Cat Addo: “Are you working to make the world better, safer, stronger, or are you working to hear the sound of your own voice?”

Cat Addo is a strategist in the social impact space. I first met Cat through her Issue Space events, I was blown away by the intentionality. What I most admire about her is her passion for her work, her Issue Space events are a SIDE PROJECT while working full time AND being a Mama. We recently reconnected to talk about her story and approach to impact work. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

🗨 Hi Cat. Tell us who you are and what you do.

I am Cat Addo, and professionally, I am a strategist in the social impact space. I help brands, businesses, nonprofits, foundations, and some startups clarify their social missions and then manifest that in brands that are true, useful, effective, of strong character, and help them make the change that they're meant to make. This year, I also started leading strategic partnerships in the social impact space, which is basically a matchmaking process between values-aligned organizations and brands to see how they can help each other with resources, content, credibility, and other collaborations so they can reach their respective impact goals. I'm also the creator, strategist, and host behind Issue Space, which is a community and content brand that I started for other folks who work in purpose-driven work. It started as a podcast in 2024. Now we've incorporated events and an essay series that I share every month via the Issue Space newsletter, and hopefully other things soon.

🗨 It's so impressive. That's where we met, through Issue Space. What do you do to sharpen your creativity?

I love going through the news app, looking at all the articles and the essays, and what people are posting. When I left Purpose, which is a social impact agency where I spent most of the almost-ten years that I've been in social impact, I was very locked into the progressive media landscape and just making sure I was very up to speed there. But when I left, I made a point to turn on my mainstream news app on my phone and see a cross-section of stories and frames. And in honesty, I probably could have done that earlier. I was kind of protecting myself because a lot of the issues and dynamics I was working on were depressing. For mental health reasons, I didn't want a ton of negative noise, because I had to go into my job and keep everybody motivated and believing that we can make a difference, and make the client feel that their work is important. But I really had this sensation of needing to reemerge back into the cross-section of conversation and really understand what people who might not be my co-workers are saying and feeling. That helps me round out my thinking and understand how different people are experiencing issues.

🗨 What's something that you've had to unlearn or rethink as a leader?

As a leader, one thing that I've had to rethink is what is implicit. What feels obvious to you doesn't necessarily feel obvious to your team. I remember at one point in my career at Purpose, I stepped up from being a strategy director leading projects to being a senior strategy director and one of the heads of our New York office. One time, we were having a town hall about work-life balance. It was during the height of COVID, and we had to put a lot more thought into what helped people feel like they had boundaries. And somebody said something about feeling pressured to respond to Slack messages around the clock. And I was confused. I was like, "Well, why don't you just not respond if it's outside of your office hours?" But this was a more junior person, and this poor young woman was doing none of that. She thought that every single time a piece of communication was sent, day or night, she had to get back to it. It reminded me that it isn't obvious to everyone that they have a choice to log off. It was also a broader lesson about just remembering, in leadership, you're walking with a certain amount of presumption, power, and privilege. And you have to intentionally offer that to other people and tell them that they possess the same thing, or you risk talking past each other.

🗨 How can we better prepare younger people for their careers?

I'll share what I just said to somebody who reached out. She's finishing school and is job-seeking in the purpose-driven space. She's trying to plan her career. I told her that there will probably be a fork in the road where she can either lock into a specific issue or two and be willing to do almost anything within her skillset in those issues to get exposed to the players, the advocacy landscape, and the right contacts. Or she can lead with a skill. Her education was in marketing, even though her heart was in impact. So, I told her that the other way to look at it is that she has a defined skillset. So she could go into the job market and say, “This is what I know about marketing, brand-building, communications, whatever it is, and I could offer it to anybody who's mission driven.” And sometimes that will perfectly overlap with her favorite pet area, and other times it might not. Early in your impact career, it's worth thinking about whether you are more attached to a specific advocacy issue, or to offering your skillset to any advocacy issue.

🗨 That's smart. What shifts in the world around us are we giving too little attention to?

Particularly for purpose-driven, issue-driven, society-touching work, I think there's been a real degradation of strategy. If you’re really trying to move the needle on an issue at scale, you kind of have to face the contributing factors and say, ‘Whether I like it or not, what is the reality of how other people are thinking and feeling and experiencing whatever issue I'm talking about? What are the resources that I have? What's the landscape that I'm in culturally, or politically, or in terms of power?’ And your strategy, if it's good, will respond to that. It concerns me, and sometimes embarrasses me, when I see approaches in my field where I can't imagine what the strategic grounding is. It seems more like it's about feeding an echo chamber than making a difference. These are critical issues and times, and you have to decide what you're really working towards. Are you working to make the world better, safer, stronger, or are you working to hear the sound of your own voice?

🗨 I agree that organizations need to slow down and be more strategic. What would the movie version of your life be like? 

There's a version that is like The Devil Wears Prada. My career has had two parts: the music industry and then social impact. A lot of my foundational, professional characteristics come from hustling and seeing great creative, legal, and vision in the music industry. But when I moved from working in entertainment to working in social impact, I felt like I was being more honest with myself, in the same way that at the end of that movie, Miranda is trying to convince Andy that staying at the magazine is what she wants because it's so coveted, and Andy can tell by how much that doesn't excite her that maybe that's not true for her. And I relate to that – the concept of having a dream job and then being like, "If it's my dream job, why am I still wanting to take a risk and leave it?" When I was a little girl, I idolized Mariah Carey. She was on the label that I was working at, and I got to go to a private concert she did. Kanye West was, at the time, still a not-seriously-problematic genius and he came into the office to play unreleased music. It was just a dream scenario. And I still felt like, "I don't know if I feel 100% myself here.” Ironically, the woman who I sat next to at Island Def Jam when we were both assistants is one of the creators of the Black Square motif that became a racial solidarity symbol in 2020. So there was obviously something inside us that was more advocacy-oriented. But it didn’t come to life for me until my next work chapter.

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