Your community is broken.

How?

Talk to a honest neighbor or a member of your community for ten minutes and you'll be able to take notes. Soon you'll figure out that you have a lot of examples of your own. Detection of broken things is easy. You hear other's complains all the time. But can something be done about it?

Richard Avazino chose to fix the adoption of saved cats and dogs in San Francisco bringing down the animal euthanasia rates. We are talking of millions of cats and dogs per year. He not only lowered the rates. He's influence lowered those to the lowest in the states. Started small, aimed to the right goal, then goes big.

Maddie's Found has embraced the retribution law in a very generous way. They did that by setting the right goal. And they help people that seriously want to achieve it too.

Alexandre Orion felt there where no enough attention on São Paulo's pollution. He knew something was broken and designed a fix that started this trend. He sent one message: pollution is death. Beside that, a strong metaphor emerges from that action:

Communication trough unpollution.

Even after authorities washed the tunnel, he's work keep passing a clear and consistent message. Since then, cleaning a wall can be more than that. It can be the construction of an urban communication device.

Now São Paulo owes a clean tunnel to he's work. Shouldn't be surprising he got calls from New York, Paris and San Francisco to make some exhibits.

Why can't more people create movements like those?

Sure, it requires good will and it isn't as abundant as reality demands. Besides, most of good heart people don't know how to profit from that. Even in ways that money can't give you. When there is good will and problems starts to be seen it isn't rare to feel overwhelmed too fast. Maybe the expectations where raised too high to do anything at all to solve those. 

But that is a crappy business.

Is mostly fear based bullsh*t.

When your goal is aligned with something that could make the difference you need to know that guerrilla marketing campaigns proved to work extremely well. That means you can and probably should start small but always think big. Specially when economy is in a bad shape.

Running a business or doing it for the love to the art, in the end, will not matter. Achieving your goal will. You should always confront your goal. Don't fall on fear and don't use make up. Be explicit with yourself about it. Fix something efficiently.

How do you judge if it's worth?

There is money of course but it comes and goes. What tells the difference is the universality of the goal. How many people you will positively affect with your service, your music, your design or your art?

Brokenland is full of opportunities. You can even choose your broke. You shouldn't wait people to ask you. You need to "read it" from reality and decide to be the movement that fixes it.