to analyse which programmatic approach is best for the situation - direct aid (food, supplies), resilience programming (building up people abilities to survive shocks), supporting active market actors, bridging a systems gap for a while, or supporting local actors to bridge said gap.
The whole point is that we do not undermine what’s already in place in a community. When ignored you can get programmes that do more harm than good.
FOR EXAMPLE, an United Nations WASH project gave soap to a refugee settlement. That’s all well and good but it put all the local women who were selling homemade soap as their livelihood out of business. A better option may have been to support those women to expand their businesses to the whole camp.
The issue with MSA is that it takes time and requires resources $$$.
Not to mention that the cost benefit of investing those resources is not necessarily a net positive.
Check out BEAM exchange for more - BEAM Exchange - Building Effective and Accessible Markets
Quote from the sector
Dr. Paul Farmer (Co-founder, Partners In Health):
“The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that’s wrong with the world.”
Interested in hearing more?
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