Second in a series designed to show creatives opportunities with clients that are good for people and the planet.
Creatives think skills. Design skill, writing skill, film skill, strategy skill, maybe account skill. One person, one craft, looking for the gig, the next client who’ll pay for it.
That’s not enough anymore, and it never got us as far as needed.
The real opportunity is past that: creatives combining skills with other creatives, then aiming the whole at organizations that are actually built to do right by people, not just at whoever happens to come out with an RFP or a job post.
How about a focus on organizations that are good for people and planet.
That’s the idea.
Why this matters now: It’s not just a strategy. It’s something worth being angry about.
Gen Z is getting screwed, and they know it. Banks that won’t lend to anyone without a W-2. Credit cards with 25%+ interest. Corporations laying off people while reporting record profits, hiring freezes dressed up as “efficiency,” every decision run through the lens of what Wall Street wants to hear on the next earnings call instead of what people actually using the product need.
Tech that could be lowering costs and saving time used to replace us. None of the savings passed down.
Housing that costs more every year in cities where wages haven’t moved.
Healthcare priced like luxury goods.
An economy that keeps telling us to be patient… for payoffs that keep receding.
Nobody’s coming to fix that from above. But there are real organizations already built, by charter or by mission, to actually be on the side of the people getting screwed… and most of them are losing the exact fight this series is about, not because their values are wrong, but because nobody’s helping them plan, build, communicate, and compete.
Credit unions: Chartered, by law, to serve members instead of shareholders, and losing ground to the megabanks anyway because their products and their communication haven’t caught up to how Gen Z actually live and work.
Worker-owned cooperatives: Structurally aligned with the people doing the work instead of the people extracting value from it, and most of them small, under-resourced, and short on exactly the strategy, design, and marketing skills that could grow them.
Some B corps: not all of them; some of the certification has been gamed; but the ones actually living the standard instead of just wearing the badge.
Labor unions: still one of the only structures actually built to negotiate power back to workers.
Some federated nonprofits, like the YMCA: organizations that already know how to build specific, well-run programs for specific populations, and could do more of it with the right partners.
Nonprofit news outlets: fighting to keep real reporting alive in an information economy that rewards outrage over accuracy.
Land trusts: protecting the one thing nobody’s making more of.
Farm-to-table growers and non-monocropping farms: building soil and community instead of extracting from both, and still mostly unknown to the people who’d choose them in a heartbeat if the benefits weren’t so poorly understood.
Every one of these organizations is fighting the same fight from a different angle: people over extraction, mission over margin. Almost none of them are winning it alone.
That’s where creatives, combined instead of scattered, matter. Not as volunteers donating a logo. As a real team, bringing real skill, to organizations structurally built to deserve it at the exact moment they need it most.
Use your anger. Get past your individual skill. Build your team. Find real opportunities.
Go be useful.
Together.
~
The Work Beneath the Work is available now at tedleonhardt.com/the-work-beneath-the-work
