The first episodes of the series offer a glimpse into our Moral Ambition Fellowships. We go from an off-grid retreat on a remote island — where fellows build trust and resilience — to the heart of Brussels, where they master the craft of policymaking and lobbying. Applications for the next round of the Moral Ambition Fellowships are now open until May 12, 2025 — learn more here.

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A lot of us underestimate the position we are in to actually impact change.

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When you start your career, the focus is often on getting to a place where you’ll finally be able to give something back. But before you know it, you’ve arrived: you have the privileges you once aspired to. And by that time, it can be hard to keep the idealism you had at the start alive.

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Our co-founder Rutger Bregman explains: “What sometimes happens to people who are initially really optimistic and idealistic and really want to make the world a much better place, is that they become cynical because they get stuck in a job or in a corporate environment where they just don't find like minded people.”

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In this episode, we meet Michele Galli and Camille Sharara, both fellows in our Food Transition Fellowship. Both realized that, despite successful careers, something was missing — and both chose to give up privileges to join the fellowship.

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Read our topic explainer: Our food system is reaching its limits: it’s time for a protein revolution 

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Michele Galli, Food Transition Fellow

“I mean, I had a satisfactory life”, Michele describes. “I was happy — I am a happy person. I had built an organization that I managed, it was successful. But I was kind of getting into a comfort zone.”

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Michele had built and led a successful organization, and life was good, on paper. But he found himself moving into "repeat mode."
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“You just go into repeat mode. But that was not satisfactory enough for me.”

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Michele explains: “I was entering this phase of my life when I started to have the feeling: okay, now you're just going to repeat more of it, and then more of it. You've mastered it, you know how to do it, and you're good at it. So you just go into repeat mode. But that was not satisfactory enough to me.”

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Leaving wasn’t easy. Michele left behind a stable life, a home in Colombia, and time with his daughter. But he and his wife believed it was worth it, Michele explains:

“This is for a better future that we are trying to create here for our daughter.”

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Camille Sharara, Food Transition Fellow

For Camille, every step up and every privilege that came with it came with a sense of pressure.

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“I feel like my definition of success was very much shaped by my family background, the expectations of society”, she describes. “And you just keep on going. You keep on climbing that ladder.”

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Eventually, she realized she was chasing someone else’s idea of success. Camille: “So I started to feel pretty burned out, demotivated. And I was just like: okay, that’s not the kind of ladder I want to be climbing.”

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“This is bridging the gap, where I finally have the support to move towards action.”

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Looking back, she sees how privilege shaped her life and gave her a responsibility to do something with it.

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“The way I think luck was part of my life is in the sense that I grew up privileged”, she explains. “It’s almost that luck — to experience life in its best version of itself — that becomes a drive. A drive that translates into wanting to give back.”

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For Camille, it was the Moral Ambition Fellowship that finally turned intention into action.

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“You know, I’ve been theorizing about how I want to change the world, like what good I want to be doing”, she tells. “But this is bridging the gap into action, where I finally have the tools, the empowerment, the community, the network, the support to move towards action.”

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And then it becomes contagious

Balancing idealism with practicality is hard, and it can feel lonely. That’s why the fellowship community matters so much.

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Rutger explains: “I think the power of The School for Moral Ambition and the fellowships we’re running, is that these kinds of people suddenly get this feeling: ‘I’m not alone. Actually, there are lots more people just like me.’ And then it becomes very, very contagious. Then they start inspiring each other and radicalizing each other. And they’re like: wait, we can be much more ambitious.”

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Finding like-minded people is a powerful force: it can quiet the inner voice of cynicism that tells us our idealism is naive or meaningless. And when that happens, we can start solving real problems — something sorely needed.

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Rutger: “If you look at some of the challenges that we face — whether that’s the power of Big Tobacco, whether that’s terrible moral catastrophes like factory farming or malaria killing hundreds of thousands of kids under five every year — we can actually solve these things. If we come together, if we find these really ambitious and talented people, and if we create these small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens that actually want to do it. That is what history has taught me.”

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Applications for the next round of the Moral Ambition Fellowships are now open until May 12, 2025 — learn more here. Are you based outside the EU and eager to join the Moral Ambition Fellowships? Great news: we're launching a global fellowship! Stay tuned for more details coming soon.