David Lewis began working for nonprofits in college and never wavered. He went from counseling foster children and assisting homeless families to fundraising for other organizations. “It becomes part of your fiber,” he says of the nonprofit world. “It’s really who I am.”
More than 20 years later, Lewis still loved his career, as well as his $100,000-a-year job as executive director of a community health education foundation. But with a mortgage to pay—and a stay-at-home wife and two children, now 9 and 7, to support—he also felt hemmed in by the limitations of his field. “No matter what effort I put in, I was going to get paid more or less the same,” he says. “And I always worked for someone else.”
Kerry Hannon, Time