The Gift and Burden of Being a Changemaker

Nobody tells you about the weight of it.

When I started the Young Eye Foundation at 17, I was driven by something I couldn’t fully name yet, a restlessness and hunger to make something better. I didn’t know I was becoming a changemaker.

Years later, after building organisations, speaking on global stages, writing a book, and walking alongside hundreds of young people doing the same; I have a much more deeper relationship with that word. Changemaker. It is both the greatest thing I have ever been called and, on the hardest days, the heaviest thing I carry.

I want to be honest about both sides. Because I think the world needs more people who choose this path, and the only way to truly choose it is to walk into it with your eyes open.

The Gift: You See What Others Walk Past

The first gift of being a changemaker is also the one that makes everything complicated: you cannot unsee things.

Once your eyes are open to inefficiency, to human potential being wasted, you see it everywhere. In a classroom without enough books. In a community meeting where no young voices are in the room. In a system that was clearly designed without considering the people it was supposed to serve.

That vision is a gift because it gives you clarity. You know why you’re here. You know what matters. While others are still searching for direction, you already have a compass. The vision, focus and clarity that drives a changemaker is not something you manufacture; it is something that finds you when you start paying real attention to the world.

The Burden: You Cannot Turn It Off

But that same gift is also the burden. When you see everything that needs changing, rest becomes complicated. Switching off feels like abandonment. Every moment you’re not working on the mission, there is a quiet voice asking: shouldn’t you be doing something?

I have sat in rooms full of people relaxing and felt completely unable to join them; not because I didn’t want to, but because my mind was somewhere else entirely. Planning the next initiative, solving the next problem, thinking about the gap between where things are and where they could be. For a changemaker, the work is never truly done. And that is both what makes you effective and what slowly also pulls you down if you don’t learn to manage it.

This is something I explored in my post on whether work-life balance is real. For people who are genuinely called to this work, the question of balance takes on a different shape. The mission doesn’t just clock out.

The Gift: Your Work Has Meaning Beyond Yourself

There is a special kind of fulfilment that comes from building something that is not about you. When I stood in the school in Uganda that our team supported, or watched a young person find their voice at a Young and Restless event, or heard that a listener of the podcast had started their own initiative because of something they heard on an episode, those moments are irreplaceable.

The meaning that comes from changemaker work is not the kind you can buy or manufacture. It is the deep, quiet satisfaction of knowing that your essence left something better than you found it. That is the greatest gift of this path and no amount of difficulty has ever made me willing to trade it.

It is what I wrote about when I reflected on what keeps me going. Not recognition. Not applause. The work itself, and what it means to the people it serves.

The Burden: The Gap Between Vision and Reality Is Exhausting

Changemakers live in a permanent state of tension between what is and what could be. And that gap between the world you see in your mind and the world that exists in front of you is one of the most exhausting places to inhabit.

Progress is slow. Change is nonlinear. The systems you are pushing against were built over decades and do not yield easily. There will be initiatives that fail, funding that falls through, partners who don’t show up, and communities that aren’t ready for what you’re offering yet. Every one of those moments tests whether your commitment is real or conditional.

Learning to build unwavering belief in your work through those stretches is not optional for a changemaker. Because the moment you stop believing in the possibility of change is the moment you become just another person walking past the things you used to stop for.

The Gift: You Attract People

Something remarkable happens when you commit publicly to a cause that is bigger than yourself: it acts as a magnet for other remarkable people.

The mentors who have shaped my thinking, the collaborators who have expanded what the Young Eye Initiative could become, the young people who have walked into our programmes and blown every expectation; none of them would have found me if we had played it safe. Changemaking is a signal. And it attracts people who are on the same frequency.

I believe that the quality of the relationships in my life is a direct result of the clarity of the work I have chosen to do. When you stand for something real, the right people find you. And those people become your greatest resource, more valuable than any funding or platform or opportunity.

The Burden: People Expect You to Have All the Answers

One of the lonelier aspects of being a changemaker is the expectation from others and sometimes from yourself that you should always know what to do.

The truth is that most of the time, you are figuring it out as you go. You are making decisions with incomplete information, in conditions that no one prepared you for, while carrying the weight of the people who are counting on you. The uncertainty is constant. And because you are the one holding the vision, there are fewer people you can fully offload that uncertainty to.

This is why I believe so strongly in the importance of mentorship for changemakers. You need people in your life who have carried similar weight, who can sit with you in the uncertainty without asking you to resolve it before you’re ready. Those people are not a luxury. They are a lifeline.

Choosing It Anyway

I have had moments, honest, quiet moments where I asked myself whether the weight was worth it. Whether the simpler path, the easier life, the smaller ambition would have served me better.

And every time, without fail, the answer has been the same: yes. It is worth it. Not because it is easy, or because it always works, or because the recognition matches the effort. But because I cannot imagine looking back at my life and seeing a version of it where I didn’t try.

The gift and the burden are inseparable. You do not get one without the other. And if you are someone who feels the pull toward this path of refusing to accept things as they are I want you to know that the weight is real, and it is manageable, and it is worth carrying.