Ready to Leave the Private Sector for Public Service? Read This First.
By Priti Krishtel, I-MAK Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director
Over the past decade, there has been a quiet, yet striking, shift in employment toward public service. Our nation is grappling with pressing problems — from rising drug prices to widening income inequality — encouraging more and more Americans to blend work with purpose and leave the for-profit world for non-profit work.
According to the latest from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, non-profit employment has increased consistently year over year from 2007 to 2012 — rising from 10.5 million jobs to 11.4 million — a gain of 8.5 percent. This trend is only predicted to continue.
I understand the impulse to leave the private sector: I made the switch 15 years ago. After graduating from law school, I worked as a corporate health lawyer. I enjoyed the work, but without seeing any direct human benefit, I needed a change. So, in 2003, I booked a one-way ticket to Delhi and joined a human rights and legal aid organization advocating on behalf of low-income communities.
The work originally focused on helping patients in India get access to lifesaving medicines, but I knew if we wanted to get to the root of the problem — astronomical drug prices — we had to take on abuses by major pharmaceutical companies. Unilaterally, these companies were exploiting the patent system to prolong monopolies on their drugs, filing thickets of dubious patents on treatments to keep prices high and, in the process, restricting patient access. If we could overturn those unmerited patents, we reasoned, we could change the system blocking access to healthcare for millions of patients.
The result: in 2006, I co-founded the Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge (I-MAK), a non-profit of lawyers, pharmaceutical scientists and health experts challenging the unmerited drug patents that drive up drug prices. Our organization has filed challenges on 20 drug types for eight diseases in 49 countries — enabling over $1 billion in healthcare savings for governments and patients worldwide.
While my non-profit started out with just three lawyers and an idea, we are now a team of 20 staff and consultants — many of us coming from the private sector, including pharmaceutical companies and corporate law firms.
But navigating the transition from a steady office job can be difficult. Here are my biggest tips for making the switch:
1. Use Private Sector Lessons for Social Change
You can suffer whiplash when moving from the private sector to non-profit world. But business knowledge and tactics can be used in public service.
For example, I-MAK’s lead scientist, Joe Fortunak, was the head of global process research and development at a major American pharmaceutical company. From his experience, he knew that pharmaceutical companies often extend the life of their patents by filing patents on as many forms of a single drug as possible — not just on the base compound — which allowed us to locate and challenge secondary patents on dozens of treatments.
My co-founder Tahir Amin had also spent years working as a corporate patent attorney, witnessing firsthand how companies manipulate the law to improve profits. Teaming up in 2006, Tahir, Joe and I used our insiders’ perspectives to file a series of patent challenges in India on four HIV drugs — cases that ultimately resulted in $500 million in cost savings for health programs in lower-income countries– and the potential to put a million more patients on treatment.
2. But Stay True to Your Organizational Identity
When I-MAK first started, many people advised us to consider generic companies as potential funders. After all, they reasoned, our interests converged: we both wanted to overturn junk patents on brand-name medications to increase market competition.
But while we knew generic companies could provide us with a steady cashflow, we ultimately recognized that there would be a point where our interests would diverge. Generic companies have strong incentives to settle with branded companies, whereas we wanted to exclusively represent patient interests. This meant that we needed to stay independent. It took over a decade for us to grow from a small non-profit to being able to hire full time staff, but it was worth it.
3. Social Change is a Long-Term Game
Many people join non-profit organizations to save the world — only to find that it’s not that simple or straightforward. When you’re building a business, ideally, you have a linear organizational growth model — a start-up phase, a pilot project, and a period of building and scaling. But social organizations don’t always follow linear growth model, and it can take decades to reach your goals.
For example, non-profits must spend a significant amount of time pitching and re-pitching their mission to potential funders. Growth can therefore be cyclical — even once you’ve scaled, there will be times where you return to start-up mode.
While that can be daunting, be patient: sector-switching is never a smooth or easy process, but it is regenerative. At the end of the day, it doesn’t feel like “work”: fifteen years later, I wake up every day and feel passionate about what I do.
