Dare to Care

Dare to Care

By Erzsébet Ábrám

Caring is costly, but so is waiting. This is my journey of opting out of “impact later.”

Impact is a long game, one that requires patience. But younger generations don’t really have the luxury to wait anymore. Many of us start our careers with a quietly inherited assumption: impact is something that comes after, once the “real” life is already in place. It’s a comforting story, but it doesn’t match the pace or scale of what we’re living through.

We grew up saturated with information about crises, such as climate, inequality, conflicts, and human rights violations. We don’t just hear about them in textbooks; we carry them in our pockets. We scroll through wars, disasters, and impossible ethical questions before breakfast. We know more than any generation before us about how our choices ripple outward, and our systems are biased. Yet, we often feel less empowered to create meaningful change. Too much awareness, no obvious levers. It’s a recipe for paralysis.

When the world feels overwhelming, narrowing our field of vision can feel like self‑defense. The work we do becomes a tool to survive, not a means to create. It’s no surprise, then, that many young people gravitate toward the most stable, rewarded paths; the ones the majority instantly recognize as “success,” such as finance, consulting, and corporate law. Some genuinely thrive in them, nudging things for the better. The challenge isn’t that these paths exist; it’s that they often become the default answer to uncertainty. They are visible, socially and financially validated, and emotionally easier than confronting the world’s fragility head‑on.

I chose a different path: to integrate impact into my career from the beginning. I might fail. I probably will, in some ways. But I want to try, and I want to document what that attempt actually looks like, not just the polished outcomes.

Here is the deeper truth I keep circling back to: systems are not external machines we enter. Systems are us. We are the system. They are built from the accumulation of individual choices, incentives, and habits. If we want them to change, we cannot wait until we feel fully safe or established. We have to examine the choices we make at the very beginning, when our professional instincts are still forming.

This is where the tension begins. Caring early is not convenient. It asks something of you before you feel ready to give it. It disrupts the familiar script of “impact later.” That strategy made sense in a slower world, but that’s not our reality anymore.

However, choosing impact from the start is not a moral performance; it is a practical response to the pace of the polycrisis we’re experiencing – and, for me, a response to the things I simply couldn’t ignore. I learned through experience that it comes with its own constraints. I grew up in Marosvásárhely, in Romania, in a Hungarian-speaking minority community. Later, I moved to Budapest, Hungary. Navigating between cultures and expectations was part of daily life. My first steps into impact work were barely planned: I saw problems that bothered me, so I acted upon them. This is also the origin story of how I co‑founded a healthcare nonprofit, endorsed by WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. That experience forced me to ask, much earlier than I felt ready, what it means to build a career around social challenges we face.

Years later, coming to Columbia to study impact investing and social entrepreneurship added another layer of complexity. From the outside, it can look like a polished success story, the kind people admire from afar. But what most people don’t see is the invisible architecture holding it up: seven scholarships, a part‑time job, constant recalibration, and the ongoing tension between ambition and financial reality. It’s a duality many of my peers face as well: inner drive on one side, precarity on the other.

Starting early in this field is not romantic. Many entry points are underpaid, under‑defined, or accessible only to those with existing safety nets or years of experience. For many of us, the real questions are more fundamental: Where do I begin? How do I do this well? How do I make it sustainable? And beneath that lies an uncomfortable truth: where are the role models who started from scratch? Many of the people we admire had financial, social, or institutional buffers that made early caring less risky.

Currently, we see a different kind of leadership emerging, one rooted not in certainty but in honesty. It starts with recognizing how deeply our early career choices shape us; what we normalize, what we compromise on, and whose approval we chase. The sooner we stop living up to others’ expectations, whether they come from peers, family, authority figures, or society at large, the sooner we begin accumulating a different kind of wealth: agency, clarity, and legacy. We can’t remove all the difficulty. But we can make caring far more possible than it feels.

Impact is not only about theories of change. It is also about who enters the field, and who gets to stay. If we spend a decade training ourselves to look away from what hurts, it becomes harder, not easier, to turn toward it later. But if we learn early how to integrate earning, meaning, and responsibility, we don’t just survive in our work; we build something better over time. The courage to start may be one of the most valuable things our generation can offer a chaotic world.

This column is for people like me: young, ambitious, values‑driven, but realistic enough to know that good intentions don’t pay rent or health insurance. It will be published monthly with ImpactCEE, a nonprofit committed to accelerating the impact transition in Central and Eastern Europe.

I don’t have all the answers. What I do have is proximity: to the confusion, the ambition, the fear, and the stubborn hope that a career in impact can be both meaningful and financially sustainable from the beginning.

Caring is costly, but so is waiting. The sooner we begin, the more possible it becomes.

Content writer: Erzsébet Ábrám

Erzsébet Ábrám is an emerging impact practitioner and graduate student at Columbia University, where she focuses on impact investing and social entrepreneurship. Originally from Marosvásárhely, Romania, she co‑founded a youth‑led nonprofit in the intersection of healthcare, education, and interdisciplinary research, recognized by the World Health Organization’s leadership. She has worked across Central and Eastern Europe on systems‑level social challenges as an entrepreneur and investment analyst. At ImpactCEE, she writes about what it really takes to build a purpose‑driven career from the beginning without safety nets, inherited scripts, or polished narratives.