[danenania]

While it's less immediate than starting or working for a non-profit directly, you can have a surprisingly big impact by creating useful devtools and other tech infrastructure (whether OSS or for-profit).

At EnvKey, our configuration and secrets manager has some amazing non-profits like GiveLively and charity:water as customers, as well as some great mission-driven for-profit companies like Lambda School and Seneca Systems. It feels great to know that we're helping them to help others more efficiently and securely. We have other devtool customers too, so we're also helping them to help others to help others... and so on :)

It's the whole "area under the curve" idea--instead of having a very visible, direct impact by, say, working for the Gates Foundation, another option is to play a small but important role as an enabler for many others, and this can still add up to making a big difference overall.