Aaron Hurst is a notable pioneer and a recognized social entrepreneur in the U.S. Inspired by his experience working in the nonprofit sector in Chicago, Hurst went on to create the largest nonprofit consulting firm in the world and popularized purpose in the corporate sector around the world.
Taproot Foundation
Hurst is the grandson of Joseph E. Slater, the architect of the Peace Corps under President John F. Kennedy and CEO of the Aspen Institute for 25 years. He began his career in the nonprofit sector, seeking to find his path to making an impact in the world. After college, Hurst worked at the Chicago Foundation for Education and DePaul Center for Urban Education. These experiences left him frustrated by the barriers to scale for nonprofit organizations.
In early 2007, he moved to Silicon Valley, where he worked as a software developer and ultimately ran product groups for venture-backed startups. Over five years working in highly funded startups, Hurst came to understand one of the key barriers to scaling for nonprofits like the ones he knew in Chicago. Money was clearly a barrier, but so was access to human capital with expertise in areas like marketing, technology, and human resources.
This insight emerged in 2001, and the 9/11 attacks led to an increase in demand among business professionals to make a greater contribution to the community. With this demand, Hurst founded the Taproot Foundation, a nonprofit organization that enabled business professionals to donate their professional skills to help community organizations. At the time, business professionals rarely used their professional skills when they volunteered, and his novel approach was quickly embraced.
By 2007, the Taproot Foundation had become the largest nonprofit consulting organization in the world, powered by the generosity of business professionals donating their time and skills by the thousands. The organization had developed offices in seven cities and was partnering with over fifty foundations to fund their work, but ironically, the demand far exceeded their ability to deliver even as they scaled. As a result, they shifted their focus from delivering services to building a marketplace and enabling other organizations to run pro bono programs.
Taproot began to build cross-sector partnerships to power the marketplace. Inspired by President Kennedy’s work to develop the modern pro bono service ethic in the legal profession, he lobbied the George W. Bush administration to call on businesses to donate the skills of their people, leading to the launch of the Billion + Change campaign. The campaign ultimately engaged over 500 companies and resulted in over $2 billion in pro bono services supporting the nonprofit sector. To expand the impact globally, they then partnered with the BMW Foundation to develop a network of pro bono service providers across 30 countries.
In 2011, Taproot began working with LinkedIn to leverage the power of the professional social network to support the development of the pro bono marketplace. LinkedIn added the ability for members to flag their desire to engage in pro bono and board service to their profiles. Within the first seven months, over 1 million people had added it to their profile.
Purpose is an imperative at work
The success of the LinkedIn partnership ultimately led Hurst to leave the Taproot Foundation. He realized that enabling business professionals to serve wasn’t addressing the core issue in their lives. People were not finding meaning in their work and trying to address it through service. He realized the great social impact would be to actually address the lack of purpose at work.
Partnering again with LinkedIn but also with other companies and research universities, Hurst led the first national and global studies on purpose in the workforce. These studies brought attention to the purpose gap and clearly demonstrated the business value of having employees with a “purpose mindset” (a term he coined) who were consistently showing up as high-performing and loyal.
With these insights and those from his experience at Taproot, Hurst published his book “The Purpose Economy.” His uncle, Marc Porat, had coined and predicted the rise of the information economy in the 1970s. In “The Purpose Economy,” Hurst predicted that we were in the early days of the next economic era in history, one in which our need for meaning would drive economic value creation and transform the workplace. The book and research built awareness and demand for change in corporate America, and nearly a decade later, 181 of the top CEOs in the world pledged to change the purpose of a company from a sole focus on shareholder value to creating positive value for all stakeholders.
Tech for good
With the momentum built from the book and his research, Hurst founded Imperative, a venture-backed tech startup. Imperative sought to create a technology platform that could bring purpose to employees on a massive scale. The platform, used by some of the leading employers in the world, enabled employees to quickly uncover their personal purpose and apply it to their jobs. In 2019, Imperative expanded to invent a technology platform that could enable peers inside a company to coach each other. This made coaching accessible to all employees for the first time and removed the cost of expensive professional coaches. The peer coaching platform’s launch was perfectly timed with the rise in corporate investment in employee well-being and remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2023, Hurst left Imperative to focus on better unlocking technology to create positive social and environmental impacts in the world. With a colleague from his work at the Taproot Foundation and in partnership with Okta, he cofounded Board.Dev. The platform is working to develop the field of technical governance and to place and train tech executives on nonprofit boards where they can help identify opportunities to use technology to advance the mission of the organizations.
Service redefined
Over the last 20 years, Hurst has been a pioneer in shaping how people think about service. Beginning with the Taproot Foundation, he created the market for pro bono services and changed the way companies think about harnessing their human capital to make an impact. His work to bring purpose to people’s day jobs changed the expectations of the workplace as hundreds of companies began to embrace work as a form of service and not just as a transaction.
The news and editorial staffs of the Chicago Tribune had no role in this post’s preparation.