Finding Purpose Beyond Profit

by Joe Sheppard

“Some things that have happened in my life have really led me to be driven by empathy,” says Diana Rhoten ’84, currently the managing director of Purpose Venture Group, a company that “advises, scales, and incubates ventures tackling the climate crisis and economic inequality,” according to their website. Fighting climate change and helping people and corporations find ways and the financial means to meet that challenge has been Diana’s passion throughout a thirty-year career that has taken her to Japan, Latin America, and all over the United States.

An international development major at Brown, Diana recalls, “After graduation I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I had this idea of international development. I wanted to be in youth programs. I wanted to help kids who didn’t have traditional learning skills. And I wanted to do it in South America. Don’t ask me why!” (Diana took four years of French at LA.)

So, she went — to Japan. “I was very logical,” Diana reflects. “I figured, ‘I don’t know what I want to do. I want to be in international development, and I want to do it in Latin America.’ But to be in this field, you have to have two areas of expertise. So, I thought, ‘Okay, I’ll live in Asia for a couple of years, then I’ll go to grad school.’ And off I went to Tokyo. It was amazing, and I loved it for two years. Then I went to Harvard for my master’s in education.”

Diana focused on Latin America at Harvard and planned to go to Costa Rica, but sadly, a family tragedy kept her home in Massachusetts for a while. Fortune smiled, however, and a state senator who had been her summer camp counselor “came out of nowhere and fabricated this incredible job working for [then-Gov.] Bill Weld,” Diana explains. “I was traveling to Latin America with him and doing all these trade missions while at the same time helping to build programs like City Year in Boston. Somehow, all these random career dreams were just all coming together, really by fate.”

After a couple of years, Gov. Weld “did the parental thing and kicked me gently out of the nest,” Diana remembers, advising her that if she wanted to be in policy and politics as a woman in those days (the mid-1990s), she “needed extra letters after her name.” Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education offered Diana a full scholarship. She thought she would focus on education technology programs for kids, but, as she recalls with a laugh, “This was 1995, pre-Google. They were like, ‘Nope, education technology’s not going to be a big thing.’ So I said, ‘Okay, I’ll just continue my youth programs in Latin America.’”

Five years later, Diana earned a Ph.D. in education with joint master’s degrees in Latin American studies and sociology after conducting her Fulbright-funded dissertation on education reform in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay — and teaching herself Spanish along the way. The problem was, when Diana finished her doctorate, she didn’t want to be an academic focused on only sociology or education or Latin America. “I kind of wanted to do it all,” she says, “but people were like, ‘You can’t do that in the university.’ This was very frustrating given the way my brain works. I’m not a specialist, I’m a problem-solver, and that’s just inherently messy.”

For a long time, Diana had been “really concerned about climate.” So, in 2000, forging ahead at full speed despite the proverbial torpedoes, she and a New York Times journalist started a nonprofit focused on interdisciplinary collaboration to solve big problems. “We were a little bit before our time,” she explains, “but we raised some money. Then we got a very large grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to help ask the question: ‘How do you bring together physical scientists, social scientists, designers, engineers, and artists to address questions of climate and climate change?’ And I was off again, traveling all around the country, helping these scientists build new labs.”

Diana’s work with climate scientists lasted five years, after which the NSF invited her to help create the Office of Cyberinfrastructure. As a program officer, she “was investing a lot of money in large-scale technologies to help people collaborate” and eventually realized “there’s a way to do this that’s cheaper and easier if we use consumer technologies.” So, when her government work was over, Diana started her first “incubator,” which focused on building digital tools for student-centered learning and teaching. She convinced six foundations it was a market worth creating — this was 2009, when digital learning had yet to reach our smartphones and tablets — and would improve both the way kids learn and the way teachers teach. “And so we did that and we were pretty successful,” she says, a note of pride in her voice.

A move into the corporate world was natural for Diana at this point, so when she was asked to help launch a billion-dollar company focused on building educational technology, she said yes. But when she realized after three years that she “didn’t want to be corporate forever,” she moved to IDEO, a global design and innovation company, where she started working on organization design. “I wanted to help other companies figure out how to find their purpose beyond profit,” she explains. “How do you help a company like Unilever, who’s already driven by purpose, to be even more purpose-oriented in the types of products it builds, the services it offers, the way it treats its employees? … As companies, we’re responsible to investors and shareholders, but we also need to be responsible to our stakeholders. So the real challenge is how to build products that are trying to do more than just earn money — like creating products that are sustainable, renewable.”

Diana loved her job at IDEO, where she stayed for several years, but a hiatus that happened to align with the pandemic gave her another unplanned chance to regroup while she did a bit of independent consulting and “served on a couple of boards.” Then, last summer, her dream job — “I want to dedicate the next ten years of my life to this,” she says — came along, at Purpose Venture Group, a small firm made up of “interesting people who are really focused on the intersection of tackling the climate crisis and solving for financial inequalities within that space.” Smiling, Diana adds, “I met the team and just thought, ‘This is where I want to be.’”

An example of PVG’s work, close to home, stems from the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act last summer. One provision of the act funnels money toward incentives to help people electrify their homes. Diana explains, “We are really focused on trying to help people electrify their homes, to make the transition to cleaner, healthier, and more efficient energy sources.”

Diana’s years at Lawrence did much to develop her passion for making the world a better place to live. She credits Bill Mees and John Curran with developing her “ability to think differently but to then also actually better express my complicated thoughts,” and a 1983 Winterim trip to Russia with Tanya Sheppard was a “life-changing” event. “I have very vivid, powerful memories from that experience,” Diana states. “It was [the basis of] my college essay, which was a photo essay from that trip. It opened my eyes to so many things that I didn’t even know existed in the world. It was the thing that set me on a career path that I didn’t even really know I was on.”

On the Winterim trip to the grim Soviet Union of the 1980s, Diana confirmed her passion: to help people — and, she would soon discover, companies — make the world a better place to live. “I’m just now trying to save the world, one solar panel at a time,” she reflects. “Driven by empathy, so much of my life has been about fate — and determination.”

We are thrilled to welcome back all alumni from classes ending in 3 and 8 for Reunion Weekend, June 9-10, 2023.

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