John Megrue – The Art of Maximizing Your Impact

One World with Deepak Chopra – John Megrue

John Megrue – The Art of Maximizing Your Professional & Philanthropic Impact Simultaneously

There used to be a fairly consistent progression in the business world’s approach to philanthropy. You would start a business, make your fortune and then, later in life, take that fortune and put some of it towards making the world a better place. With profits being the major driver of business, there doesn’t always seem to be room for giving back at the same time.

John Megrue, however, strongly believes that business and philanthropy can and should be blended and giving back should not be left as an afterthought at the end of a successful business career. “I’ve always believed that you can’t just separate; you can’t do business for some period of time and then retire and go do philanthropy. There’s a really important overlapping role for the two,” John explained to Deepak Chopra when they recently sat down for a discussion on NEWSWIRE.FM’s program ONE WORLD. “And there needs to be a specific time in everyone’s career, regardless of your giving ability, to start to give back.”

For John, giving back has been focused primarily on the fight against HIV/AIDS. He is a founder of the BornFree Campaign, which is a campaign the stop the transmission of HIV from mother to child at birth. “It’s one of the great global health stories actually, over the last few years we had 600 thousand babies born with HIV per year…now we’ve gotten it down to 260 thousand babies born per year with HIV.  That’s an extraordinary success.” But John doesn’t want to stop there. He is confident that they can drive that number down further and virtually eliminate cases of children being born with the disease in the next three years and he has enlisted the help of some very famous mothers to achieve that goal.