Whose Future Is Secure Anymore?
What happens when purpose isn’t enough
Welcome back and thanks for reading.
Note: This is part two in a series I’m writing on work, purpose, and what happens when the old playbook no longer fits. If you missed the first installment, “The Future of Work: Reclaiming the Table in a Digital Age” you can read it here. Today’s piece looks at job security (or the lack of it) and what that means for those of us who’ve built careers in public affairs.
In public affairs, we don’t usually talk about job security. Not directly. We talk about impact, we talk about staying nimble, we talk about being mission-driven. But beneath all that, if we’re honest, we’ve quietly relied on a sense of institutional stability to carry us through.
Most of us didn’t enter this work for the perks. We knew the salary would be modest. The hours long. The stress high. But there was an unspoken promise: if you did good work, showed up, built relationships, the system would take care of you. Not lavishly, but sustainably.
And for a while, it did.
But that’s changing.
More and more, I hear from colleagues — talented, seasoned professionals — who’ve been restructured, defunded, or just quietly let go. Not because they failed. Not because they weren’t good at the work. But because something shifted: a grant, a governor, a budget cycle, a board decision. The ground moves, and with it, entire careers.
Even government work, once considered the safest bet of all, hasn’t been immune. The recent mass layoffs across federal agencies have shaken a core assumption: that public service meant stability, even when everything else felt uncertain.
Some of this is economic. Some of it is political. Some of it is the natural churn of a sector that was never built for permanence.
But it still stings.
Because for those of us who’ve spent our careers building coalitions, guiding strategy, working behind the scenes to keep the public good moving, the layoff or contract end doesn’t just feel like a professional detour. It feels like a personal one. Like the work we gave our time, energy, and weekends to couldn’t return the favor when it counted most.
And the truth is, we never had the same playbook tech or finance did. We didn’t get stock options. We didn’t get six-month severance packages or headlines announcing our exits. Our stability was supposed to come from purpose. From mattering.
But when the funding dries up, or the mission pivots, or the priorities shift, purpose doesn’t pay rent. And when the paycheck disappears, it can shake your sense of who you are.
So where does that leave us?
It leaves us building something new. Slowly. Awkwardly. Collectively.
Not a manifesto (there have been plenty of those) but a real-time draft of what it means to chart a career in public affairs today, when even the most righteous mission can’t guarantee job security.
We learn to document our work, not just for funders, but for ourselves.
We shift from relying on institutional reputation to cultivating our own.
We stop pretending that purpose and protection are the same thing.
We do the hard thing: we keep going. Maybe with side hustles. Maybe with exit plans. Maybe with new boundaries, backup plans, and group chats that double as career therapy.
But most of all, we start talking about it. Honestly.
Because if the ground is going to keep shifting, then the least we can do is steady each other.
Final Thought
If security is no longer guaranteed, then maybe the future of work, especially in public affairs, has to look different. More transparent. More flexible. More honest about the risks, and more intentional about how we support each other through them. This is just one chapter in that conversation. But if you’re figuring it out too, I hope we’ll keep building what comes next together.
If the old playbooks no longer work — for ambition, for stability, for leadership — then we have to write new ones. And that starts with asking not just what kind of table we want to sit at, but how we build it in the first place.
Looking Ahead
This is part of an ongoing series on the changing landscape of public affairs work.
Next, I’ll be exploring how digital innovation and AI are reshaping the field and what it takes to adapt without losing the human connection at the core of what we do.
After that, I’ll dive into a harder question: If job security is no longer a given, whose future is even being protected? We’ll look at what “safety” means across race, class, and career stage in public interest work and how we build something more equitable from here.
Hope you’ll keep reading, and that you’ll share your thoughts, too.