Dear Reader, 

When I was in my mid-20s, with an MBA in hand and just off a wild ride with a dot-com startup that left me with a pile of cash in my bank account, I stopped to take a breath. In that space, I read Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez, which confirmed my suspicion that I had an important choice to make. I could continue down my current path of leadership roles in companies designed to accumulate wealth for myself and other owners, and surround myself with the things I didn’t have growing up. That path had its allure but also a gnawing sense of unease—would a pile of money and things be enough? 

Or a different path, allowing me to put creative and intellectual energy toward meaningful work and offering sufficient money to cover the most important things. 

To be clear, I’m not terribly courageous. I take only calculated risks. The reason I could choose to “go change the world” is that—unlike many people—I had the security and confidence to assume that I would always have sufficient means to live a comfortable life.   

I mulled my options while backpacking around the world, opening my heart and mind to different cultures and ways of living. When I returned, I chose the path of meaningful work, deprioritizing material wealth and investing in a life of purpose. 

And many years and jobs later, here I am at YES!, building a better world together with you.

YES! turns 25 this year, and we have a lot of choices ahead that will determine its path for the next 25 years. As a progressive media organization that is a catalyst for change, YES! has extraordinary opportunities to make a real difference in the lives of millions of people and their communities. My greatest hope is that YES! will always have the security to take the kind of bold steps needed to help change the world. We’ve got big plans and exciting goals that will require hard work, talent, and money.

That’s why we’ve established a special fund—we’re calling it the Fund For Our Future—which will enable us to take advantage of exceptional opportunities to grow and to weather unexpected storms.

What I love about this issue of YES! is that it expands the question “How much is enough?” to go beyond material wealth to all the ways we measure our worth. It asks us to consider fairness as we take stock of what we value, and design our lives and relationships to support those values. By doing this, we can ensure enough security for everyone to live a purposeful life.

Hoping for change is not enough; it takes individual and collective energy to create it. Whether your energy is in the form of time, money, or making connections, thank you for putting your values to work for our future. 

Christine

P.S.: If you’d like to make a gift to the Fund For Our Future, use the envelope in this magazine, or donate online at yesmagazine.org/future.